There are many reasons to revel in Professor Fitzgerald's translation, but delight in Rolf Humphries' translation, in Day Lewis' (which still offers the best last line of all translations: And it is precisely our difficulty that the past of poetry is less real for us than its possibility. We read Virgil, in the same circumstance, to discern what poetry has done. We read Homer, out of school, to discern what poetry can do. Of course there have been quite as many translations of Homer, but for the converse reason- Homer is not difficult, merely essential. VIRGIL is difficult for - perhaps that is why there have been four English translations of the Aeneid since the Second World War, two by British poets, two by American. Will be published in January his translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal wa October 16, 1983
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