Translating the Aeneid to the Nouveau Roman: Pierre Klossowski's Aeneid

Abstract

The end of World War I in 191 8, Theodore Ziolkowski tells us, was regarded by most French intellectuals as 'a sign of the re-establishment of traditional Western values, of which they considered France the appropriate spiritual center'.1 In 1920 Andre Bellessort was paying grateful homage to the cultural father of this Western tradition, calling Virgil 'non seulement un des plus nobles genies, mais le plus noble inspirateur de notre art, le pere de notre poesie moderne'.2 Virgil's adoption for this role in France owed much to the use of the Homeric hero as the German soldierly model, as well as to the preeminence of German classical scholarship. Over forty years later, the most eminent French Virgilian of the century, Jacques Perret, was continuing to promote a Virgil who had walked straight out of Dante's Commedia, the Father of the West: 'N'acceptons pas que vis-a-vis de cette tradition, nous qui en sommes issus puissions nous conduire en etrangers. On ne refait pas son passe. On ne renie pas les siens. Virgile, un peu notre pere, a droit a notre piete'.3 Two years after these words were published, Pierre Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid appeared. It was absolutely unlike others available to the French public at this time, the majority of which had been produced by professional classicists. Those classicists reacted with predictable hostility, and Jean-Paul Brisson appeared to be voicing the pique of most of his colleagues when he complained that this translation 'qui a fait grand bruit est un veritable contre-sens qui denature profondement le texte de Virgile'.4 Klossowski's crime is to have produced a translation which makes no attempt to familiarize Virgil or to make his work accessible. It questions the comfortable figure presented by classicists as the Father of the West.