Virgil after Vietnam

The focus of this chapter is the major American verse translations published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance on the war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s, and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, Braund offers an interesting juxtaposition in gender perspective between the male translators, who, as professors, were all influenced by scholarly debates, and Sarah Ruden, who, as a woman and as a professional translator, undertakes her task on the margins of the academic controversies and provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced perspective.