The two most famous metrical narratives of the "golden age" of Latin literature are Virgil's Aeneid (70-19 BC) and Ovid's Metamorphoses (43 BC-17 AD). Technically, both belong to the genre of "epic", but the first one undertakes to establish a monument for the man who has the mission to create the conditions of future Rome, while the second one is offered as a kind of metrical mythological encyclopedia, where, inevitably, Greek names, characters, and things abound. In the first one, the maestoso of a national constitutive myth is heard above all, while in the second one, the allegro and allegretto of dozens of myths dominate, which, even if they have a tragic mark, become the whim of a narcissus and a playful narrator. The undersigned happens to have faced the translational challenge of the Aeneid after previously serving translationally in the Metamorphoses.

The difference is great and cannot be adequately described if one says that the one, a gifted poet with rhetorical flair, constantly surprises you with a high-tech verbal prestidigitation, while the other, Virgil of the Aeneid, with a thoughtful flair, seeks out words, and the words, sometimes by themselves as signposts oscillating between statement and implication, and sometimes with the "familiar" combinations and well-calculated connections, show you paths and byways "towards the depths" - a depth of sensations and concepts that seems to be rearranged every time you return to the text. That is why the feeling of a je ne sais quoi that always remains outside the translation is heavier and more tormenting when dealing with the Aeneid. With this feeling, the present translation is delivered, and it renounces here fruitless considerations of fidelity or freedom.