ABSTRACT
The differences between Klossowski's translation and the other versions of the Aeneid available to the French public at the time are instantly and palpably obvious. Klossowski's crime is to have produced a translation which makes no attempt to familiarize Virgil or to make his work accessible. The charge of making a source text inaccessible seems a serious one in the domain of translation. But Klossowski's concern was to produce a version of the Aeneid energized by an adherence to the syntactical structure of the original, and to achieve this it was inevitable that easy readability would be sacrificed. Throughout his translation Klossowski has indicated the helplessness of the Trojans, their status as playthings of fate, subject to the divine decree of the gods. Pierre Leyris has suggestively observed the way in which Klossowski has turned the Aeneid to face both past and future.
