The publication of C. S. Lewis' fragmentary translation of Virgil's Aeneid is an event of significant interest to students of classical poetry and English literature alike. It is not every day that sees the release of a hitherto unknown translation of one of the most canonical works — for centuries arguably the canonical work — of antiquity by one of the leading literary critics of his age. In his introduction to the volume, A. T. Reyes relates the story of the rescue of Lewis' notebooks containing his versions of the Aeneid from the posthumous bonfire (a curious parallel to the close escape of the poem itself from a similar fate, if the ancient tradition is to be believed) by Lewis' secretary, Walter Hooper, who contributes a foreword to this edition. R. further provides a survey of Lewis' engagement with and attitudes towards Virgil in his letters, autobiographical writings and academic works, and of his views on translation (including his well-known partiality for the sixteenth-century Scots Eneados of Gavin Douglas). There is also an enthusiastic endorsement from the Virgilian scholar D. O. Ross, comparing Lewis' handling of Virgil's description of the Libyan harbour at Aeneid 1.159–68 favourably with other twentieth-century translations.
The main body of the volume presents the text of Lewis' translation, which includes the whole of the first book, the first five hundred lines of Book 2, and a little over 250 lines of Book 6; these passages are interspersed with synopses of the rest of the poem, and with smaller excerpts from the Aeneid culled from the translations that appear in Lewis' critical writings and elsewhere. An appendix collects further discussions of and translations from the Aeneid in Lewis' published work. The presentation is clear and generous with space, marred only (for this reviewer) by a handful of questionable editorial decisions, most notably the choice of Goold's revised Loeb edition for the parallel Latin text, when it seems clear that Lewis used Hirtzel's Oxford text of 1900; the grounds given for this are that ‘as a scholar, Lewis would surely have preferred Latin that was as true as possible to what Virgil had himself composed, so far as professional critics have been able to determine this’ (30) — but the anachronism involved in this choice would presumably not have escaped Lewis the literary historian. Some differences between the two texts are listed on p. 183. The approach to orthography is inconsistent: R. alters Lewis' spellings of ‘lightening’ for ‘lightning’, ‘comerade’ for ‘comrade’, and ‘hoards’ for ‘hordes’ ‘to avoid distracting the reader’ (31), but leaves other non-standard spellings such as ‘expells’, ‘buz’ and ‘pourtrayed’, which are surely no less distracting — it would have been preferable in all instances to retain Lewis' own orthography, which is a significant element in the calculated archaism of his translation (an editorial admission of ‘the neatening of some eccentric punctuation’ (31) therefore also arouses suspicion). It is not clear why the subtitle ‘Arms and the Exile’ has been added: this expression encapsulates nothing distinctive about Lewis' translation, does not replicate exactly Lewis' text (which has ‘Of arms and of the exile’), and is not even the opening words, since Lewis includes the so-called ille ego proem.
Lewis renders the Aeneid in twelve-syllable rhyming alexandrines; the rhyme at the end of each line never allows the reader to forget the formal structure of the verse, but the long, loose body of the line enables Lewis to achieve one of the most striking features of his translation, namely its ability to reproduce to a surprising degree the shape of Virgil's lines, even where the same word or phrase does not appear in the same position in the English as in the Latin (for just a few examples, see his versions of 1.46–9, 1.257–66, 1.292–6, 2.102–3 and 2.325–7). At times the translation is nothing short of brilliant, mirroring features of the text or even serving as an implicit commentary on the verbal texture of Virgil's verses: the rendering of 1.91 as ‘And present death encircles every ship around’ neatly points to the encircling word-order of ‘praesentem … mortem’; at 1.160–1 ‘broken thus’ interrupts Lewis' line as the Latin word-order is itself broken, reflecting the meaning of the lines; might ‘the Italian interdicted strand’ at 1.252 reproduce the verbal disjunction in ‘Italis longe disiungimur oris’? At 1.419, Virgil does not tell us in so many words that Aeneas' ascent of the hill was achieved ‘with toil’, but the implication is certainly there in the imperfect tense and in the scansion. The slightly archaizing compound adjective ‘sail-besprinkled’ nicely captures Virgil's velivolum (1.224), while Lewis' Shakespearean ‘hurricanoes’ is an inspired touch to evoke the long sonorous syllables of Aeneid 1.53.
Lewis' echoes from classic texts of English literature are a characteristic feature of his translation, and serve to make an important literary point: although Lewis recognized the impossibility of recapturing a Roman audience's response to ancient poetry (see p. 16), the allusive quality of Virgil's poetic idiom, with its evocation of the iconic works of Greek and previous Roman literature, will surely have conjured up recognition of a kind similar to that offered to a modern English readership by Lewis' appropriation of the phraseology of Shakespeare (‘go thy ways’, 1.401) and the King James Bible (‘the Trojan seed | Must bruise one day the progeny of Tyre’, 1.19–20; ‘how long, oh Lord, must they endure? How long?’, 1.241; ‘my unalterable will be done’, 1.260). At times it is tempting to think that Lewis expects the reader to remember the original context of his reminiscences, as when the devilish devices of Sinon become the ‘glozing lies’ of Milton's Satan (2.80; PL 3.93), or Cupid's subterfuge at Dido's banquet instils ‘new loves for old’ (1.722), remembering that the discomfiture of those ‘that do change old loves for new’ is claimed in the old roundelay to be ‘Cupid's curse’.
It must be admitted that not all of Lewis' translation is equally outstanding, possibly as a result of the lack of final revision: phrases and parts of phrases in the Latin are occasionally sacrificed to preserve Lewis' metre, and some renderings which could have kept closer to the original without injury to the metre are not easy to explain: it is not clear why vani … parentes at 1.392 have been reduced to ‘my mother’; famuli (1.701) are not — or at least, not exclusively, unlike famulae (1.703) — ‘girls’, although some manuscripts (not followed by Hirtzel) do read famulae here; and tota … urbe (2.421) does not mean ‘half the city’. At 2.433–4, Lewis translates as if taking Danaum with vices (‘danger of the Danaans’, reflecting Virgil's alliterative vitavisse vices), but as the text is punctuated here (and in Hirtzel: was Lewis using e.g. Conington at this point?) it must be taken with manu. Instances could be multiplied. There are relatively few misprints: James Hankins appears repeatedly as ‘Hankin’ (19 n. 58, 190) and Jan M. Ziolkowski as ‘J. M. C. Ziolkowski’ (26 n. 86, 190), and I cannot help wondering whether Lewis in fact wrote (or meant to write) ‘king Acestes’ rather than ‘kind Acestes’ for regem … Acesten at Aeneid 1.558 (as at 1.570).
In conclusion, although Lewis himself acknowledged that ‘every translation ruins Virgil’ (see p. 15), this is a fascinating and valuable addition to the long and distinguished list of demolition jobs wrought on the Aeneid in English. Had Lewis completed his translation of the Aeneid in the same vein as the sections presented here, I would have no hesitation in recommending it above other currently available versions; as things stand, however, these tantalizing relics must remain — like another of Lewis' works — an experiment in criticism.
