![]() ![]() Reviewers possessing these qualifications aren’t exactly thick on the ground. Namely, who do you get to review the thing? Your reviewer will need, ideally, not only a working knowledge of classical Latin but a detailed familiarity with at least a few of the scores of translations of the work that have appeared prior to this one (an ability to cobble together coherent English prose might also be added here, although anyone steeped in the reading of book reviews will be ruefully aware of the fact that it no longer seems to be an ironclad requirement). Translating classical authors was a widespread hobby among the better educated set, and even the most private, unpublished examples of this could often be quite good.Įducation in the West has declined so steadily and so rapidly in the last century that a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, appearing in 2007, poses problems never dreamt of by the editors of the Quarterly Review. ![]() In 1857, every well-prepared schoolboy in the Western world was armed with an at least functional Latin by the time he was eight years old successful conjugation invariably preceded successful masturbation. ![]() Except for the fact that the review quoted is from the London Quarterly Review of 1857, and the bracketed isn’t Robert Fagles but Virgil himself, being taken to task by the Review’s (anonymous) reviewer for the shortcoming of his epic poem. This would seem to bode poorly for Robert Fagles, the latest person to undertake a full-scale translation of The Aeneid. ![]()
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