The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I am a four-eyed geek whose love of the word transcends even her love of the sea. So I have undertaken a massive project to do with the salvation of a literary work, and I think it will be what saves me, this summer.

[Yes, I have to worry about my book. But my book is what I love, and in some ways, what I owe; this is different. This is academic sport of a kind I have not allowed myself for years, and I need it.]

See, in light of recent events, I have dusted off my old high school Aeneid. And it's like... it's an exercise in what not to do when you translate. I'm in no position to say how faithful Robert Fitzgerald is to the original, but he's very high-flown and vague, like Heaneywulf.

And his meter makes me want to die.

He's enslaved the poem to the damn meter, to the point where you see the feet and not the words. And the words are empty, serving mostly to fill space.

It's a dramatic poem about a damaged man who has seen terrible things and is just trying, now. Please let it jump off the page at me. Please let me feel something instead of just mentally marking that people's names have come up.

So. I, um. Er. For my intellectual good and my peace of mind, I'm going to do it better.

I am.

I'll keep to the meter as far as possible -- it's rough work in English -- but I will not sell out the words. I have the West prose translation, which avoided affront by avoiding being a poem, and I have the Fitzgerald, which is just an affront; and I am going to patch my poetic sensibilities by doing it myself.

If you think I'm smoking the special crack, do tell me. But if you want something done right, sometimes...

...if Sonya or Andrea laughed at me, I do not think I would have the heart; but I don't think they're going to laugh.

So off I go. I have forty-eight hours in a train coming up, and eight weeks out of town in hotel rooms after that, and Israel after that, assuming the political situation grows no worse; I have time to read and write.

And if anyone knows the word for translation of a translation, let me know.

I'm going to fix this, because dammit, it's bad.