JOLLY DAYS

The Aeneid

I've been listening to Ian McKellen reading (via CD) Fagles' translation of The Odyssey. Today, the NYT has a wonderful piece by Brad Leithauser about Fagles' translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

The “Aeneid” is suffused with a fascinating, upending sense that most of what goes gravely wrong on earth isn’t imputable to human agency. There’s something comforting to Virgil’s conception of humanity, in which relatively little malice and unreasonableness and rapacity seem innate to our kind. And there’s something unsettling as well — a vision of a world that would be safer and more secure if only the heavens were emptied.