Robert Fagles translates things. Homer's Odyssey. The Iliad. And now Virgil's Aeneid.
The first two are from the Greek, the latter is from the Latin. That's pretty good right?
If you want to hear a good story well told, listen to the Fagles translation of the Illiad on a spoken book, read by British actor Derek Jacobi.
Good story? Maybe the best in the world. They keep making movies about the fall of Troy, starring Brad Pitt, and the wanderings of Ulysses. See "O Brother Where Art Thou?" starring George Clooney. The country and roots music alone is worth the price of admission. The whole story was ripped from Homer, who got not a cent in royalties, his, or her, work having passed into the public domain some years ago.
You'll be amazed at how Homer tees up his antagonists so that while you enter predisposed to root for the nominal hero, Achilles the Greek warrior par excellence, by the time it's shown he's not so heroic after all, except that he wins, you're rooting for Hector, destined to be run through with a sword and dragged around the walls of Troy, with his wife and infant son watching. Hector's father then comes crawling to Achilles, and on bended knee begs the return of the son's body for decent burial. Achilles has to think about it. More importantly, so does the audience, meaning you.
“I usually try not to ride the horse of relevance very hard,” Mr. Fagles said recently at his home near Princeton University, from which he recently retired, after teaching comparative literature for more than 40 years. “My feeling is that if something is timeless, then it will also be timely.” But he went on to say that “The Aeneid” did speak to the contemporary situation. It’s a poem about empire, he explained, and was commissioned by the emperor Augustus to celebrate the spread of Roman civilization.
“To begin with, it’s a cautionary tale,” Mr. Fagles said. “About the terrible ills that attend empire — its war-making capacity, the loss of blood and treasure both. But it’s all done in the name of the rule of law, which you’d have a hard time ascribing to what we’re doing in the Middle East today.
“It’s also a tale of exhortation. It says that if you depart from the civilized, then you become a murderer. The price of empire is very steep, but Virgil shows how it is to be earned, if it’s to be earned at all. The poem can be read as an exhortation for us to behave ourselves, which is a horse of relevance that ought to be ridden.”
Hmmm...Pres. Bush, meet Prof. Fagles...
The story is below.