A few days ago I stumbled on an inactive twitter account styling itself @VirgilTweets. This person, between 4 September 2009 and 21 Aug 2012 (usually daily, but sometimes after a gap of months), tweeted a line from The Aeneid each time, accompanied by a corresponding line of English translation. Latin poetic syntax being what it is, there are problems with this approach of course, words showing up in the English which hasn’t yet appeared in the Latin and vice versa, but on the whole he manages surprisingly well to keep each line more or less standalone and closely keyed to the actual revealed Latin lines while also keeping whole passages coherent as the text line by line unfolds (as far as I can see he never tweeted more than once a day even though he must have prepared whole passages at a time.)

When I first started reading I wondered whether he might not have been cribbing from a published translation, but I think it is his own. At least it isn’t the Fitzgerald or the Dryden, nor yet (I’ve sinced determined) the Fagles* or Lombardo, and it is a pleasing translation, kept in modern, unfussy English, (no deliberate archaising or embroidery) but without being intentionally colloquial (think David Slavitt’s 1994 free verse translation of Ovid.), only a little stilted at times, with some redundancies and insertions of pronouns for clarity (like a student with neat handwriting careful to show a grader he had understood and accounted for every part of speech.) This person, I thought, is perhaps an academic, a Latin professor (not a grad student; they have not the leisure), maybe someone like Brantley Bryant of GC Hath a Blog (perhaps they even know each other!) I begin to reread the Latin, slowly, one line at a time, struggling over vocabulary I’d lost, construing lines with the help of the English. At this level of attentiveness to each word I begin to marvel at his project. For also it is a form of constraint writing — a double constraint really — not merely keeping to the overall 140 twitter characters but, because the Virgilian lines predetermine his quota of leftover characters for the English. A kind of poetic twohands, almost.

But fter 224 lines, the tweets ceased. I can quite understand someone wearying of their project. Perhaps work and life circumstances occupied him, the projec languished, then the momentum was lost. Or perhaps he’d lost interest in his idea. Enough is enough. No longer a love-task, these self-imposed labours must cease. Too ambitious, unsustainable. The way of resolutions. I understood stopping. But that anyone should stop after 224 lines, not even at a pause in the narrative action, suggests a kind of supreme boredom or indifference to the enterprise begun. A mere 2% of the text; narrative-wise nothing has happened yet — we haven’t even got out of the first book. Rest his pen at a natural lull, we would applaud. Like a man who chooses to run a marathon, no one supposes he might not give up; one almost expects it. To do so at a milestone however small, would be understandable, a heroic failure even — I am not in form, it was a foolishness, I have not the will, I don’t need to meet this goal. (At a line a day, it would have taken him more than 27 years to finish tweeting The Aeneid…) Well done, we hasten to assure him. But to choose to begin a marathon and then to stalk off nonchalant from the course after a desultory 200m and to — the spectators begin to mutter, feel mocked. He had not died, I was sure, though I had no reason for believing one way or the other.

(*I have to my regret never read the Fagles translation, and I expect I never will. When I was in college, Fagles had not yet been published, the gold standard in modern translations was Fitzgerald’s 1981 version. I had not cared for it (the translation was exactly as old as I was). Besides, for relevancy it was Dryden’s 1697 that mattered. By the time Fagles came out I was already in graduate school and what did I want with yet another translation when I could always work from the original? (I didn’t, as it happens, end up reading more than the 6th and the 12th books in the original; but snobbishness kept me from reading translations after college, so it was Fitzgerald who stayed with me.)