In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante).

Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press. FERRY’s Aeneid will be a landmark, a gift to longtime lovers of Virgil, and the perfect entry point for new readers.Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Best Barbarian was published by W.

Never before have Virgil’s twin gifts of poetic language and urgent, compelling storytelling been presented so powerfully for English-language readers. In FERRY’s, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, of devotion and death. Yet in doing so, he surrenders none of the feel of the ancient world that resonates throughout the poem and gives it the power that has drawn readers to it for centuries. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal metrical lines into an English that is familiar and alive. DAVID FERRY has long been known as perhaps our greatest contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. It’s the first in centuries crafted by a translator who is first and foremost a poet, and it is a glorious thing. This new translation brings Virgil’s masterpiece newly to life for English-language readers. Virgil’s story of the journey of Aeneas has been a part of our cultural heritage for so many centuries that it’s all too easy to lose sight of the poem itself-of its brilliantly cinematic depiction of the sack of Troy the monstrous hunger of the harpies the intensity of Dido’s love for the hero, and the blackness of her despair and the violence that Aeneas and his men must endure before they can settle in Italy and build the civilization whose roots we still claim as our own. So begins the Aeneid, greatest of Western epic poems. This event is free and also includes a book signing. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning poet and critic, former poet laureate, and Boston University professor ROBERT PINSKY.

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning poet and translator DAVID FERRY for a discussion of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.

The aeneid david ferry