Aeneid, Books VII-XII

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 Agōn’.