Schiller describes Dido’s last breath in today’s post. Hear the German with an English translation here and see the blog post with an illustration by Rembrandt here.
Today’s poem is taken from Schiller’s free German translation of Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which he describes how the Goddess Juno finally takes pity on Dido as she lingers in her death agony after stabbing herself with Aeneas’s sword and sends the rainbow-Goddess Iris to free her spirit from her body. Hear the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
See and hear passages from Schiller’s fine German version of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, follow in English and compare with Virgil’s Latin original.
Today we publish a selection of extracts from Friedrich von Schiller’s free version of Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas tells the story of the fall of Troy, and Book 4, in which Aeneas’s ill-fated affair with Queen Dido of Carthage ends in tragedy. See the selection here, hear Schiller’s German read by Tatjana Pisarski, and use the links to compare his version with Virgil’s original.
Translations of poetry in another language are often our only option. They tell us, sometimes more and sometimes less precisely, what the original “meant”, but can’t fully replicate it with all its subtleties, allusions, deliberate or accidental ambiguities and aural effects. Translating poetry is rather like trying to bake an identical copy of an elaborate cake using only a random few of the same ingredients. But, with all the inevitable problems, the best translations can be marvelous. For me, no English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid that I know is as good as the German poet Friedrich von Schiller’s version of Books 2 and 4, covering Aeneas’s account of the fall of Troy and the story of his catastrophic love affair with Dido. It does not mimic the original in style or metre, but has pace and energy, telling the story powerfully while also giving full expression to its moments of great pathos. It is a pity that Schiller did not translate more than these two books. Here is a selection, with links that will take you for comparison to the original Latin. The Latin and the German are both recited in the original with an English translation.
The Scene is North Africa. Following the destruction of Troy by the Greeks, the Trojan prince Aeneas and his followers are wandering the Mediterranean in search of a new home. Bad weather has blown them here, where the Phoenician queen-in-exile, Dido, is founding the city of Carthage, and makes them welcome. We know something that neither Dido nor Aeneas does: in centuries to come, the Carthaginians and Aeneas’s Roman descendants will fight long and bitter wars in which their very survival is at stake. Sitting at table, and invited by Dido to tell his story, Aeneas is recalling the fall of Troy.
A Trojan, Laocoon, sacrificing as the priest of Neptune, hears that the besieging Greeks have gone, leaving a huge wooden horse which his countrymen are considering bringing into the city: a force of Greeks is hidden inside. He delivers Laocoon’s warning.
Laocoon’s warning is wise, but he is terribly punished for it by two monstrous serpents, which destroy him and his sons before disappearing into the temple of Minerva.
The Trojans bring the horse into the city, where, under cover of darkness, the Greeks emerge and the sack of the city begins. Aeneas is visited by the ghost of the greatest Trojan warrior, Hector, son of King Priam, who urges him to escape with the city’s sacred relics.
Achilles, the greatest Greek fighter, is now dead, but his son Pyrrhus finds and kills King Priam in the royal palace.
Captivated by Aeneas, Queen Dido falls in love. Matters come to a head on a day when she and her retinue accompany Aeneas and his Trojans on a magnificent hunt.
It looks as though Aeneas might stay with Dido in Carthage, but the Gods send a stern command to remember that he has a mission of his own to found a new home that will grow to become the great city of Rome. Before he has told Dido, she learns that he is preparing to sail away and leave her. She is devastated.
The Trojans’ preparations continue.
Distraught, Dido has a great pile made of the possessions that Aeneas has given her. The intention is supposedly to burn them, but they become her funeral pyre as she stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. She dies a lingering death. The scene is set for the struggle centuries hence between Rome and Carthage.
This poem by Schiller, “Nänie” (meaning a Roman funeral song) is famous in the German-speaking world. It is a fine example of how influential classical education, which most significant European writers between the Renaissance and the mid-twentieth century would have had, was on their work. Schiller actually uses an ancient Greek and Roman metre – elegiac couplets – and takes it as read that his audience will immediately recognise the figures from myth that he refers to, although only one of them is referred to by name in the German text.
The illustration shows the courtship on a red-figure cup of Thetis, the grieving mother of Schiller’s poem, and the hero Peleus. Thetis, a shape-shifter, attempts to elude him by using her gift, but he holds her too tightly. Achilles, also a figure in Schiller’s poem, will be among the results.
Hear Schiller’s German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow in Westbrook’s English here.
