By URSULA K. Le GUIN [Ars Interpres] – Most writers, if they are honest, will tell you that the book they love the best is the one they are writing – or one they are going to write. As I’m not writing one at the moment and don’t know what I will write next, I will tell you about the one I just finished, which won’t be printed for nearly two years. The story was given to me by the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic The Aeneid.
It is the story of the Italian girl whom Aeneas marries. We know all about poor Queen Dido, but there is very little about young Lavinia in Virgil’s poem – only a few words. I began wondering what it was like for a girl to know it was her destiny to meet and marry a great hero.
My Latin is not good (I was learning Latin by reading Virgil’s poetry, really) – so I could not dream of translating Virgil, and in fact he is quite untranslatable, his poetry is so much like music. But I loved him and his poem: and writing this story was a way for me to “translate” something of that love and fascination into a form that might have meaning for other people.
But to write it meant not only thinking about The Aeneid and war and heroism and so on, but also finding out about the part of Italy where the story takes place, southwest of Rome. And also I needed to find out how people were living there during the Bronze Age.
Although the poem takes place in the imaginary period of ancient epic, a novel cannot have that freedom – a novel is tied to a particular place and time and way of living, a geography, a technology, a culture. Fiction gains much of its freedom through factual accuracy.
So I had to read a great deal about the very early period of Roman history – although little is known about it – and to study early Roman religion, and so on. I enjoyed all this very much, and very much enjoyed writing about Aeneas and Lavinia, and now that the book
Interviewed by Margarita Meklina and continued at Ars Interpres | More Chronicle & Notices.
