Nell Gardiner

on translating Lucan

In my translation I hoped to heighten the uneasy effect created by Lucan’s empty questioning through placing the question words at the beginning of each line. Instead of the glory (κλέος) offered by the Homeric poeticising of deaths in the much earlier Greek Iliad, I wanted to promote Lucan’s dishonourable portrayal of the death of men in civil war. One word that particularly interested me was spoliare in the way that it suggested the greed of those desiring to plunder their victim’s corpses: I translated this as "pick at", hoping to evoke the image of a bird of prey mincing its carrion. The dead bodies are no longer loved ones or even humans, but flesh to be profited from. All the dead are equal in battle, but even more so from the fact that it is self-same slaughter in this war. I somewhat had a more difficult decision to make through the wording to describe the wounding of the men in the opening lines. The Latin is explicitly alliterative (uiscera uolnus...uitalia), made possible through the jumbling of word order allowed in the language. In an English rendering, ‘viscera’ and ‘vitals’ are certainly possible translations, but at the risk of sounding archaic. I opted for the semi-alliterative effect of ‘wound’ (volnus) and ‘vitals’ (vitalia) as a compromise. On a structural note, I separated the final section of Latin into its own paragraph, as it seemed to mark a change tone after the indirect questions. The poet returns cyclically to his original statement that no death deserves its own record when Rome herself is dying. Now that he has evoked individual – if nameless deaths - this assertion appears to be somewhat contradictory. Although Lucan wants to lament only the death of Rome, he can only do this by lamenting its men.