![]() ![]() ![]() And if we ignore these multiple resonances then we are doing something akin to playing Beethoven on a tin whistle."Īhl was committed to do justice to Virgil and his literary masterpiece. "The wordplay, the puns and anagrams, are the pivotal chords that enable the poet to change register and to set up multiple resonances simultaneously. Virgil created something like a symphony, Ahl said, except with "all the music notes for a score on one line." Almost all life contains the elements of the humorous and the pathetic and the touching - and an epic poem certainly does." But the ancients found that humor and earnestness went side by side. "In our thinking, if something is funny it cannot in any way be serious. "The Romans loved puns and anagrams, which translators tend not to translate," Ahl said. What distinguishes this "Aeneid" is Ahl's use of Virgil's original meter and his line-by-line restoration of the poet's wordplay, an element often lost in translation. But it's taken me most of my life to understand it." ![]() "I just love the work and have ever since I was a child. "It took me longer, actually - I wasn't being supported by the emperor," Ahl said. The Roman poet Virgil spent the last 11 years of his life writing the "Aeneid," an epic poem of a hero's journey from Troy to Italy, styled on Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad."įrederick Ahl, Cornell professor of classics and comparative literature, has published a new translation for Oxford University Press, in an effort of labor that rivals Virgil's. ![]()
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