PARTISAN REVIEW
295
translation and his rich and packed introduction shows how much
thought and care he gave to his task. Saintsbury, one of the few great
critics to feel a positive dislike for Virgil, felt that the
A eneid
is too
"finished" in every sense.
It
has been so worked upon that Virgil has left
the imagination no scope to explore margins of suggestiveness and mys–
tery. And yet, if Saintsbury is quite right, why did Dante adore Virgil
and the Middle Ages think of him as a magician? Mandelbaum's version,
which I read with enormous pleasure all through, is "finished" in a good
sense. I give the Latin of a famous passage of ornate pathos, the death of
Euryalus from Book Nine, and Mandelbaum's equivalent. Virgil:
volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus
it cruor. inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit:
purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro
languescit moriens lassove papavero collo
demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.
And Mandelbaum:
He tumbles into death, the blood flows down
his handsome limbs; his neck, collapsing, leans
against his shoulder: even as a purple
flower, severed by the plow, falls slack in death;
or poppies as, with weary necks, they bow
their heads when weighted down by sudden rain.
This strikes me as magnificent.
It
is here and there one might say more
"idiomatic," or more vivid, than Virgil. "Sudden" is Mandelbaum's addi–
tion and perhaps improvement; "falls slack" strikes me as much more
vivid and concrete than "languescit." But there is a wonderful loyalty to
tone, as well as text, all through. Virgil, as Mandelbaum says in his
introduction, presented us with
a
world, not
the
world: and he is the
kind of poet whose diction selects from, rather than welcomes, the total
human vocabulary. But he is a very great poet all the same, and Mandel–
baum has carried wonderully over into English that fastidious, selective
greatness.
G.S. Fraser
