CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
February 2015
CAI Presidential Address 2014 Dr Peter Fallon On Friday, 3 October 2014, Peter Fallon addressed CAI members in the Assembly Hall of Belvedere College, Dublin. His intriguing subject: “The Arts of Translation.” Few people in that field could claim to be his equal. Publisher, poet and life-long practitioner of the craft of translation, Dr Fallon entranced his audience that stormy autumn evening. As the elements raged outside, inside the audience enjoyed a discussion of the purposes and possible achievements of translation. (One thought inevitably of another stormy night in October 1816 when Charles Cowden Clarke sat with John Keats and they read through Chapman’s translation of Homer until daybreak, “Keats sometimes shouting aloud with delight as some passage of special energy struck his imagination”.1 At breakfast, Cowden Clark found Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” on his desk.) Dr Fallon’s own work on the Georgics has been recognized throughout the Englishspeaking world. His The Georgics of Virgil (Gallery Books, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and has recently been republished by Oxford University Press. His love of Virgil brought him to a discussion of how the famous first lines of The Aeneid might
best be rendered in English. (Recent practitioners to assay this include Robert Fagles, Frederick Ahl, Sarah Ruden and Stanley Lombardo, to mention only Americans). In Fagles’ translation for Penguin, for example, the poet recites “Wars and a man I sing,” for “arma virumque cano”,2 an opening similar in many ways to the “Arms and the man I sing” of Edward Fairfax Taylor’s translation of 1907, and yet crucially different. Each and every beautifully crafted sentence in Dr Fallon’s address had charm and provoked thought simultaneously. We were witness to the truth of what Seamus Heaney had written of Fallon’s approach in June 2010, namely that “the seriousness of [his] caretaking [of words] has developed over the years to a point where the artistic and the moral have converged”.3 Fallon’s originals have been translated into French, German, Irish, Japanese, Romanian and Hungarian. He merits the encomium of Tennyson in the ode “To Virgil”: “lord of language.” We left that storm-tossed Assembly Hall uplifted and enthused, and ready to look into the deep “arts of translation” anew. Damhlaic mag Shamhráin Chairman, CAI 1 Robert
Chambers (ed.), The Book of Days, vol. 2 (London: W. & R. Chambers, 1832) 511. 2 For an interesting comparative discussion of the translations by Fagle, Ahl and Ruden, see the article by A.N. Wilson in The Telegraph (2008): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personalview/3560281/Virgil-through-modern-eyes.html (last accessed 6 January 2015). 3 Address at Villanova University, 20 April, 2010.
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