Recently, I wanted to compare many different English translator’s approaches to a particular line in Vergil’s Aeneid, but I discovered that there was no easy reference chart online listing all English translations of the Aeneid. The few aging websites that had some partial bibliographies only listed a handful of translations, and did not include notable recent translations, including the few produced by female translators (a factor I felt was relevant to the line I was looking at).

So there was only one thing to do – collate the list myself. Here it is:

Translator	Date	Link	Prose or verse?	Notes
William Caxton	1490	Link	Verse	Translated from French Liure Des Eneydes of 1483
Gawin Douglas	1553	Link	Verse	In the Scots language
Henry, Earl of Surrey	1557	Link	Verse	Precise date unknown. Books 2 and 4 only.
Richard Stanyhurst	1582	Link	Verse	Books 1-4 only
John Dryden	1697	Link	Verse	The most highly regarded pre-20th century translation; rhyming
Joseph Trapp	1718	Could not source	Verse	Blank verse
Alexander Strahan	1739	Link	Verse	Blank verse
Christopher Pitt	1740	Link	Verse	Rhyming
James Beresford	1794	Link	Verse	Blank verse
Charles Symmons	1817	Could not source	Verse	Rhyming
C. R. Kennedy	1861	Could not source	Unknown
J. Conington	1866	Link	Verse
J. Conington	1870	Could not source	Prose	Could not source the prose version
Christopher Pearse Cranch	1872	Link		Blank verse
William Morris	1876	Link	Verse
W. J. Thornhill	1878	Link		Titled “The Passion of Dido”, Book 4 only
J. W. Mackail	1885	Link	Prose
W. J. Thornhill	1886	Link	Verse	Blank verse
Charles Bowen	1887	Link	Verse	Books 1-6 only
Oliver Crane	1888	Link	Verse	English dactylic hexameter
J. Rhoades	1893	Link	Verse	Books 1-6 only
Joseph Davidson	1896	Link	Prose	Literal translation of books 1-6 only
Theodore Martin	1896	Link	Verse	Books 1-6 only, could only find book 6 online
Archibald Hamilton Bryce	1897	Link	Prose	In ‘The Works of Virgil: A Literal Translation’
Archibald A. Maclardy	1901	Link	Prose	An ‘elegant’ translation on the side of an interlinear version
Edward Fairfax Taylor	1903	Could not source	Prose	Could not source the prose version
T. H. Delabère May	1903	Could not source	Verse	Could not source
Charles Billson	1906	Vol 1; Vol 2.	Verse
Edward Fairfax Taylor	1907	Link	Verse
Theodore C. Williams	1908	Link	Verse
H. R. Fairclough	1916	See the 1935 version	Prose	This is the original Loeb edition
Frederick Holland Dewey	1917	Link	Interlinear	Interlinear translation of Aeneid books 1-6
Frank Richards	1928	Could not source	Unknown
Henry S. Salt	1928	Could not source	Verse	Retains half lines, uses a variety of rhyming schemes
Percy Ellesmere Smythe	1933	Could not source	Unknown	Said to have the title “A literal translation (with difficulties explained) of Virgil’s Aeneid”, but this translation could not be sourced.
H. R. Fairclough	1935	Link	Prose	Loeb edition; Revised by G. P. Goold
Unwin S. Barrett & J. H. O. Johnston	1937	Could not source	Verse	Books 1-9 translated by Barrett (published after his death), books 10-12 by Johnston
William Wordsworth	1947	Could not source	Verse	Rhyming; incomplete, covering parts of book 1-3 only; written between 1822-1824 but not published until long after Wordsworth’s death. First published in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford 1947) Vol. 4
Rolfe Humphries	1951	Link	Verse
Cecil Day Lewis	1952		Verse
Kevin Guinagh	1953		Prose
W. F. Jackson Knight	1956		Prose
Michael Oakley	1957		Verse	A line of five stresses separated by one or two unaccented syllables
Patrick Dickinson	1961		Verse
F. O. Copley	1965		Verse
Allen Mandelbaum	1971		Verse
Robert Fitzgerald	1981		Verse
C. H. Sisson	1986		Verse
David West	1990		Prose
Edward McCrorie	1991		Verse
A. S. Kline	2002	Link	Verse
Stanley Lombardo	2005		Verse
Robert Fagles	2006		Verse
Frederick Ahl	2007		Verse	English dactylic hexameter
Sarah Ruden	2008		Verse	Blank verse but same total lines
C. S. Lewis	2011		Unknown	A. T. Reyes rescued the fragments of this incomplete translation from a bonfire and published them long after C. S. Lewis’ death
Barry Powell	2015		Verse	Free-verse
David Hadbawnik	2015		Verse	Books 1-6 (follow-up volume published 2021)
Seumas Heaney	2016		Verse	Book 6 only; published posthumously
Joshua W. D. Smith	2017		Close translation line by line
David Ferry	2017		Verse	Blank verse
Lee M. Fratantuono & R. Alden Smith	2018		Prose	Parallel text of book 8 with prose translation
Shadi Bartsch	2020		Verse	Same number of lines as the original
Len Krisak	2020		Verse	Blank verse but same total lines
Sarah Ruden	2021		Verse	(Revised and expanded edition) Blank verse but same total lines
David Hadbawnik	2021		Verse	Books 7-12

