Epic Failures

This chapter addresses the lack of canonical translations of the Aeneid into Russian. While Homer found his widely accepted rendition in Nikolai Gnedich’s and Vasilii Zhukovskii’s translations of the two main poems of the epic cycle, Virgil has had no such luck. But Zhukovskii also attempted a translation of the second book of the Aeneid under a title of its own, ‘The Destruction of Troy’. Torlone argues that Zhukovskii, in his rendition of the Aeneid, succeeded where other translators failed: it achieved the goal of ‘demystifying’ the foreign text and of conveying in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text without alienating the reader.