I first read Virgil in college at the University of Chicago in a second-year Latin course on the Aeneid. The professor, Gary Forsythe, was blind, and he brought to class his enormous braille edition of Book 6, Aeneas’s descent into the realm of the dead—which was the focus of the course. It seemed poetically apt that our guide through the underworld was sightless. As is typical in introductory courses of the sort, Forsythe would call on us in turn to read a short passage from the Latin and render it into English. While we grappled with Virgil’s compact constructions, Forsythe’s index finger would glide over the scored lines on his page. I learned in that class that translation is often a collective activity and that we ought to welcome alternative readings because there are wildly varied ways poems like the Aeneid can be transmitted and received.
Indeed, over the last five centuries the Aeneid has been rendered into English by numerous translators in many ways. The epic first came ashore with Gavin Douglas’s Scots translation of 1513:
The battelis and the man I will discruive
Fra Troyis boundis first that fugi
By fate to Italie come, and coist Lauyne
Ouer land and se cachit with meikill pyne[1]
Ezra Pound admired Douglas’s textured language and drew substantial examples from it in ABC of Reading. But Pound ignored the next high-water mark for the Aeneid in English, Dryden’s 1697 version:
Arms, and the man I sing, who forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore:
Long Labors, both by Sea and Land he bore;[2]
Within living memory there have been a raft of translations. Cecil Day-Lewis mirrored Virgil’s line with lumbering English hexameters in 1963. Allen Mandelbaum’s strict pentameters won him the National Book Award in 1973. In 1981 Robert Fitzgerald produced an elegant free verse translation. Stanley Lombardo’s sinewy, plainspoken version appeared in 2005, followed by an ornate Aeneid from Robert Fagles and, in 2008, an extraordinary lean and rapid line-for-line pentameter rendering by Sarah Ruden. Since these, Barry Powell, David Ferry, and Shadi Bartsch have offered their own takes on the epic. In addition to all the verse translations, a simple Google search will uncover a handful of prose trots.
After David Hadbawnik had published the first half of his own translation of the Aeneid, he was interviewed about the ongoing project by Kent Johnson, who asked: Why another Aeneid? Hadbawnik’s answer: “Precisely because we don’t need one.” He goes on to explain, “There are so many good translations out there that if you are looking for a literal version, or whatever kind of verse approximation, you can find it. That fact liberates one to do something more creative with the poetry and not worry so much about literal accuracy.”[3] His translation is less about keeping faith than about seizing an opportunity. Hadbawnik has taken the Aeneid as a chance to bring Virgil into an American idiom and a contemporary poetic form. This translation is a compelling English long poem in its own right, one that’s deeply respectful of the original and at the same time innovative and very much of our current moment.
Hadbawnik takes a free and lively approach to Virgil, one that favors energy over accuracy. He uses Virgil’s original as a score on which to improvise. His lineation is brisk and visually interesting, shifting off the left margin and composing across the field of the page:
soft southerly winds
Doric seas
Apollo’s island
sacrifice
friendship
prophecy
father
interprets again—
we set out (69)
The translation ranges from the grim, wry humor of comic book moments …
And he raises a giant fist between
the bull’s horns and
BAM
beats its brains out with one punch
it falls on the ground
shaking
dead
fuck (145)
… to the careful and moving:
just like
when a hawk snatches a swan
in mid-air
or a wolf
makes off with a lamb
leaving its mom
bereft,
bleating. (158)
The approach is original but not without forebears. It bears more than a casual resemblance to Christopher Logue’s cinematic retelling of the Iliad, War Music. And Hadbawnik himself has cited Thomas Meyer’s contemporary American Beowulf as inspiration—a book he edited for Punctum Books. In an interview Hadbawnik conducted with Meyer (included in the Punctum volume), Meyer says he approached Beowulf as “a real gymnasium for trying out the possibilities of a poetic language.”[4] It’s a model Hadbawnik has clearly followed, bringing Virgil into the realm of innovative poetics.