I quickly discovered why no one had published a full list of English translations online before. When I started putting this list together, I thought I might end up with a total of about a dozen books. It quickly snowballed.

This catalogue – and I doubt that it is truly complete – contains a whopping 66 Aeneid translations published in English. Granted, this number includes new editions, as well as translations of sections of the Aeneid. But even if those are removed, there are still 51 original translations of the entire Aeneid, the majority of them in verse.

After taking this census of Aeneid translations, it seems the English language is almost improbably full of them. It almost feels like hardly a year goes by that another Aeneid is rendered into English. This is a slight exaggeration, but I hope these two statistics help paint the current picture:

• From 1860 to the present, no decade has passed without the publication of at least one more English translation of the Aeneid.
• In the last ten years spanning 2014-2023, ten translations (including seven complete translations) were published.

The question is, do we actually have too many translations of the Aeneid?

Devil’s Advocate: Why another Aeneid when there are so many untranslated texts?

While the Aeneid is lavished with 66 English translations and counting, the vast majority of medieval and Neo-Latin texts (Renaissance and later) remain untranslated.

Exactly what percentage of texts remain untranslated is unknowable, especially since many of the surviving texts of these periods are obscure.

But for a sense of scale, I have heard it estimated that over 90-95% of our surviving Latin texts were written after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, most of which remain largely untranslated. Jürgen Leonhardt in Latin: Story of a World Language (2013) claimed that the classical period contributed as little as .01% of all Latin texts, though he does not show how he reached this figure:

The mere fact that more Latin texts have been created and archived in libraries around the world since the end of the Roman Empire than were written in Roman antiquity is significant. But an extrapolation—which can be little more than an approximation, given the state of the sources—testifies to the continuing significance of Latin as a world language: the quantity of post-Roman texts is so extensive that it exceeds the total of all extant classical Latin texts by a factor of ten thousand.

Latin: Story of a World Language (2013), pg 2 (emphasis added)

His footnote simply says,

Christian Sigmund kindly helped me to calculate the scope of Latin
literature.

I would have liked to know whether he means ‘all Latin text ever written’, ‘all surviving text, including untranscribed manuscripts and inscriptions, different manuscript copies of the same text, fragments, and non-literary documents’, or ‘all Latin literature that has been published in modern editions’, because these would yield different numbers (he called it an approximation either way). Whatever the exact figures really are, it is clear that an overwhelming proportion of Latin material comes from post-classical times.

