Classics

This chapter addresses the lack of canonical translations of the Aeneid into Russian. While Homer found his widely accepted rendition in Nikolai Gnedich’s and Vasilii Zhukovskii’s translations of the two main poems of the epic cycle, Virgil has had no such luck. But Zhukovskii also attempted a translation of the second book of the Aeneid under a title of its own, ‘The Destruction of Troy’. Torlone argues that Zhukovskii, in his rendition of the Aeneid, succeeded where other translators failed: it achieved the goal of ‘demystifying’ the foreign text and of conveying in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text without alienating the reader.

The introduction describes the broad landscape of translation of Virgil from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. It then explains the genesis of the volume and indicates how the individual chapters, each one of which is summarized, fit into the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries and across the world. The volume editors indicate points of connection between the chapters in order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Braund and Torlone emphasize that a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies; they therefore consider it important to extrapolate larger phenomena from the specifics presented here