Event Description
Shadi Bartsch: Translating While Female: Is the New Aeneid “Feminist”?
Translating the Aeneid requires close reading of the primary text, awareness of the original context, and familiarity with how the author manipulated models to create his new work. But what happens when this familiarity leads to a different interpretation of the poem than the standard one? Bartsch’s new Aeneid, along with its introduction and explanatory notes, rejects the traditional reading of the poem as an ode to duty, a celebration of the inexorable march of arms and the man towards the foundation of what would become the great and eternal city of Rome, an empire “without limit in time and space.” In this Aeneid, which takes pains to stay true to the original, Aeneas is outed as a crafty Odysseus while Dido, traditionally represented as deluded, has full reason for bitterness, and the poet himself will not let us forget the pre-Vergilian Aeneas, betrayer of Troy. For Bartsch, the poem’s hero reveals himself to be all too accurate a prototype of Augustus. The question is: why has it taken 2000 years for translators to come to this view? And why has the new translation been called “feminist”?
Event Info
May 15, 2025 at 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM EDT
Online, May 15th, 7:00p.m. ET
Guest Speaker
