Translation
Kimberly Johnson
Kimberly Johnson holds graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the University of California-Berkeley. Her first poetry collection, Leviathan with a Hook (Persea Books) appeared in 2002. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Slate, Arion, and Modern Philology, among other publications. Johnson's honors include a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Barish Prize for Renaissance Scholarship, and a McKay Prize for Latin Translation.
Of her translations, Kimberly Johnson comments: "This translation has made a particular effort to replicate the syntactic experience of reading Vergil's Latin, to preserve original structure as far as possible. Although this tactic occasionally results in English sentences that require slower reading, it does go some way toward preserving the linear accumulation of detail in the poem, an important consideration in a work so conscious of structure. Moreover, Vergil's attention to the etymological connection between poetry and plowing-contained in the roots of the word verse, versare, to turn—recommends at least some endeavor on the part of the translator to sow the details of language in order, so that they can be reaped with their original associations intact."