The second, and concluding volume, of David Hadbawnik's radical new translation of the Aeneid comes with a phalanx of images - grayscale in this paperback edition - by Omar Al-Nakib. The second half of Virgil's almost-completed epic on the founding of Rome is famously blood-soaked, with battle after battle, and with titanic heroes - of a decidedly Homeric kind - fighting for their honour and for the continued existence of their cities and their people. As with Homer, the capricious gods continually meddle, but Aeneas wins through in the end, his sword dripping with blood.
"Few narrative poems have possessed the Western imagination like Virgil's twelve-book epic written during Augustus's triumphant consolidation of the Roman Empire. [ ...] This new volume goes a long way toward moving the narrative into the hands of contemporary readers, drawing out a playful understanding of the ancient story while exhibiting modern preferences for poetic interaction and inquiry into the history and terms of poetic form and translation. Hadbawnik shows the fun to be had in language's etymological resonance, and he delights in scenes of dramatic fulfillment and failure. His translation distills the essence of the narrative by directing a reader's perception of the tale.
[ ...] The turbulent energy Hadbawnik frames in the Aeneid is reinforced by Omar Al-Nakib's illustrations. The images are extraordinarily active, shimmering. Figurative abstractions in black and red ink commit visual renderings that merge a new language with the text. A kind of haptic interplay takes place in textures of visual and auditory modes that interact in the experience of reading. The interplay between the text and images vividly enhance the poem's movements. Readers enter it anew as a work of contemporary art and not as a furzy excavation or dour education in classical writing. It is instead a vivid opportunity to confront our own pleasure for words and images violently imagined in the ancient corpus." -from Dale Martin Smith's Introduction, 'The Warrior Agon'.
Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.), is best remembered for his masterpiece, The Aeneid, in which he represented the Emperor Augustus as a descendant of the half-divine Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy and legendary founder of Rome. Virgil claimed on his deathbed that The Aeneid was unfinished and expressed a desire to have it burned, but it became the national epic of ancient Rome, a monument of Latin literature, and has been regarded as one of the great classics of Western literature ever since. Virgil's other works include the Eclogues and the Georgics, also considered masterpieces.
David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. In 2012, he edited Thomas Meyer's Beowulf (Punctum Books), and in 2011 he co-edited selections from Jack Spicer's Beowulf for CUNY's Lost and Found Document Series; he has also published essays on Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer. Other publications include Holyy Sonnets to Orpheus, and other poems (Delete Press, 2017), Aeneid, Books I-VI (Shearsman Books, 2015), Field Work (BlazeVOX, 2011), Translations From Creeley (Sardines, 2008), Ovid in Exile (Interbirth, 2007), and SF Spleen (Skanky Possum, 2006). He is the editor and publisher of Habenicht Press and the journal kadar koli, and a co-editor of eth press, which focuses on creative interactions with medieval texts. Currently, he is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