Famous works from the classical canon (the Aeneid being a prime example) have all been widely translated, but post-classical texts usually lack published translations, making it difficult for the general public and scholars who do not know Latin to access these texts.

I do not genuinely believe in a ‘fixed-pie’, competitive mindset where interest and appreciation of one part of Classical studies necessarily means diminished attention to everything else. But it is very tempting to point at all these translations that the Aeneid is getting and say ‘Why aren’t they translating these untranslated texts instead?’ Many of the lesser known works in the Patrologia Latina remain untranslated. What makes it right for the Aeneid to get a 65th and 66th English translation in 2021 while so many texts have yet to receive their first?

This is why seeing a list of 66 translations of the Aeneid is worrying to me. Unless we can uncover a reason for why so many translations of the same text exist, it will feel like we are wasting time in one area that could be better spent spread out over less famous texts.

‘Language changes so we need more translations’

When I bring up the question of whether we need more translations of the Aeneid, people tell me that new generations will always need more translations because our language changes.

However, this ‘linguistic shift’ argument does not account for why ten translations were published within the last ten years between 2014-2023 (or seven, if you exclude the partial translation by Fratantuono & Smith, and combine Hadbawnik’s two volumes into one). Surely language does not change so fast that we need seven completely new translations per decade!

To put this in perspective of a human lifetime, say that I will live to be 90 and die in 2082, i.e. 59 years from now. If we continue publishing English Aeneid translations at the same rate as this decade (0.7 translations per year), there would be 41 more English Aeneids before I die, with a new one published every 1.4 years.

Language certainly does change across generations, but my own generation will not pass away before seeing some forty more translations if we keep going at the same rate! Should we keep doing this?

This made me ask: how many Aeneid translations do people even know exist? Perhaps we are only ever aware of a small number of the most recent or famous translations. What happens to the rest of them?

People can only name about four translations

In general, there is not a widespread perception that there are – or even could be – too many English translations of the Aeneid. I also found that people do not encounter, remember, and interact with most of the English translations of the Aeneid.

I recently ran a poll with my Latin email newsletter subscribers asking whether they felt there were too many English Aeneids. 38 people responded, and the opinion of there being ‘too many’ was in the minority (18.4%). Most respondents either felt there were ‘just enough’ English Aeneids (47.4%) or ‘too few’ (34.3%).

I also asked them how many English translations they could name from memory. 29 respondents answered this question, and the average person named 3.97 translations, with the highest number being 10 and the lowest 0. Some people mixed up translators of the Aeneid with translators of Homer (e.g. naming Lattimore as a translator of the Aeneid), or named Pharr as a translator (though he produced a commentary, not a translation). One respondent said they could name 10, but also knew that more than 10 existed, because they were keeping their own ongoing list.

If my sample roughly represents fans of the Aeneid, and if this group can remember the names of about four of the 66 translations on average, this gives us an idea of how few of the translations are commonly in people’s minds. In general, the audience is not aware that there is an order of magnitude more Aeneid translations out there than they would have realistically interacted with.

Corroborating this sentiment, Fagles (2006), the 53rd English translator of the Aeneid, reports in his acknowledgements section that no one suggested to him that there might already be too many English translations of the Aeneid: ‘Most heartening of all, none has asked me, “Why another Aeneid?”‘

So the next question is, which ones do people remember existing?

What is the most memorable translation of the Aeneid?

I wondered whether each generation of readers just cycles through knowing about the most recent four translations. After all, publishers tend to market and hype up new translations while they are still fresh. Also, a more recent translation is more likely to use up-to-date language and reflect up-to-date scholarly understandings of the work. The argument that we need a constant stream of new translations of the Aeneid would be bolstered if we mostly read the new ones.

But on the other hand, old favourites could be more famous and widely appreciated than new translations, since they have had more time to build up a following.

