The Aeneid
Virgil
Shadi Bartsch's modern translation of The Aeneid breathes extraordinary new life into the great epic of Latin literature. Here, the twists and turns of Aeneas’s journey are rendered in language so fast-paced and lacking in pretension—at least compared to the cumbersome and florid version I slogged through at school—that I raced through the adventure with the same ease and compulsion as when watching the best TV series. An achievement to sit alongside Emily Wilson’s high-bar-setting Odyssey.
'The most truthful translation ever, conveying as many nuances and whispers as are possible from the original' The Times
After a century of civil strife in Rome and Italy, Virgil wrote the Aeneid to honour the emperor Augustus by praising his legendary ancestor Aeneas. As a patriotic epic imitating Homer, the Aeneid also set out to provide Rome with a literature equal to that of Greece. It tells of Aeneas, survivor of the sack of Troy, and of his seven-year journey: to Carthage, where he falls tragically in love with Queen Dido; then to the underworld,; and finally to Italy, where he founds Rome. It is a story of defeat and exile, of love and war, hailed by Tennyson as 'the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man'.
Translated with an Introduction by DAVID WEST
