In 2012, David Ferry capped a long career as a poet with a National Book Award, given in honor of his book Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations. But he had no interest in resting on his laurels. In fact, he was in the middle of the most ambitious poetic project of his life. Six years earlier, at age eighty-two, he had embarked on a complete translation of one of the foundational works of Western culture: Virgil’s Aeneid.

Now we have it, and it is a glorious thing. Ferry has long been known as perhaps the foremost contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius, rendering Virgil’s formal, metrical lines into an English that is familiar and alive. Yet in doing so, he surrenders none of the feel of the ancient world that resonates throughout the poem and gives it the power that has drawn readers to it for centuries. In Ferry’s hands, the Aeneid becomes once more a lively, dramatic poem of daring and adventure, of love and loss, devotion and death. Never before have Virgil’s twin gifts of poetic language and fleet storytelling been presented so powerfully for English-language readers. Ferry’s Aeneid will be a landmark, a gift to longtime lovers of Virgil and the perfect entry point for new readers.

“I sing of arms and the man . . . ” The epic journey, from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome, is ready to begin. Join us.

David Ferry was born in Orange, New Jersey in 1924. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and has translated several works from classical languages. Currently he is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, as well as a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Boston University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Suffolk University.

His book of new and selected poems and translations, Of No Country I Know, published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press, received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

In 2011 he was awarded the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

He won the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for Bewilderment.