Trained as a medievalist, Hadbawnik has written scholarly articles on Chaucer, edited Jack Spicer’s fragmentary translation of Beowulf (in addition to the Meyer mentioned above), and published original poetry of his own that shows his allegiance to experimental and New American lineages. He appears to have devoted much of the last decade to this project, publishing the first half of the translation, Books 1–6, in 2015. The remainder, Books 7–12, arrived in a second volume late in 2021, both books published by Shearsman. The two volumes have helpful, stage-setting introductions by Chris Piuma and Dale Martin Smith, respectively. Each is also generously illustrated with Carrie Kaser’s moody images (Books 1–6) and Omar Al-Nakib’s synesthetic abstractions (Books 7–12). Hadbawnik worked with both artists while he translated the epic and he clearly intends the visual elements to form part of the experience of the books. The Kaser drawings sit within the passages they illustrate; each Al-Nakib image has a caption drawn from Hadbawnik’s text and places the visual elements in conversation with the poetry.
It would seem, given the diction and formal moves, that Hadbawnik strays far from the source, but it’s constantly evident he’s working from the Latin. He breaks the epic into short, roughly five- to ten-page sections, each preceded by a Latin epigraph drawn from that portion of the Aeneid. The epigraphs anchor the translation in the original, and I had little trouble identifying any of them in Hadbawnik’s English text.
Yet while this translation isn’t a paraphrase, the most inspired moments occur when he takes liberties. At the end of Book 4, Dido, jilted and in despair at Aeneas’s departure, takes her own life. Hadbawnik transforms her preparations for death into a dialog between V (Virgil, apparently) and D (Dido). The interlocutor, V(irgil), becomes a proxy for the reader and D(ido) addresses us directly:
V
When did you decide to end your life?
D
When the sorrow became too much I worked out
a time and a way to do it (113)
This passage becomes more chilling as we listen to her calculated plan to end her life and curse Aeneas. Elsewhere, in the melee late in Book 9, Hadbawnik reduces a withering list of casualties into shorthand:
The kill list:
Ilioneus -> Lucetius (huge rock)
Liger -> Emathion (spear)
Aslas -> Corynaeus (arrow)
Caeneus -> Ortygius
Turnus -> Caeneus
Turnus -> Itys & Clonius,
Dioxippus & Promolus,
Sagaris & Idas
Capys -> Privernus. (159)
This form has the numbing effect of a government-issued mortality chart or a memorial wall etched with names.
Hadbawnik’s daring has also allowed him to highlight an important feature of the epic. The Aeneid is unquestionably an ideological poem, written in large part to legitimize—as destiny—the authority of its patron, the Emperor Augustus. Yet for all its political conviction, the Aeneid is rife with doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. W. R. Johnson argues in Darkness Visible that ambiguity is deeply woven into the fabric of Virgil’s epic, extending beyond political misgivings. Virgil uses what Johnson calls the “negative image,” figures that are blurred, ambiguous, and fragmentary, to reflect the psychic state of actors (and elicit the same in the reader). By unspooling Virgil’s lines and teasing them apart, Hadbawnik can slow the pace and open up an image for inspection. When Aeneas catches sight of Dido’s shadow in the underworld:
Aeneas like one who sees
or thinks he sees the new moon
through the clouds spots her
wandering in the dark (191)
Hadbawnik draws a single line in the Latin, “aut videt aut videsse putat per nubila lunam,” across the first three lines above (187). He dilates the figure, amplifying Aeneas’s doubts about what he thinks he sees. Further, as Johnson notes, Virgil’s Latin can be strikingly elliptical. The economy, abrupt shifts, and accretive, layered descriptions form a mosaic, and the poem frequently becomes a collage of sense impressions. Late in Book 12, when Turnus realizes his luck has turned, the Latin runs:
Obstipuit varia confusus imagine rerum
Turnus, et obtutu tacito stetit: aestuat ingens
Uno in corde pudor mixtoque insania luctu
Et furiis agitatus amor et conscia virtus.[5]
A close (and clumsy) English rendering might be:
Stunned, confused by the varied image of things
Turnus stands with silent gaze. Shame burns
in his heart mixed with madness, grief,
shaken by love and knowledge of courage.
