I can remember reading these lines of Horace-of Ferry’s Horace-with amazement at their simple, unprepossessing ecstasy:īecause the muses favor me and love me, As far as I’m concerned let the wild winds carry All sadness and trepidation far away.
How strange to have the American vernacular put back in our mouths by this roundabout method.
No American poet has translated better the greatest classical authors Ferry’s translations of Horace are among the predominant texts in contemporary American poetry, teaching American poets (I’m one of them) the Horatian tones-the modesty, civility, and gossip the swift, fly-by urbanity-that went missing from much of the best American poetry of the seventies and eighties. He carries us to places we can’t possibly visit, from the Mesopotamia of Gilgamesh to Horace and Virgil’s Rome. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe-the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.ĭavid Ferry, who, at the age of eighty-eight, has just won the National Book Award for poetry, is a special kind of thief. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. The glorious future of Rome is observed from the past, which is not to be forgotten, as it can be seen from the beginning of Anchises`speech, when only after the explanation oflifès meaning the reader can see the Roman warriors and the premature death of Marcellus.Poetry is innately related to theft. The main virtues promulgated by Augustus through his Pax Romana are to be found in the national epopee, but are these ideas changing the image of the Inferno? Extremely interesting is in how the politically ideas are combined with the religious ones, and the Shield of Anchises is one of the best examples on proving many of Augustus ideas which are to be found inVirgiìs Underworld. In his Inferno, the Augustan poet offers an image of how the great Roman Empire was, and more important, how it wanted to be seen in front of posterity. Another issue put in discussion is the role of evil in common life in the Ancient Rome, a society that imagined an Underworld ruled by one god: Hades, a different kind of ruler that the other underworld gods from coexistent cultures. The issues to be discussed are the relationship between reality and fiction in the sixth book of Aeneid and the role of memory in the creation of Inferno. This paper seeks to offer a clearer image of how the Underworld was illustrated and interpreted by Augustus`most prolific poet: Publius Vergilius Maro.
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