Virgil and Trauma Recovery

One of my favorite courses in high school was Virgil's Aeneid in Latin taught by an excellent teacher named Robert Iorillo. Part of his theatrics was standing on his desk and cringing or throwing an eraser at you if your rendering of Virgil's beautiful was inadequate.

One of Dr. Iorillo's translations stuck with me. In Book 1, line 203, the Aeneid famously reads "forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" which he rendered as "perhaps one day it will even please you to remember these things." It was an encouraging statement because, like Aeneas, "Doc I" was assuring us that one day we would look back with pleasure on our current sufferings. (I even considered making it my yearbook quote, but chose a much worse quote to honor Doc I with.)

Recently I have been using some of my quarantine time to revisit the fundamentals of my Latin with my Anderson and Groten textbook. In chapter five of a 70 chapter book, the text lists the verb parts and translation of "iuvo, iuvare, iuvi, iutum" as "help, aid." That set me to thinking that his translation, although encouraging, did not seem correct.

This line comes at a time that the men of Aeneas had suffered extraordinary wartime trauma. His speech was meant as a help to his men, but the difference in translation is important. Is Virgil having Aeneas say that this memory will be like college friends who get together, laugh and recollect exploits that landed them in trouble or is this memory something more important?

Three years ago, I studied a book by Bessel Vanderkolk titled The Body Keeps Score. In my characteristic enthusiasm, I recommended the book to all and even bought it for some. One of my friends termed it "the Granowski bible." The premise of the book is that childhood recovery is a challenge because trauma needs to be processed, but the mind, being merciful, typically suppresses the memory of the trauma. The long term result of the suppression is physical and mental illness. It seemed to me that Virgil might be pointing in that direction.

I began lookin up other translations on Google and almost all were in Doc I's translation camp. But I then found a wonderful article on this topic by a Latin high school teacher Dani Bostick titled "Forsan Et Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit: Will Remembering Help or Please?" She comes down on the side of help and even narrows it down to trauma. I would love to audit her class!

I think that a rendering of iuvabit as "help" forces a deeper interpretation of "meminisse." "Iuvabit" is the future tense "will help" and is paired with the perfect infinitive "to have recalled or remembered" implying an action that has to be done in a prior time. With this verb, Latin generally uses a perfect tense form with a sense of present tense. However, I think that it is better to render this as a perfect tense that implies a past work completed. So a better translation might be "perhaps one day it will  help to have processed even these things."

Why has everyone gotten this so wrong? I think it might be rooted in generations of glorifying war. For years, Vanderkolk struggled to get anyone to acknowledge PTSD. There was a societal unwillingness to acknowledge the true horrors of war. I believe that Virgil profoundly understood the horrors of war and that a real purpose of the Aeneid was to critique the high price of empire, but carefully worded to not offend the emperor. I think my translation honors that critique of empire - relevant to our current day struggle as we try to help vets returning from long campaigns in the Middle East.

Who says the classics are irrelevant? Maybe its been the translations that have been irrelevant.