C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When I tell you my finger smashed the "order now" button--apparently there's a fragmentary translation of the Aeneid by C.S. Lewis that he was working on all throughout his life. It's a rhyming version in 12-syllable Alexandrine lines, and you KNOW I had to do a review of it. Here are my thoughts, as well as a little more on Lewis's theory of epic and his lifelong relationship with Rome's greatest narrative poem.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh hey, nice to see you again.
0:04.4	I've just been here, you know, chilling, reading this Translation of the Enid by C.S.
0:11.7	Fricken Lewis. This is a very galaxy brain experience. So when I was getting ready to start talking about
0:28.7	the inyid on the show, I was thinking I should do some translation episodes about the Inniad,
0:35.3	because I like to do one long episode every week where we talk
0:38.1	about a great work of literature. And then, as you know, I'm really into talking about
0:42.3	translation, ancient languages, foreign languages generally, what it means to do translation,
0:47.9	why we need multiple translations. And there are many, many English translations of the
0:52.8	Aneed. A couple episodes back, I did my review of them and gave you my recommendation for the Alan Mandelbaum version, which if you're following along with me, that's the one I think you should check out. I think that's the one that is probably most readable, but also captures some of the dignity and density of the poem. And I really
1:13.7	love it. But in the process of researching some of the other ones, I found this long list of
1:18.9	every available English translation, or at least every available translation that the author of the
1:24.2	list could find. I'm scrolling through, I'm like, yeah, Shottie Barch,
1:34.7	yeah, Sarah Rudin, yeah, Alan Mandelbaum. There's a CS-Lewis one, or there are fragments of a CS-L-L-W-1? This, to me, was like, do not pass go, do not collect $200, instantly order on
1:40.3	Amazon. When I tell you, my finger smashed the buy now button, it was like Prime couldn't
1:46.3	even handle my order fast enough. Because CS Lewis, as listeners to this podcast know, C.S.
1:52.9	Lewis is my intellectual hero, bar none. He is the guy whose prose style I most admire. He's the
1:59.5	person I try to be like intellectually most in the way that
2:03.4	he communicates really high-level ideas in a very clear and engaging and often very beautiful
2:09.6	way. So he's somebody that I would be fascinated to read a translation by. And the minute I posted
2:16.4	about this on Twitter, I got some people saying
2:18.8	this might kind of be an op. It might be a sci-op. It might be somebody just trying to profit
2:26.9	off of C.S. Lewis's name. And the editor, A.T. Reyes, I think, has been accused of using unfinished material by Lewis just to make his
	...

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