From Sam

Today's translation was certainly a challenge, albeit an enjoyable one. Despite the distastefulness of Rutilius' anti-Semitism, his description of his encounter with the innkeeper had some amusing moments which I attempted to highlight in my translation. To accomplish this I heightened what I viewed as a kind of latent anthropomorphism in the description of property damage; used a loose, colloquial paraphrase (the interjection "Also"); and finished that couplet with a feminine ending a la Don Juan. This section is where I felt the most momentum in translating, which immediately dissipated with the ensuing invective; in going back and trying to re-render the rest with a similar verve and bounciness, I realized that very few passages in either today's reading or the poem as a whole were anything like this. This little glimmer of a satiric voice is like so many other features of the De Reditu--its mourning for Gaul, its technical obsessions veering towards didactic poetry, its lovely, fleeting nature descriptions. It bears little organic relation to the rest of the poem, but appears rather as a brilliant fragment that was inserted for its brilliance rather than its relevance. This raises some interesting aesthetics problems as to cohesion in long poems. In the course of actual reading, it's unintrusive and even pleasant; but in reflecting back over the course of the poem, it increasingly juts out as something that should have been either amplified or cut altogether.