![]() ![]() ![]() Fortunately, his “Translator’s Note” makes the straightforward claim that he “almost always … the simpler and more direct rendering rather than the elegant or ‘poetic'” (p.xxii). I have a difficult time imagining this ideal, to say nothing of evaluating Caldwell’s success in attaining it. In contrast to John Dryden, who endeavored in his translation of the Aeneid“to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age,” 1 Caldwell claims that he has tried to make the Mantuan speak such English as a Roman contemporary of his would have used to translate the work into prose (p.232). It assumes no special background on the reader’s part and therefore supplies a great deal of information in its Introduction and notes, making it suitable for both high school and college students, as well as the general reader. In this Focus Classical Library translation of the Roman national epic, Richard Caldwell has produced a prose version in clear, idiomatic, and readable English, appropriate for anyone who “wants to read the Aeneid but doesn’t know Latin” (p.xxii). ![]()
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