The chapter explores the economics of translating Virgil, examining the role of patrons, printers, publishing houses and presses. I first explore the relationships of translators with their patrons, publishers and printers, in France, Italy and Britain during the first two centuries of the print era. I reveal the tension between the desire to satisfy the elite’s need for exclusive badges of culture and the impulse to extend the vernacularization of Virgil by producing accessible translations for less educated readers. I investigate the power relations involved in initiating or commissioning translations, with examples from Cinquecento Italy, and the funding of expensive folio editions in France and England. In Victorian England, translations published in low-priced series of books, including Everyman’s Library, flourish alongside ambitious luxury productions. The chapter concludes with a study of Virgil’s works in the Penguin Classics series in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.

The topic of competition starts with translators’ incorporation of others’ versions into their own texts, then moves on to translators’ prefaces where they situate themselves in relation to particular predecessors, such as Leopardi’s relationship with Caro’s sixteenth-century Eneide. I examine in depth the self-positioning and self-fashioning in the paratexts in the English tradition of Aeneid translations from Caxton down to Wordsworth. The second section deals with the phenomenon of ‘retranslation’, which has two manifestations: when translators lift elements from preceding translations and when they revisit their own earlier versions and modify them. Then I consider competition with Virgil himself, starting with the challenge to Paul Valéry to translate the Eclogues. The chapter concludes with brief consideration of parody and travesty of Virgil as special forms of retranslation, with examples from a seventeenth-century Dutch collaboration on the Eclogues, a seventeenth-century parody of Eclogue 1 by an Irishman and an eighteenth-century travesty of the Aeneid in German.

The chapter deals with fidelity of form: after briefly considering prose translations of Virgil, I analyse the wide range of choices of metre for the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. One of the largest issues facing any translator is whether or not to attempt to find an equivalent of Virgil’s dactylic hexameter. After discussion of prosody wars in French and English, I examine Italian Aeneids in depth and then metrical experimentation in English translations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The final portion of the chapter is devoted to the hexameter in the hands of translators into German, Slovenian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish and Hungarian, with a glance at twenty-first-century hexameter translations in Italian and English. Throughout I explore the ideological significance attached to the chosen metre by analysing the familiar cultural paradigms invoked by each choice. There are two axes on which choice of metre can be located: past/present and home-grown/foreign.

The chapter deals with fidelity of content, specifically concepts and register. I first discuss the querelle (‘dispute’) between those who favoured word-for-word translations and those who believed in updating or beautifying the ancient text for their contemporary audience, as captured in the phrase ‘les belles infidèles’, an approach which involves the notion of ‘compensation’. I then ask how translators tackle key concepts in Virgil’s oeuvre, such as the untranslatable pietas of the Aeneid, along with specific challenges that arise from Virgil’s Latin texts, such as puns and the incomplete lines. I investigate how translators attempt to match the various registers of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, then I consider the lens provided by the theoretical spectrum of domestication and foreignization, with examples including Aeneid translations in Italian, English, Romanian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian, concluding with Chew’s uncategorizable Georgics.

I argue that the most efficacious way of establishing a national literature was through the translation of major, high-prestige, foreign texts, such as Greco-Roman epic poetry: translation of Virgil’s poems has had a significant role in creating and honing literary language in European vernaculars and has sometimes served proto-nationalistic and nationalistic agendas. After analysis of the scope of ‘nationalism’ and its relevance to Virgil, I examine examples of the appropriation of cultural authority through translation of the Aeneid in French translations from the sixteenth century, then in other languages including Russian, Hungarian, Portuguese (in both Portugal and Brazil), Catalan, Katharevousa Greek, Maltese and Welsh, with special discussion of the foundational work of Ukrainian literature. I then discuss cases of translation as a proto-nationalist phenomenon, in Hebrew and Argentinian Spanish, and as a transnational phenomenon, in Esperanto. I conclude by relating translation and nation in both outward-looking and inward-looking modalities and in vertical and horizontal dimensions.

Here I examine the phenomenon of partial as contrasted with complete translations: some translators publish complete translations of the Aeneid and the Eclogues, while others select individual books or poems. Some selections, for example Eclogue 4 and Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, are consistently popular, while others wax and wane. My chief focus is on partial translations of the Aeneid, where the ability to select and isolate individual books or passages gave translators great flexibility and the freedom to domesticate the material or to turn it to particular aims. After a glance at the ‘Messianic’ Eclogue (Eclogue 4) and the ‘Aristaeus epyllion’ (from Georgics 4), I analyse some famous and less famous translations of Books 4, 2, 1 and 6. Factors that explain some of these selections include the translator’s self-image, education and circumstances, their aims and ambitions, and their motivations for writing as generated by patronage and the venue of publication.