The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’

This chapter walks us backwards on the path of French prose translations of Virgil, from Paul Veyne to Jacques Perret. While Clément-Tarantino emphasizes that Veyne’s fluid and vivacious translation rekindled the interest of the French-reading public in Virgil, she also analyses the principles behind Perret’s translation of the Aeneid in the context of his book Latin et culture. In this work, which elaborates on the ?art of translation?, Perret considered attention to the philological and prosodic intricacies of the source text to be the main goal for the ‘ideal translator’; yet he decided to translate the Aeneid in prose. Perret’s translation of the Aeneid for Les Belles Lettres serves the goal of facilitating the reading of Virgil in Latin; by contrast, Veyne distanced himself from philological scrutiny, offering instead the renewed pleasure of reading Virgil in French.