Cancelled: David Ferry - "The Aeneid" - Rosanna Warren

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE FOR A LATER DATE AND APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

"Ferry's Aeneid can be read with excitement and pleasure." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post

David Ferry discusses The Aeneid. He will be joined in conversation by Rosanna Warren.

At the Co-op

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About the book: In 2012, David Ferry capped a long career as a poet with a National Book Award, given in honor of his book Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations. But he had no interest in resting on his laurels. In fact, he was in the middle of the most ambitious poetic project of his life. Six years earlier, at age eighty-two, he had embarked on a complete translation of one of the foundational works of Western culture: Virgil’s Aeneid.
 
Now we have it, and it is a glorious thing. Ferry has long been known as perhaps the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar and alive. Yet in doing so, he surrenders none of the feel of the ancient world that resonates throughout the poem and gives it the power that has drawn readers to it for centuries. In Ferry’s hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death. Never before have Virgil’s twin gifts of poetic language and fleet storytelling been presented so powerfully for English-language readers. Ferry’s Aeneid will be a landmark, a gift to longtime lovers of Virgil and the perfect entry point for new readers.
 
“I sing of arms and the man . . . ” The epic journey, from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome, is ready to begin. Join us.

About the author: David Ferry is the author of a number of books of poetry and has translated several works from classical languages. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress in 2000, was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in 2011, and won the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for Bewilderment.

About the interlocutor: Rosanna Warren teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008. Her most recent books of poems are Departure (2003) and Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.