As per an earlier language query, I’m making my way through the Aeneid VII-XI, which I have not looked at before in the Latin. At the same time, I have picked up my copy of Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, which makes for a very good combination.
I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Le Guin, and hers is a retelling of Vergil’s story that I find affectionate and accurate. Accurate is a funny word to use of a poem about mythical events, but it is right insofar as it describes Le Guin’s marvellous attention to detail of the original. I’m happily bumbling along in the narrative when I come across something that, as a Latinist, pleases me no end to see that she’s spent the time to really know her source material.
A few examples of what I’ve been reading today:
- Ascanius is described as “wearing a bent-forward red cloth cap.” To the layman, it is an imaginative visual description, but a Classicist recognises that Le Guin is describing, without using its name, a Phrygian cap, such as were used ubiquitously in ancient artistic depictions of Trojan persons.
- Le Guin anchors her story with a number of points that are directly drawn, sometimes very close translations of Vergil. E.g. Ascanius’s “joke” about eating their tables, which forms the fulfilment of a prophecy marking the end of the Trojans’ odyssey:
“Well, it’s not at every meal you get to eat your table too.”
Compare the original (Aen. VII.116-7):
“Heus ! etiam mensas consumimus,” inquit Iulus,
nec plura adludens.
Her free translation allows a the remark to remain a joke/ironic remark, while staying faithful to Vergil’s original.
3. Interestingly, Le Guin gives the sense of Faunus’ prophecy to Latinus, but after the first line it is too distant to be thought of as a translation:
“Do not let the daughter of Latium marry a man of Latium. Let her marry the stranger that comes, that even now is coming. And the kingdom of her sons will be far greater than the kingdom of Latium.”
Here’s Vergil’s (VII.96-101):
“Ne pete conubiis natam sociare Latinis,
O mea progenies, thalamis neu crede paratis:
externi venient generi, qui sanguine nostrum
nomen in astra ferant quorumque a stirpe nepotes
omnia sub pedibus, qua Sol utrumque recurrens
aspicit Oceanum, vertique regique videbunt.”
I wonder if Vergil’s language is to imperialistic and conquesty for Le Guin to go further than “will be far greater”.
As an aside, I think I see a play on words by Vergil on “generi”: either it’s gener, generi, m. (“Foreign sons-in-law will come…”) or genus, generis, n. (“Foreigners will come for [i.e. to grow, dat. of advantage] your line.”).
Has anyone else read Le Guin’s Lavinia?
NB I put this rather literary topic on the Learning Latin board, where it seemed to me best placed. However, being new, please do (Moderators…) instruct me if I have desecrated the temple of the language-learning gods (Minerva?), and whether there is a better location.