[Note: This review discusses the translation by Sarah Ruden.]

Sarah Ruden, a classically trained poet and translator of Petronius, Aristophanes, and the Homeric Hymns, has now taken on Virgil. She, too, has chosen iambic pentameter for her Aeneid. But she has limited herself to one English line for each of Virgil’s. The result is a translation that is fast, clean, and clear, sometimes terribly clever, and often strikingly beautiful.

Ruden’s enforced brevity brings a variety of advantages. At the most superficial level, a Book 1 of 756 lines (instead of 1,053 in Mandelbaum’s translation; 1,031 in Fitzgerald’s) generally endears itself to the speed-obsessed culture of the twenty-first century. But speed was pleasing two millennia ago—Virgil intended his battle scenes and much of his narrative to move swiftly and cleanly. And Ruden’s economy has other more profound attractions. Time and again, Virgil has packed his meaning and observations into one line. Epigrammatic statements that lose their punch in more diffuse translations are virtually always preserved by Ruden with immense profit to the impact in English. Moreover, Virgil repeatedly makes the point, particularly through Aeneas himself, that conciseness is attractive in and of itself. Greeks were famous for (treacherous) eloquence; good Romans kept it short. A compact translation is in keeping with Virgil’s style. . . .

But some cuts are costly. When Aeneas responds in frustration to his mother Venus who has disguised herself, Ruden translates: “I am your child—must you keep torturing me/ With these illusions?” Ruden has condensed, “You are cruel too. Why do you torture your child so often with these illusions.” Virgil’s “too” and “so often” provide mystery, depth, and verisimilitude. We imagine who else’s cruelty Aeneas thinks of and what other times he may have felt tortured by his charming but mischievous mother. . . .

Besides the effects of conciseness, one finds odd choices here and there. Several times in Book 1 Ruden’s poetry misses the imagery of fire and burning as metaphors for destructive emotion and passion, imagery which Virgil will bring to full blaze in Book 4 in the further development and culmination of the disastrous affair between Dido and Aeneas. . . .

Ruden closes her introduction with some reflections on struggle—the struggle to found and maintain a civilization, the struggle to achieve beauty in poetry. These efforts are, she notes, sickening, exhausting—all leading inevitably to death. As she says, “We cannot match in reality our vision of what we need to create from our minds.” The world of the Aeneid is famously sad; tears—especially Aeneas’s, but those of others too—moisten page after page. Aeneas, seeing the Carthaginian depiction of the Trojan War, sees “tears of pity for a mortal world.” But side by side with tears Aeneas sees “praise for valor.” Many human achievements deserve our praise, and this excellent translation is certainly one of them.