The distinguished classicist Shadi Bartsch has completed a new translation of the Aeneid and it is due to published early next year.
The blurb reads “This fresh and faithful translation of Vergil’s Aeneid restores the spare poetry and driving rhythm of the original, allowing us to see one of the cornerstone narratives of Western culture with new eyes.”
You can read more here https://shadibartsch.com/books/the-aeneid/. The links on her web page (those that work that is) are worth exploring.
She recently took part in a BBC programme where she talks about her translation https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000p1t4.
There are also some interesting contributions from Natalie Haynes on Women in Greek Myths and Letizia Treves on a current exhibition in London of Gentileschi, which alas we can’t see at the moment because of “lockdown” restrictions.
The Latin scholar Shadi Bartsch has written a new translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid. She tells Kirsty Wark how this timeless epic about the legendary ancestor of a Roman emperor has been constantly invoked and reinterpreted over its two thousand year history. She argues that this poem still has much to say to contemporary readers about gender, politics, religion, morality, nationalism and love. It was while arguing about the merits of the Aeneid’s tragic queen, Dido of Carthage, that the classicist Natalie Haynes decided it was time to rescue the women in ancient myths. Centuries of male interpretations, she argues, has led to the demonization and dismissal of the likes of Medusa, Phaedra and Medea. In Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myths she goes back to the original stories, reinstating the more complex roles given to these women in antiquity. In the 17th-century the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi drew inspiration from the women in ancient myths, allegories and the Bible, as seen in a new exhibition of her work at the National Gallery in London. The curator, Letizia Treves, says that Gentileschi challenged conventions and defied expectations, painting subjects that were traditionally the preserve of male artists, and transforming the meek into warriors.