Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Sat 03 Mar 2007New words to an ancient songPoetryWhat could they ever be again, those three words, but a loud knock on the door of a fabled poem, with interested readers all ears to learn how a new translator might venture to answer? Arma virumque cano.Dryden nailed them in 1697 - "Arms and the man I sing" - and set a near-impossible bar for more recent distinguished authors: "I tell about war and the hero" (C Day Lewis, 1952); "I sing of warfare and a man at war" (Robert Fitzgerald, 1961); "I sing of arms and of a man" (Allen Mandelbaum, 1971). (Could there be a much less inviting translation than CH Sisson's "This poem is about battles and the man"? Plod.)