Lost Emotions
2007; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2007.0110
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Misinformation and Its Impacts
ResumoLost Emotions Paul Oppenheimer The Aeneid Virgil Translated by Robert Fagles Introduced by Bernard Knox Viking http://www.penguin.com 496 pages; cloth, $40.00 The chiefproblem with writing and translating epic poetry in modern times is that of avoiding bombast . This is the problem wim translating ancient tragedy too, and so-called "modern tragedy" aside—what is often termed the tragedy of ordinary people—it remains the reason that successful new tragedies are not often written. Bombast drives audiences out of the theater faster man literary mediocrity, poor acting, and bathos: it is not itselfliterary mediocrity so much as antiquarianism, treating a fossilized and long-dead emotion as ifalive, resuscitating it in the manner of a Hollywood zombie, and forcing it to parade about the stage or some other epic arena, strutting and fretting and, because evacuated of life, participating in a tale told by an idiot that seems to mean nothing. The chief reason for this is that a whole complex of epic emotions, like those evoked by ancient tragedy—what Aristotle thought were released by catharsis—remains unfamiliar to modern audiences. It is unsettling, if not humiliating, to realize that a vibrant emotional reality may now be lost to us, that people may be less complicated, even less visceral and free, than their literary forebears, but such seems to be the case. At issue here are notjust those old chestnuts of fear and pity with regard to tragedy, whatever Aristotle may have meant by obscure terms that remain controversial, or even a glorious defiance ofthe gods by the exiled hero of an epic poem, but the gods themselves, along with a venerable view of war as a divine enterprise, no matter how ugly, bloodthirsty, and catastrophic it might be as well. The mysterious divine-human relations ofclassical epic and tragedy, with all their rich dimensions, have turned alien if not off-putting. Their ossification, traceable at least as far back as Hamlet, a play that buckles against itself as tragedy, seems to dissolve only on rare occasions in recent years, as with T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which succeeds because it centers on vital religious convictions. Along with these blocages, that other adored ancient trophy, of a brilliant empire cobbled together and sustained by brute force and governed by fate—an unquestioned tyranny—fails to stimulate enthusiasm among secular modern people. A crucial sympathy for ancient values is lacking , unless the audience happens itself to consist of criminals eager for a feast of atrocities, divinity, treachery, torture, and elegance. Nor is it apt to return, or be coaxed back to life, the full literary life rather than some comic-book zombie version, by mere linguistic fiddlings. A few centuries ago, Alexander Pope and John Dryden, among the most imaginative translators of the classical Greek and Roman epics into English, understood this challenge, which in their day too consisted of bridging the widening cultural abyss, and made a number of essential adaptations . On the one hand, the heroic couplet, then fashionable, might be combined with anachronisms to offer English-speaking readers an imitation of ancient literary splendor. On the other, the superhuman, fast-paced, and murderous adventures of Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas might be dressed out in the voluptuous shadows and colors of Renaissance and Baroque art. Ifaudiences enjoyedtheirMichelangelo, Caravaggio, and Peter Paul Rubens, they might relish the sack of Troy while commiserating with Dido's amorous suicide on an excruciating funeral pyre. The exaggerations of Baroque rhetoric might soften the terrors of abandonment. Is anything like that possible now? Should it be? Both questions seem important if only because our own day is witnessing a flowering oftranslations of the greatest ancient epics, with some, such as Robert Fagles's of The Iliad (1990) and The Odyssey (1996), turning into best sellers, while others, whether of the Greek masterpieces plus Virgil's masterpiece, or of The Aeneid only, among them fine work by Allen Mandelbaum, Rolfe Humphries, C. Day Lewis, Robert Fitzgerald, and Stanley Lombardo , meriting sophisticated critical acclaim. Their success, however, seems only to render more potent a familiar conundrum: if Dryden's goal as translator has by now become a well-nigh...
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