Hadbawnik dismantles the lines and visually displays the welter of emotion:
TURNUS
confused
stupefied
silent
in his great heart
madness shame
grief
awareness
of virtus. (342)
Beyond the formal moves, the language throughout is highly engaging. Hadbawnik’s diction is direct and he favors vernacular, especially in speeches (“Now O chosen guys/lean on your oars” (195)). It is frequently facetious (“Spoiler alert: Fortune’s not going to let/either one of them go back home” (204)) and spiked generously with allusions (“set keel to breakers” (72) “A screaming comes across the sky” (159)). He conjures the invective and bluster of barracks talk or the smack talk that precedes a bar fight (“Divine mother-fucking cocksuckers fighting for Greece” (50)). It’s hard to top Dryden’s “An iron sleep his stupid eyes oppress’d/And seal’d their heavy Lids in endless rest,”[6] but Hadbawnik brings Virgil up close with a contemporary American voice:
It’s a hard rest and metallic sleep that press down
the eyes of Orodes, whose lights shift
to eternal night (228)
Everywhere in this translation the language is vital and urgent.
Hadbawnik clearly had fun with the Aeneid, and at times his inclination for fun can get the better of him. When Arcadian King Evander laments over the body of his slain son Pallas, he remarks on all the booty Pallas earned before death, “I mean…look at all these spoils!” (256). It’s hard to imagine these words coming from the mouth of a grieving father. I found a handful of other passages where Hadbawnik was droll when I thought he should be more sober—a little off-key with the pathos of the moment.
This translation also suffers from the same fate of any retelling of the Aeneid: a weaker second half. What the Aeneid gains in martial energy, it loses in interest. The high points of the epic are in Book 2 (the fall of Troy), Book 4 (the betrayal of Dido), and Book 6 (the passage through the underworld). Nothing in Books 7–12 matches the imaginative feats of the first six. While there are still brilliant and moving moments, the story becomes largely a slog through a series of battles. I can’t fault Hadbawnik for a shortcoming in the original, but his second volume is half as long as the first, covering virtually the same amount of material. In the second volume his translation moves closer to the source, becoming more comprehensive and less distilled. Hadbawnik edits less and less inventively. The second volume would have benefited from the more selective approach he used in the first. While still enormously satisfying, the back half doesn’t quite maintain the excitement and tight pacing of the first half.
In his essay “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness,” the philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes that translation—particularly of literary works—is never exhaustive, in part because of the “conflicting tasks of ‘bringing the reader to the author’ and ‘bringing the author to the reader.’”[7] No translation can capture all the possibilities of transmission and reception, and so, for texts of enormous cultural significance—the Bible, the Koran, the Aeneid—the work of translation is never complete and never ends. Ricoeur says, “just as in the act of telling a story, we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and total adequacy.” He concludes that we must settle for an accommodation modeled on hospitality, “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.”[8]
David Hadbawnik has made Virgil our guest in ways that other translators of the Aeneid have not. He has recast the poem in contemporary verse, in poetic forms that are innovative and visually compelling. Moreover, he has used form to offer insight into the action of the epic and into the minds of its actors. Through Hadbawnik, Virgil speaks in our modern American idiom. Most translations of ancient authors attempt to recreate the experience of reading the original. That’s a worthy and even necessary service, but it can keep the text at arm’s length—an artifact from the past. Hadbawnik, without the overuse of easy anachronistic gimmicks, has brought Virgil into company with us, hospitably. His Aeneid isn’t an artifact; it’s a new living poem, novel in its interpretation yet respectful of the Latin source. It’s a more thorough embrace of Virgil, bringing him intimately into the current state of poetry. In doing so, it opens new possibilities of translation and affords us the pleasure of a fresh rendering of a familiar text. Hadbawnik’s Aeneid is radical, and welcome.
Notes:
[1] Virgil, The Aeneid (1513), MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations 7 no. 1, trans. Gavin Douglas, ed. Kendal Gordon (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011),
[2] Virgil, Virgil’s Æneid, trans. John Dryden (New York: PF Collier & Son, 1909), 75.
[3] Harriet Staff, “Another Aeneid: David Hadbawnik in Conversation with Kent Johnson,” Poetry Foundation, May 12, 2014,
[4] Thomas Meyer, Beowulf: A Translation, ed. David Hadbawnik (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012), 263.
[5] Virgil, Virgil’s Aeneid XII, ed. John T. White (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1887), 24.
[6] Virgil, Virgil’s Æneid, 406.
[7] Paul Ricoeur, “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness,” in On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 2006), 8.
[8] Ricoeur, “Translation as Challenge and Source of Happiness,” 10.