Today’s Poem of the Day commemorates the birth of Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC), known to us as Virgil and traditionally held to have been born on the fifteenth of October. What biographical details we possess come down to us as gossip and accounts by the Roman poet Varius (74–14 BC) as filtered through the historian Suetonius (AD 69–122), the fourth-century commentary of St. Jerome’s teacher Aelius Donatus, and the fifth-century writing of Servius the Grammarian, who with Donatus was one of the great writers of what we would now call literary criticism, devoted to the Virgil’s works. We see, as through this gauzy scrim, the sketch of a life: birth in a village near Mantua, education at Cremona, Mediolanum, Rome, and Naples, consideration of a career as a rhetorician, and eventual choice of poetry as a life’s calling.

Meanwhile, we know, with the clarity of direct encounter, what Virgil did with that life’s calling. We have his great works available to us, though if we’re not Latinists we must encounter them through translation. Still, there they are: the “Eclogues,” the “Georgics,” and, most famous of all, the epic of Roman identity, the “Aeneid.” Of course, we also see Virgil appropriated as, literally, the light of poetic tradition, as his fictionalized character leads the fictionalized Dante first through Hell, then through Purgatory, before stopping short of the threshold of Heaven. For most ordinary Anglophones, at least those who read poetry and care about its traditions, Virgil simultaneously casts a sharply outlined shadow across the centuries and shimmers just out of reach, a figure at once solidly, historically real and insubstantial as any fictional character, a construct of words, touched to life only in imagination.

Still, the gift of a good translator is one of those gifts that endlessly give. It grants us access to a text we would otherwise struggle to read and, left to our own devices, fail to see intelligibly, let alone clearly. Here, the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum (b. 1959), opens for us the first lines of Virgil’s great epic, in which Aeneas, fleeing the destruction of Troy, sails through various perils and adventures to effect the founding of Rome. The thrust of the poem is itself an act of translation, imposing the foundational Greek narrative on the chaotic origins that would, at Virgil’s moment in history, which was also the moment of the Emperor Augustus, coalesce into an empire.

Here the contemporary translator has achieved a similar kind of retroactive organizing, using a metrical system of choriambs and trisyllabics which he had developed for translating post-Renaissance Latin hexameters, to enable English poetic lines to behave metrically, as nearly as possible, in the way that the lines would behave in the original. As in any good translation, if we hear the English-speaking voice of our own time in these lines, it’s as an echo of the original, the voice of antiquity, uttering its lines across millennia and languages, elusive but present and real to us. 

The First from Far Troy (Aeneid, 1.1–11)
by Virgil (translated by Joseph Bottum)

Of war and a man, now will I sing —
            The first from far Troy to arrive
At Italy’s coast: Exiled by fate,
            He sailed to Lavinium’s shore.
On strands of strange soil, wracked by the sea,
            He struggled against a vast rage,
For Juno herself, savage in fury,
            Fomented mishap and woe.
Though punished with pains, wounded in wars,
            He founded a city at last.
Thereby did he fill Latium’s lack
            With gods who are wellsprings of all.
And from this there came races of men
            For raising the high walls of Rome.

O Muse of my song, tell me the cause —
            Explain why the queen of the gods
Expended her wrath, ruthless and rough,
            To injure an exile from Troy.
His piety praised, famous in faith,
            He nonetheless felt the fell weight
Of burdensome trials, hardship and hurt.
          Do gods truly hold to such ire? 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.