Adventures Between Cultures: Tracking The Roman Poet Virgil (70-19 BC) From Eleventh-Century Ireland to Twentieth Century Singapore

In this talk, Susanna Braund will share some intriguing and moving moments from her project to trace the translation history of the Roman poet Virgil, whose poems were the centrepiece of the European educational system from the time they were written down until the nineteenth century. The highways and byways of the journey include sixteenth-century versions of the Aeneid—the epic poem of the founding myth of Roman nationhood—in French and Italian by Joachim Du Bellay and Annibal Caro, John Dryden’s complete English translation of Virgil’s works (1697), forays by other poets including Spenser, Schiller, Leopardi, Wordsworth, Shelley, Valéry and Heaney, and by movie director Pasolini, and irreverent travesties in Dutch, German and Ukrainian.