On Translating Vergil

Taken together, the first five lines of Vergil’s Eclogues are the most beautiful lines of poetry in the Latin language. It seems people don’t make claims like that very often anymore and, sometimes, I think that’s a shame.

Why is it that translators are so often driven to attempt precisely those passages that seem so perfect in their original language, so untranslatable? Perhaps it is because translation feels most necessary when it is most impossible.

I could say that I am drawn to translating these lines because they deal with the same issues facing a translator: the speaker, a herdsman named Meliboeus, is leaving his native land (and taking his song with him), while Tityrus creates an echo of his own voice, spreading his song at the risk of distortion. And it must be the image of the forest. As a translator of Walter Benjamin writes:

“Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at the single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work.”

So I send my translation to the woods, hoping that its echo picks up some Vergilian timbres along the way. It’s found some dactyls, at least.

Vergil’s Eclogues (1.1-5)

Tityrus, you lying back underneath the shade of a beech tree
spreading open, on a thin stalk of grass you try the song of the forest.
I go beyond the ends of my fatherland, leave these sweet fields
behind—I flee from my fatherland; you, Tityrus, calm in the shadow,
teach the forests to echo Amaryllis is beautiful.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena.
Nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva.
Nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

By Erik Fredericksen ’12