30 September 2013

Two Book Reviews: The Aeneid by Virgil, and Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin

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I’ve always been a bit ashamed to admit that I never finished reading (in English translation) Virgil’s classic epic, The Aeneid -- until reading Ursula Le Guin admit that she didn’t read it until she was in her seventies.  (But I will say this for her:  she read it in Latin.)  I just couldn’t finish it, because I cannot take the strained attempts of many translators to make it rhyme.  I finally found a translation that was readable for me, yet well-metered, the 2002 one by Michael Oakley, and I highly recommend it. 
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It was actually Ursula Le Guin that led me to read Virgil again, as she had written a novel about Lavinia, the last wife of Aeneas, and a character who Virgil only mentioned a few times and with no speaking parts.  I enjoy reading Le Guin’ works, and I knew that to read this novel, Lavinia (2008), I would first have to absorb myself fully in The Aeneid.  Oakley’s translation has a very fine Glossary and Notes.  The day I finished reading Virgil, I started right in on Le Guin’s book.  I enjoyed them both. 
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Lavinia is much like Le Guin’s other light fantasy works.  Le Guin is very true to Virgil’s epic and also to his personal history.  Virgil left his epic barely finished and not revised at the time of his death, and this is relevant to Lavinia’s story. The more that Virgil's epic, and his personal history, is fresh in your memory, the more you will appreciate so many of the little details of Le Guin's story.  
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One big difference from Virgil was that Le Guin’s Lavinia, being an early Latin, has no concept of what we call the “Greco-Roman” gods, with all of their bickering, back-biting, and petty intrigues – which are the driving forces behind Homer's and Virgil’s epics; and those were the gods that, traditionally, Aeneas had only just brought with him from Troy’s ruins.  They were completely absent from this story – much to my relief, as Juno et al are just plain tiring.  
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The mysticism of Lavinia, her father, Latinus, and their people is an older pastoral one, more about the deep forests and the silent sacred spots found there.  My kind of places.  Ursula Le Guin re-creates those places for us. 
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-Zenwind.

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