Updating the classics

The undisputed master of science fiction, Ursula Le Guin, visits the Cap

Le Guin: "War makes good men act very evilly"

Ursula Le Guin’s latest work, Lavinia, isn’t a simple revision of Virgil’s Aeneid, an iteration of the story that corrects a perceived wrong “like what [Margaret] Atwood does with Penelope. She… feels that Penelope doesn’t get a fair chance, nor her handmaidens.” Le Guin chuckles here at the pun: “Atwood feels for handmaids.” Lavinia is named after the character in Virgil’s epic Aeneid. Silent for the entirety of the actual poem, the novel retells those events from her point of view, lending a new vantage to the 2,000-year-old work of genius.

“I didn’t feel that I had to [challenge] Virgil, because he’s infinitely more sympathetic to women than Homer. I mean, everyone knows the story of Dido and is on her side.” Le Guin is often unfairly regarded as a particularly didactic writer, but the nature of speculative and science fiction is to simply complicate issues in a beautiful way. In conversation, Le Guin seems far more captivated by thinking of her own craftsmanship, and by the monumental beauty of Virgil’s writing and thought, than with any overtly political or social motivations. “I think he simply didn’t have enough time, in the artistic sense, to place Lavinia in his story as more than a stick figure. I just don’t sense he had a will to wrong her. I couldn’t translate Virgil but, as a novelist, I could translate a piece of his will, a piece that he could only hint at.”

Le Guin also translates Virgil’s original meditations on war and the idea of empire, meditations which can strike shockingly close to home today: “I read the Aeneid as an anti-war manifest. Aeneas is a good man, and honourable… But war makes good men act very evilly. It seems to me that the story itself is a tragedy and that intrigues me.”

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – April 30, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=17194