> The Ovid in Latin is ravishingly beautiful.
Maybe this aspect of the matter partly explains some of Virgil's unpopularity; he translates well, in a sense (Dryden's Aeneid is terrific) but the sensuality and seductiveness of his language is hard to convey. There's a tag that often echoes in my head when I'm sailing at night:
Adspirant aurae in noctem, nec candida cursus Luna negat; splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus.
I would never attempt to versify it, but prosaically:
The little breezes whisper into the night, and the radiant Moon does not refuse her course; beneath that quivering light shines the sea.
"Shines" is not good enough for splendet, and "radiant" isn't right for candida, either. Hopeless. And then having to frog-march the word order to suit English syntax puts the whole thing on Quaaludes.
So it sounds impossibly hokey in English but to my ear at least it's irresistible in Latin. There's even something about the way the lines scan -- those slow spondees in the first, and the galloping dactyls in the second, checked by the two spondees, feel like a deck moving complicatedly underfoot in a cross-sea. But no doubt this is all quite fanciful.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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