From the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Here is an excerpt.
The article provides a good overview of the recent (and many) translation of Virgil's classic, so go check it out.On the subject of Virgil's attitude toward war, Sarah Ruden warns against casting an ancient tragedy as some kind of modern political statement.
"People make a fundamental mistake arguing about the politics of the Aeneid," says Ruden, a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School. "It's about things that have to be, about which people have no choice, and that means it's about submission to the divine will."
Ruden acknowledges "a lot of grappling" with that aspect of the Aeneid. "This runs up hard against my Quaker faith because Quakers are not strongly about accepting the divine will," she says. "People are bound to express their faith in God by going out and changing things for the better."
Born in 1962 in Bowling Green, Ohio, and raised in the countryside, Ruden grew up Methodist and became a Quaker late in her graduate training at Harvard University. She had already studied and translated Virgil as a classics major at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote her senior thesis on the poet's Eclogues.
"It was all about stylistic hotdogging and emotional grandstanding," she says. "I'd had enough Latin by that time that I could see what an amazing writer he was."
She did her doctoral work in classics at Harvard. There, she recalls, "somebody told me, 'Don't work on Ovid. All of these women work on Ovid.'" Rather than study a writer known for his love elegies as well as the Metamorphoses, she chose the harder-edged satirist Petronius instead.
Scholars, she believes, should be careful not to wall themselves off. "Several generations of women have been trained in classical languages and literature just the same as men. But you still see many, many women working on love poetry — a tiny portion of the works that survive — and talking and writing endlessly about 'gender' in prescribed terms. It's like a seraglio."
Throughout her career, Ruden has not let gender determine which texts she works with or how she approaches them. She has published translations of Petronius' Satyricon, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and the Homeric Hymns. Last year she arrived at Yale to work on her current project, which she describes as "an exploration of the letters of Paul against the background of Greco-Roman literature."
Ruden intends her translations for popular and classroom audiences rather than for fellow scholars. Like many of Virgil's translators, she is a published poet in her own right. She holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
No comments:
Post a Comment