From The Daily Telegraph July 7 08

Virgil through modern eyes

By A.N Wilson

There have been three very striking translations of Virgil's Aeneid just recently, all from Americans. I have extravagantly bought them all, but which of them would I recommend if forced to choose but one?

They are, in turn, by Robert Fagles of Princeton - whose versions of Homer were rightly praised throughout the world and who, before his untimely death, translated The Aeneid for Penguin; Frederick Ahl of Cornell University, whose translation is published by Oxford University Press, and Sarah Ruden of Yale, whose University Press also publishes her work.

Fagles was an old pro - a great translator, and his version comes with a useful apparatus, including (necessary nowadays) a pronounciation glossary, which explains more than just the main places, gods, mortals and monsters. OUP is to be commended for dropping the really bad translation by Cecil Day Lewis, which used to be its World's Classics Aeneid.

Ahl's notes and apparatus are useful and there is a good introduction by Elaine Fantham. The Yale version comes, like Cordelia, last and perhaps disastrously lacks this explanatory material. Yet who could not be won over by Ruden's opening preface - "I am in awe of scholars who can expertly debate Vergil [sic]'s political purpose and attitude; I find him difficult just to read".

He is difficult, very difficult, even if you have been doing Latin for years. His style is so dense, and he is so clever. It took many of us a whole term at school to read one book of The Aeneid and, in grown-up life, perhaps we have been content to read him in the great translation of John Dryden.

If we assemble Dryden with our three recent American translations, let us see how the four deal with just one line. I choose the onomatopoeiac description of a thundering cavalry charge at the very end of the 11th book. The magnificent Amazonian Camilla is dead, slain by the hand of Arruns, and he has met his death at the hands of the nymph Opis - who is fighting on behalf of the grief-stricken goddess Diana. The battle is over, and Camilla's squadrons are cantering away - "Quadrupedumque putrem cursu quatit ungula campum". You can almost hear the horses' hooves thumping the broken earth of the plain - the soft thump, thump, and the final thud of the hoof that hits the "cam - poom". A wonderful line.

Frederick Ahl (Oxford) has - "Cloven-hoofed quadruped clatter kicks clumps, quivers plain at a gallop". This is a line that is saying: "Look at me, I'm writing poetry, guys!" There is a bit of Hopkins here. It does not exactly make sense. And horses are not cloven-footed, nor does Virgil say they are. He says that the hoof, "ungula", of the quadrupeds hits the crumbly plain.

Sarah Ruden (Yale) has "The speeding hoofbeats shook that soft-earthed plain". This surely conveys the sense much better, and in a much less intrusive way. The "putrem... campum" is a plain that is crumbly because it is dry earth over which many horses have ridden. "That soft-earthed plain" is just right. She has lost the rather odd Virgilian "quadrupeds", but at least she hasn't made them cloven-footed.

Fagels has "Galloping hoofbeats pound the rutted plain with thunder". He is trying to get the sense, while conveying the onomatopoeia, but I still think Ruden has the edge over him. Dryden takes his time, as he often does when unpacking a dense Virgilian parcel, and makes one line into a couplet: "The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound/Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground".

Dr Johnson defines "rattle" as "to make a sharp noise with frequent repetitions and collisions of bodies not very sonorous". It is the last three words that count. "Thumping", though a coarse word, was an option for Dryden. It would have been better than "rattling". Hoof-beats simply do not rattle. On this analysis the best prize goes to Sarah Ruden.

When the fleeing rout meet the city gates, the melée is one of confusion and tragedy. Dryden here outsoars all the modern translators - "The vanquished cry; the victors loudly shout:/'Tis terror all within, and slaughter all without". Dryden can't be discarded - but which of the moderns would I choose?

It is a toss-up between Fagles (earthy and impressive, and with all those useful notes) and the quiet line-by-line modesty of Sarah Ruden whose version "grew" on me the longer I lived with it.