Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation

This chapter’s discussion of premodern Virgilian translations, those that predate 1850, provides an important historical background to the different directions of Virgilian translations in Europe and beyond. While Kallendorf avoids offering aesthetic judgements on any of these translations, the statistics provided in this chapter shed light on the role that Virgilian translations played in their respective cultures. The most noteworthy part of this study, however, is that Kallendorf brings back from obscurity such translations as those of Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cynyngham, Marot and Gresset, emphasizing that, regardless of their aesthetic quality, translations can never be ranked only in terms of failure or success, because each one has elements of both and each one contributes to future attempts.