I decided to investigate whether recent translations were more memorable than older ones. I had given people space to type the names of the translations they remembered as an option, so here I tabulated which of the translations were most often mentioned by my pool of respondents.

Translator	No. of times named
Dryden (1697)	10
Fitzgerald (1981)	6
Fagles (2006)	6
Mandelbaum (1971)	5
Bartsch (2020)	5
Ruden (2021)	4
Lombardo (2005)	3
West (1990)	2
CD Lewis (1952)	2
Kline (2002)	2
Heaney (2016)	1
Fairclough (1916/1935)	1
Humphries (1951)	1
Guinagh (1953)	1
Ferry (2017)	1

The Dryden (1697) translation is clearly the most famous of all English translations. It is not the oldest translation, but certainly the most highly regarded of pre-20th century translations. Perhaps people find it distinctive because it represents an ‘older’ type of translation, with its quaint rhyming couplets.

Next comes a cluster of well known translations from the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Fitzgerald (1981), Fagles (2005), and Mandelbaum (1971). All three are in blank verse, but freely expand upon the number of total lines.

After this group come a pair of very recent translations, Bartsch (2020) and Ruden (2021), from the current decade. Both translators are female and both wrote in verse while keeping within the same number of total lines. It appears to be a recent trend (among both male and female translators) to challenge oneself to render poetry within the same total lines as the source material, even if this greatly restricts the total number of syllables.

Almost all of the translators mentioned above wrote in English verse. The most well-known prose translator was West (1990), who appears halfway down this list, but some mention was also made of Fairclough, who translated the Loeb (1916/1935), and Guinagh (1953) (though the person who mentioned Guinagh noted that this translator was not well known to others).

I suspect Kline (2002) is mentioned a couple times because his translation is accessible online for free on the poetry-in-translation website.

In conclusion, while some people in my survey did only know the most recent translations, most respondents seemed to remember a range of different translations, and the most commonly mentioned translations represent a range of categories. The largest category represented here in people’s memories was those of the late 20th century and early 21st.

I would theorise that the average person does not remember just the most recent 4 translations, but remembers a small number of translations per category: Dryden is the prototypical ‘old’ translation (representing the ‘well before your time’ category). Ruden and Bartsch are the most notable contemporary translations (representing the ‘brand new’ category). Finally, in between these two extremes, there is a selection of notable translations from the late 20th century or early 21st century that people alive today may have read when they were students (representing the ‘relatively recent’ category, books that were around when you were younger).

From this I would speculate that at any given point, people typically care about a few brand new translations, a few relatively recent translations, and Dryden. Those 0.7 new translations coming out per year compete fiercely with each other to secure limited places in the public consciousness, become part of people’s cherished memories of first encountering the work in translation, before they too will fade away and eventually get outshone by the classic Dryden in the ‘old’ category (no one in this survey had mentioned any 18th or 19th century translations).

Fagles, one of the middle-category favourites, seems to have made peace with the inevitable conclusion that any new translation will only be ‘fresh’ for a short time before it is overtaken by scores of later ones. He quotes Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator”: ‘Even the greatest translation… is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal. (p. 73)’

So now we are starting to build up a picture of the life cycle of English translations of the Aeneid. People have enough room to remember the existence of somewhere between 0 and 10 translations, and there is a bias towards being aware of Dryden, of relatively recent translations, and of some brand new ones.

But within both the ‘brand new’ and ‘relatively recent’ category, multiple examples of each stood out. There still exist more translations per generation than the minimum required to satisfy the need to have a translation in current day language.

So then the question is, do the language choices and format of the translations help explain why there are so many?

Why are most translations in verse?

One of the most distinctive patterns which emerges from this list is how most of the translations are rendered in verse. They are poetic works.

This to me is the biggest reason why there are so many: each new English verse translation is a unique work of art. If it is beautiful, it succeeds in its purpose even if there already exist 60 other translations, because no other translation can be exactly like this one.

