'The Epic Re-Mixed: An Aeneid for Now'

Join us Wednesday, Oct. 29, from 12 – 1:30 p.m. in Sarofim Hall, as Scott McGill, the Deedee McMurtry Professor in Humanities, and his Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures colleague, assistant professor Susannah Wright, discuss a project nearly eight years in the making, their collaborative translation of Rome’s epic origin story.

This new Aeneid is rendered in an unrhymed iambic pentameter that engages modern readers while preserving the epic dignity and pathos of the original. Their version faithfully conveys the poem’s delicate balance between its triumphant celebration of the Roman Empire and its sensitivity to the human costs of antiquity’s most powerful and influential society. The result is a poem in English every bit as complex, inviting and affecting as the Latin original. With a rich introduction from Emily Wilson, and the full complement of maps and supporting material that have made Wilson’s Homer translations the standard for our time, this gorgeous edition of Rome’s founding epic will capture the imaginations and stir the souls of a new generation of readers.