Death of Virgil

Great novel. Not an easy read.

The story is Virgil’s death in his final hours on arriving back at Brundisium to see Emperor Augustus. The fiction is based on the understood history of the real Virgil of 19BC. The book is a long 480 pages comprising 4 books of water (arrival), fire (the decent), earth (expectation), and air (homecoming) – the four universal constituents of Aristole – the final book of air appears to have Virgil merging with the ether. There are few characters including Augustus, a slave boy, Lysanias, Plotia Hieria (a girlfriend) – however as the prose draws along it is clear that pretty much everything is going on in Virgil’s artistic head but fading brain. This is the conscious and dying thoughts of a poetic and philosophical man. The middle section dialogues and imagined arguments mainly centre on Virgil wanting to burn his poem the Aeneid. Not a lot actually happens – Virgil dies, the poem is saved if slightly unfinished. The author manages to juggle some very thought provoking concepts such as the reality of words and history, the ownership of ideas, religion, art and belief. Virgil has premonitions of a saviour so the obvious overlap with ideas of the Bible and Dante’s Inferno, as similar documents, are clear. The four phases are prose-poem structured around the barque music with slow and fast movements (short/long sentences etc).For all its complications, style, stream of consciousness and deep reflective nature it is a remarkably readable and philosophical work. The last section of 40 pages is a most incredible picture of a thinking soul’s journey, merging with the oneness of everything – quite an astonishing achievement really (and in translation too)So quotes:“Oh, only when awakening in tears did the earthly-death, in which, the play-entangled discovered themselves and to which they clung, become changed to death-perceiving all-perceiving life.”“he did that which he had done his whole life long, but now he knew what it was, he knew the answer: he was listening to dying”.“the demonic piety of the transported being who looked on beauty, on the threshold of ecstasy but without the will to go beyond it, turned back to the pre-creation, to the fore-show of the divine which resembles divinity, to beauty”This is probably one of the most brilliant, clever and readable prose-poem, surrealist novels I’ve read. The quotes above don’t really give it justice; one really needs whole sections to convey the ideas. It is ranked among similar dazzling books like of Joyce ‘Ulysses’, Bely ‘Petersburg’, Dodlin’s ‘Alexanderplatz’. I would recommend it highly as the most easily accessible of its genre.

That is a feeble translation of Virgil's phrase `plurima mortis imago'. Those three words show a special way he had of using language not as a vehicle for thought but to convey something outside and beyond thought, and it is something that this book seems to be trying to replicate on a large scale. It is not something I find in Milton, still less in the collective folk-poetry of the Homeric epics, and the nearest to it that I can think of might be in Blake. It is not the normal idiom of the Aeneid by any means, but something that gleams through unpredictably now and again, and I am no nearer now than I was 50 years ago to getting an adequate translation of such a line as `Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt'.This book is hung around the legend that the dying Virgil wanted his incomplete epic the Aeneid burned as being imperfect, but it is about much more than Virgil, or his poem, or even death itself. It is about totality, something completely shapeless, senseless and even immortal - immortal partly because death itself is permanent and cannot be killed or destroyed, partly because there is always, has been always and will be always an infinite universe of what is. The book divides into 4 sections, each named after one of the 4 elements that some ancient philosophers reasoned to make up the world - water, fire, earth and air. This division actually seems to me rather contrived and unimportant to the book, and it is nothing remotely resembling the way the ancients themselves viewed their `elements'. Ovid explains them clearly if we just correct his text to read what he must have been saying `...aer, qui quanto est pondere terrae/pondus aquae leuius, tanto est onerosior igni' - `air which is heavier than fire by the same margin as the weight of water is less than that of earth'. The ancients found exact aliquot ratios like this to be intellectually satisfying, but the last thing this book is about is exactness. In the `fire' section we are engulfed in a drifting mist of ideas, concepts and abstractions, each forever changing its identity and merging randomly into the next. The only connection with fire seems to be that this is where the question of burning the manuscript of the Aeneid first arises. The first section relates the arrival of the dying poet by barge from Greece and has nothing more about water. The third section brings us abruptly back to earth with the dialogue between Virgil and Augustus, who does not want the poem glorifying his new Rome destroyed for very worldly political reasons. The fourth resembles the second in a more pictorial way as the flotilla of boats carrying the characters of the book, losing their identities as they go, sails into the infinite; and air was the one to fill the last slot.At one point I read the phrase `the shadow that is language', and it is worth remembering that this edition is a translation. Translating a work like this is nothing like translating directives on food-labelling or fishery quotas in the European Commission. It is an art in its own right, it must have been superbly done, but what it simply cannot be is the same as the original. I hope it is the original that George Steiner is talking about on the back cover, because if not what he says does not deserve a moment's notice. There is nothing abnormal in the least about the English syntax here, although many sentences are certainly very long. I also doubt whether there is any useful concept of `technical advance' in fiction. There are untold million ways of being original, Joyce himself did not change the basic development of English one iota, and I don't read this work, at least in translation, as representing any more of a step-change in fiction-writing than, say, Stapledon.I credit Broch with a good knowledge of his poet, of Latin and of the period, although I don't know who perpetrated `Sallustus' (for Sallustius) twice on one page. He seems to associate himself with the view that the poems Aetna and Culex are Virgil's and I would rather believe that he had never read them (for which I could blame nobody) than that he could possibly have taken that stuttering rubbish for the work of the master. I dare say I would have read the book differently if I had not been familiar with Virgil's own style, but it is only a side-issue whether I am right in seeing its influence here or not. Not all the knowledge of Latin in the world will make this book an easy read, and none is necessary really. Do not make it more obscure or complicated for yourself than it already is. The previous owner of my copy was some hapless student trying to make a connection with the Divine Comedy, as forlorn a quest for mares' nests as I ever saw in my life. I wouldn't dream of `recommending' such a work, which is bound to be of minority appeal, and if I have conveyed something of the feel of it that is as much as I can hope to have done.

Excellent

This novel reads more like an epic poem than a novel, which is only right as the novel deals with the demise of the Aeneid's brilliant author. A sensitive and patient reader will be generously rewarded by the sheer poetry of the rich and meaningful language written by a first-rate, unheralded genius in Hermann Broch. One sees many shades of Aeneas in this tale about Virgil's trip to visit Caesar to present him the Aeneid. There is much in this tale about the challenges of writers to capture the true essence of life and the torment by Virgil about his inability to truly capture it in the Aeneid. Virgil is so tormented by the inadequacies he finds in his masterpiece that he threatens to burn the Aeneid but is forbidden by Augustus to do so. If it were not for Nora Barnacle, wife of James Joyce, much of that work of genius would have been lost to a fire from which in a bit of quick witted work she managed to retrieve it. Broch presents the rich, dense, intellectual sensibilities of Virgil with a style that will challenge and immensely satisfy readers of gorgeous literary novels. The innovative, prose style of Broch reminded me of Proust with some of the longest and most beautiful sentences that I have ever read. As beautifully as this book is written, the translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer utterly blew me away -- this is a highly nuanced and complex novel about poetic sensibilities which dive deep into the abyss and float high into the "second immensity" of the "cupola of the stars". Untermeyer provides full poetic justice in her translation to richly bring to life in English a truly memorable work and one of life's greatest literary treasures. Broch's novel ranks near the very top of the world's most masterfully articulated, literary novels and is truly worthy of the high critical acclaim it has received on this site by extremely bright readers. Seize the day: this novel is truly one of a kind --like the Aeneid, which so deeply inspired Broch, this novel is one for the ages.