If the purpose of a translation was simply to accurately convey meaning, then a plain prose rendering would have been sufficient. It would also only need to be updated when the English language had changed enough that the old one became less intelligible. A new prose translation every few decades could do the job, with a verse one here and there for aesthetic people who like that stuff.

What we see instead is the opposite: a teeming mass of English verse translations, and a small number of prose renditions. Verse dominates both what is written and what is remembered.

The majority of translations of the Aeneid are written as art for art’s sake, not because people would be totally ignorant of Vergil’s Aeneid without another one.

Against the fixed-pie mindset

The proliferation of Aeneid translations doesn’t necessarily mean that labour is wrongfully spent on re-re-re-translating a well known work when that same labour could be spent translated never-before translated texts.

On the contrary, general audience interest in the Aeneid could be a factor which grows the total pie, increasing the number of people with skills and interest in Latin-to-English translation.

English verse translations of the Aeneid are expressions of beauty aimed at re-creating the power and effects of the original Latin text in the homely, familiar, and moving language of English speakers today.

Ambitious art projects like these help to show modern audiences that we can still be moved by ancient texts. They are a vital part of classical reception in modern times, driving curiosity and interest towards Latin texts and the Latin language itself.

From my perspective as a high school teacher, the Aeneid has a much broader appeal than say, the untranslated patristic authors of the Patrologia Latina. The texts most likely to draw interest in Latin are the ones that, for better or worse, the Western literary tradition has been most interested in for the longest – that is, the small canon of texts which already get heaps of translations because they are the most culturally intertwined with our own production of stories and literature.

The Aeneid is not directly competing for attention with medieval and Neo-Latin literature. It is an entry point for understanding the expressive potential of the Latin language. When you appreciate the language of the Aeneid, you don’t necessarily have to think less of Augustine or Erasmus. If you read a lot of Shakespeare, does that make you think less of George Orwell? On the contrary, the more people there are who care about Latin at all, the more people there are to appreciate the later authors.

Final thoughts

I hope I’ve given you a good idea of the thoughts that run through my mind when I see how long the list of English translations of the Aeneid is. It may seem incredibly indulgent that we have given this text so many translations, but ultimately this is part of the ongoing classical reception of a well-loved work which brings in many interested readers who will probably enjoy reading other pieces of Latin literature as well.

I am indebted to Matthias Widmer’s article, “Virgil after Dryden: Eighteenth-century English translations of the Aeneid” (2017) for uncovering most of the 18th century translations of the Aeneid. These were more difficult to find than the 19th century translations.

I would not be surprised if there turn out to be a few more translations from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries which have escaped notice. When I found a dead zone in the data for the 1920s, all it took was Googling ‘Aeneid translation 1920… 1921… 1922’ before some translations popped up that had fallen into great obscurity.

It has been suggested that this list should be on a Wikipedia page. I don’t have a Wikipedia editor account, but if someone who know what they are doing could transfer this list to a newly created Wikipedia page, that would be very helpful.

Notable translations I never knew existed include two which were rendered in English dactylic hexameter: Oliver Crane (1888) and Frederick Ahl (2007).

I also didn’t know there were fragments by famous English writers such as William Wordsworth (published 1947, written 1822-1824) and C. S. Lewis (published 2011). If you are interested in those authors it would be very worth checking out their translations.

I’d be willing to bet that there are more notable figures who have died leaving behind fragmentary Aeneid translations, waiting one day to be published. In the case of Barrett & Johnston (1937), Barrett was a Master of the Supreme Court at Pretoria who was translating the Aeneid into verse as a hobby and had completed books 1-9 before he passed away. It was decided that his Aeneid should be published as a tribute to his memory, so another author (Johnston) completed the remaining books 10-12 before they were published as a whole. This is the only case I saw where a fragmentary work was completed by another translator before publication.

In any case, I’m sure that further research into the English translations of the Aeneid would yield interesting results for questions in classical reception history.