This Translation
My hope is that Latin students like me will find here a translation close enough to the text to aid in construing it and that English readers will encounter a reasonably poetic facsimile of Lucan.
I chose a six-foot line, longer than usual in English, to allow for Latin’s compression. Latin quantitative hexameter offers flexibility both by allowing vowel quantities to be (in part) positionally determined and in permitting the (almost) free disposition of syllables as either spondees or dactyls. Flexibility in meter has the effect of enhancing compression, already a characteristic of any highly inflected language. Latin’s sparing use of demonstratives and and its entire absence of articles also makes the line tighter. My point is that a single Latin hexameter can carry a lot of narrative information or poetic nuance. A lengthened verse in Latin translation descends from one of the early English (but not the even earlier Scottish) translator of Virgil. Thomas Phaer used seven feet. Seven was more than I could manage, but several early translators adopted Phaer’s line, including Chapman for his Homer.
To fit the meter, syllabic fillers are inevitable in poems and especially in their translations. I tried to make these contribute tonal enhancements, with an example from Shakespeare in mind:
Cleopatra is discovered dead on her throne, a snake at her breast.
FIRST GUARD: What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?
CHARMIAN: It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Royal” is filler, but the pleonasm elevates Shakespeare’s line.
I used weak and strong endings, but when an ending is weak the line following starts with a stress. The idea was to preserve iambic rhythm across lines. Thus, below, the first and third lines have weak endings, followed by a stress to begin the second and fourth:
Let Caesar to these fated things Perusian famine,
Struggle in Mutina add, and ships destroyed
Near bitter Leucas; slave-fought wars by flaming Aetna.
All considered, Rome should thank its civil wars
This rhythmic plan makes enjambment easier on the ear, an important consideration in English for any long poem that would unfold a complex plot in the rhythms of poetry. But the same plan is employed also in lines that stand alone:
And yet, if fate could not contrive a different path
To Nero’s advent – for eternal kingdoms come
At high price for the gods, and heaven could not serve
The thunderer until a war with savage giants –
Nothing have we to complain of, O you gods.
No. Crime itself and evil at this price are sweet.
The last two lines are not enjambed; the first starts with a stress after a weak ending. The second is purely iambic. My intention was to tell Lucan’s story in something almost like prose, driven by lines often enjambed so that the meter, half concealed, is mainly at the service of the plot.
In diction I steered away from the archaisms with which Victorian translators hoped to create altitude. Whenever possible, I tried to render Lucan’s way of putting things, perhaps sometimes flirting with obscurity. An example is in Book IV (lines 48-49):
Hactenus armorum discrimina: cetera bello
Fata dedit variis incertus motibus aer.
The arbitration of their arms. As for the rest,
Air with its changing motions gave to war a fate
Uncertain.
Should “aer” be translated for clarity as “weather”?
It was my hope to sound serious but not hide-bound, passionate without bombast, but above all clear, readable, and accurate – accurate in the sense of finding the English that best accommodates both Lucan’s literal phrase and the English idiom its meaning demands.
Where a deep knowledge of the language is wanted, I cannot approach the distinguished Latinists who have translated Lucan, from Marlowe to modern day scholars like Braund, Joyce, and Widdows. I needed to rely, in interpreting difficult passages, on the wisdom and experience of prose translators Duff and especially Riley, whose “copious” notes were always welcome.