.
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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