Mr. Holland's Aeneid

 

The 1995 film Mr. Holland's Opus tells the story of Glenn Holland, an aspiring musician and composer whose dream is to create one memorable work of music.  To pay his bills, however, he takes a job as a high school band teacher, never considering that to be his true vocation and spending his evenings laboring over his composition.  As Emilio Estevez says to his father, Martin Sheen, in The Way, you don't choose a life, you live one, and the one that Mr. Holland lives seems far from the one he would have chosen.  As the film develops, both he and the audience discover that his true composition, the opus for which he will be known, is the work he has accomplished with his students.

For many years I have wanted to publish a translation of Vergil's Aeneid.  I have played with a half dozen or more metrical schemes in which to do it and have considered prose as well.  Since 1533 and the Scots translation by Gavin Douglas, there has been a nearly unbroken succession of English renderings up to and including the one by Shadi Bartsch in 2021.  However the concept of need is defined, there can hardly be one for yet another English Aeneid.  Why, then, I have been lured by the Siren's call of this notoriously difficult task for so many years?

The opening of Aeneid, Book 1, by Gavin Douglas

When I was a boy, I played dentist when I came home from the dentist's office, barber after having my hair cut, and teacher following a day of Kindergarten.  The latter was enacted with my grandmother as my student and largely for the gleeful pleasure of putting a big, red F on her papers, regardless of her actual achievement.  The mimetic impulse is in all of us.  As children we role play and act out the lives of those around us in preparation for our adult callings, but even adults still feel the pull of mimesis as we wear jerseys bearing the names of a favorite athlete, display posters of a beloved band or album in the garage, or even try keeping up with the Joneses as we rush to purchase the latest technology.

For me, I want to go ever deeper into the amazing, beautiful, moving, haunting, inspiring, magnificent work that Vergil crafted two millennia ago.  So taken am I with it that at times I can only nod in mute agreement with Tennyson's eulogy for the nineteenth centenary of the Roman poet's death.

I salute thee, Mantovano,

I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure

Ever moulded by the lips of man.

Statue of Vergil in the Piazza Virgiliana in Mantua

What that means, in practical terms, is that I have always wanted to translate this poem.  I want to get as deep into its words and artistry and story as I possibly can, and this means giving my own performance of it in translation.  This desire is not to satisfy any glaring need in the literary world, for there are many perfectly good translations, although none can, given the nature and limitations of language, completely capture all of Vergil, and that is one of the reasons why I think I have decided to abandon the project.  Every translation into any language of a work like this can only result in one seeing through a glass darkly, and in the particular case of the Aeneid, many of the translations are deeply tinted windows indeed.  The best one can hope for is to produce a lens with the faintest color possible through which to glimpse the original, but try as one may, there will always be that hint of hue to lend a perspective not present in the model.

There is another reason why I suspect I shall never complete a written translation, and it takes us back to the film Mr. Holland's Opus.  I have, in fact, translated the Aeneid countless times as a work of performance art in my high school advanced Latin classes.  There, my students and I have explored shades and nuances and subtleties.  We have played with synonyms in an attempt to capture the right essence of a word.  We have compared and contrasted bits of plot with storylines in other works and have explored artistic expressions in Vergil's poetry alongside not only other works of literature but other genres of art, including music, film, and painting.  Every year I read it with students, I read it anew and discover some wonderful gem that had escaped notice.  Seen this way, my translation of the Aeneid is not entirely my own, but is a crowdsourced work of living art, not to be read in the paper-and-board books that line a shelf, but to be expressed in the lives of Vergil's audience, those auditores who still hear his stately measures echoing across the millennia.

Post Scriptum

After writing this post more than a month ago, I delayed publishing it until I had finished another project that it had inspired.  I could find nowhere on the Internet a complete listing of all the English translations of the Aeneid, much less direct links to them, and so I decided to fill that need.  As nearly as I can tell, there have been ninety-seven translations into English of Vergil's poem from 1513 to 2021.  I created the website Aeneid Translator to list every English translation in chronological order.  Where online or print texts are available, I have provided links.  Please be sure to check out the About page on the site where I talk about a former teacher of mine who was in no small measure the muse for this project.

