Please join us for an evening with the esteemed poet and translator DAVID FERRY. featuring works read by friends and faculty of the Boston University Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum. Readers: Zachary Bos, Jonathan Han, Brian Jorgensen, George Kalogeris, Stephanie Nelson, Anita Patterson, Christopher Ricks, Meg Tyler, Jon Westling; with David Ferry as our final and featured reader. Hosted by Sassan Tabatabai. Free and open to the public.
Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning poet and translator DAVID FERRY for a discussion of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning poet and critic, former poet laureate, and Boston University professor ROBERT PINSKY. This event is co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.
This event is free and also includes a book signing. Doors close at 6:00pm!
About The Aeneid
“I sing of arms and the man . . . ”
So begins the Aeneid, greatest of Western epic poems. Virgil’s story of the journey of Aeneas has been a part of our cultural heritage for so many centuries that it’s all too easy to lose sight of the poem itself—of its brilliantly cinematic depiction of the sack of Troy; the monstrous hunger of the harpies; the intensity of Dido’s love for the hero, and the blackness of her despair; and the violence that Aeneas and his men must endure before they can settle in Italy and build the civilization whose roots we still claim as our own.
This new translation brings Virgil’s masterpiece newly to life for English-language readers. It’s the first in centuries crafted by a translator who is first and foremost a poet, and it is a glorious thing. DAVID FERRY has long been known as perhaps our greatest contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal metrical lines into an English that is familiar and alive. Yet in doing so, he surrenders none of the feel of the ancient world that resonates throughout the poem and gives it the power that has drawn readers to it for centuries. In FERRY’s, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, of devotion and death. Never before have Virgil’s twin gifts of poetic language and urgent, compelling storytelling been presented so powerfully for English-language readers. FERRY’s Aeneid will be a landmark, a gift to longtime lovers of Virgil, and the perfect entry point for new readers.