Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil's Aeneid

This chapter argues that German translations of Virgil are the result of a complicated process, in which history of reception and history of translations move alongside one another. It explores the interaction between translations of Virgil and translations of Homer, giving particular attention to the role of the authoritative translation of Homer by Johann Heinrich Voß. It demonstrates that the discourse on translations of Virgil since the eighteenth century is deeply entwined with literary, aesthetic, and political questions, which are closely entangled with the German struggle for unity and cultural identity. The chapter tries to show this by looking briefly at translations of the Aeneid beginning with Friedrich Schiller’s experimental work, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.