Finally, I have two requests.  PLEASE contact me if you know of other translations that I have missed, online or print editions that I am unaware of, corrections to any dates that are wrong, or if you have a print translation that I do not own (see the color-coded legend on the website).  I may be interested in purchasing it from you.  I would also ask that you share the website with teachers, scholars, students, and friends who have any interest.  I want this to be a helpful resource.  It is not fancy, but I hope it will fill a need.

Sharing a Classroom

My classroom is small, measuring about 23' x 13'.  For this reason, most of my Latin classes meet in other classrooms.  As I have written elsewhere, and borrowing Hamlet's expression, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, and because this is true, I do not mind at all sharing my small classroom with many, many other teachers.  Both in this classroom, which is really more of an office, and in any place where I teach, I do not teach alone but am engaged in a most collaborative enterprise, for I have the pleasure of working alongside some of the greatest teachers the world has ever known.

There are Socrates and Plato and Alexander Pope, to say nothing of Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, and Vergil.  The history teachers have their say thanks to Livy and Tacitus, and of course Homer holds a mighty sway.

Texts and commentaries

Oxford and Loeb texts

Penguin translations

Sometimes they speak their native Greek or Latin, and sometimes they speak in English, but always they are there, guiding the conversations I have with my students.  Even when their voices cannot be heard directly, they are teaching nonetheless, for they are like the waters described by William Butler Yeats in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Although the majority of my fellow teachers speak their wisdom from across the centuries, there are more modern educators as well, speaking to matters of linguistics and philosophy and the natural sciences.

A few of my colleagues who teach philosophy and science

Surely, you say, these do not all make their way into the daily curriculum of a high school Latin class.  Surely it would not be appropriate for them to do so.  Isn't a secondary language class about nouns and verbs and learning the basics?  No, they do not all make their way into our daily lessons, at least not explicitly so, but I disagree with the notion that any of these teachers should not be allowed through the door.  In 1970, G. P. Goold, who over his illustrious career served as the chair of Classics departments at Harvard, University College London, and Yale, as well as serving as the chief editor of the Loeb Classical Library for twenty-five years, wrote a most unfortunate statement with which I took issue in an article I wrote a few years ago about a textual difficulty in Vergil's Aeneid.  Goold wrote, "An elementary teacher, to reach in due season the end of his curriculum, must every hour turn a Nelson eye to serious problems and refrain from pursuing truth beyond the charted boundaries of the textbook."  I wrote in response, "I would argue that the true magister can never be so bound, but must, along with the students, pursue the truth, no matter how anfractuous the path."

And if truth, rather than the important but necessarily lesser goals of skills proficiency and career readiness, is the foundation and raison d'etre of education, then surely there must be another teacher in every classroom, even the one who claimed to be truth itself, Jesus Christ.

The 3-D printed bust of Christ, courtesy of my son

You see, all of these great teachers have taught me.  I am the product of their wisdom, eloquence, and art, and in that way alone, they are teaching my students as surely as I am.  Because I have spent considerable time with many of them, their words and ideas are also at the ready when I attempt to do what all teachers do, make connections.  Education is essentially helping someone see that this is that.  In its simplest expression it may be an equation, for example one connecting the ideas of 2 + 2 and 4.  In more complex forms it can be seen in metaphors, allusions, and parables.  Indeed the metaphoric nature of all language points to the this-is-that nature of communication, of which formal education is but one particular instance.  For this reason, the assassination of President Kennedy can make its way into a reading of Caesar in Gaul.  The dual nature of light as wave and particle will enter into a discussion about the opening of Vergil's Aeneid.  Even Disney's The Lion King will help to illustrate the aspects of Catiline's conspiracy and the fertile ground for demagoguery among the poor and disenfranchised.

Just as these secular teachers weave their way seamlessly and effortlessly through our exploration of Latin, so does the greatest teacher of them all, but for a different reason and in different ways.  I am blessed now, somewhere past the midpoint of my career, to teach in a school where Christ is acknowledged as Lord.  We are, therefore, free to offer a complete approach to learning, one that does not exclude faith as a way of knowing.  My students and I can easily make references to Scripture just as we do to writings by Plato or Homer.  Yet, and far more significantly, Christ is present in our classes in a way the others cannot be, for He is still alive.  His Holy Spirit dwells within us, leading us, according to John 16:13, into all truth, which, as stated above, is the reason a school exists.  Although it is my name on the door, my small classroom is actually crowded with the greatest of all teachers, and I am more than grateful to share with them the delightful, exciting, and provocative calling of teaching.