Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: the Aeneid

  • Saturday, October 31, 2026 — Reading “How Do You Write Through Grief?” by Traci Brimhall from Literary Hub, published on October 29, 2026

    Why is it that these days I have come to read essays about daughters grieving their mothers? Whether through providence or because my fate has been carrying events that way, I cannot say. It started with my reading Annie Ernaux’s memoir about her mother’s death. Then came Traci Brimhall’s essay about how she confronted grief in writing as a physical manifestation of language. Now it is my turn to enter a daughter’s funereal game.

    Death is both spiritual and physical. It has no shape, but it can wear a shape through different media of visual expression, like secret invisible writing becoming visible through a candle’s teardrop. Brimhall illustrates how she and the ancient Greeks each wove a cloth of death. For the ancient Greeks, grief was expressed through tears from a cry of the heart. Grief became longing for those who had vanished from this world into the beyond—or simply become dust on the wind—forever gone. The louder the cry, the deeper the longing, and there were even professional mourners who expressed how deeply the departed were missed. In fact, funeral games in the ancient world transformed grim funeral processions into vigorous physical activities celebrating death as a transition to another form of life by giving it vitality and continuity in this world. It is another form of corporeal elegy, translating “we miss you” into “we do not forget you.”

    Brimhall’s way of dealing with her mother’s death is elegiac in both a literary and an aesthetic sense, manifesting the invisible and carving images from memory. And I love how she tries to describe the aching dolor of knowing that she would never see her mother again, even in her ailing condition, by weaving her emotions into a tapestry of language. Without doing so, she felt that her mother’s absence would become so unbearably conspicuous that she would sink into a bottomless abyss from which she could never escape.

    It was eerie to read Brimhall’s essay this afternoon by my mom’s bedside in a convalescent hospital. She was particularly upset about something I could not understand, pulling an emergency bell cord and reciting “Amen, amen” like a feverish rosary—a prayer to which she had been so devoted until she suffered a stroke after her birthday in January. We were not loving or loved because we had not received. I know I should now prepare for what Ernaux and Brimhall experienced, and honestly, I will not hire a professional mourner or go to a club and dance like a maenad to dispel the ache of losing someone who has been with me from birth until now—and forever.

  • Thursday, September 17, 2026 – Reading Book III of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Aeneas is lost. He knows that he has a fate, but he doesn’t know what it is. He tries to find it in his own way, but circumstances do not allow him to do so. Everyone reminds him of his pietas: there are things far more important than life’s simple pleasures. He suffers, complains, misreads. Still, he sails.

    In Book III, we see Aeneas as a leader of his people, a refugee looking for a place where he is fated to land. At first, Aeneas and his father are unsure where their ancestors came from. Then, through the divine intervention that repeatedly directs Aeneas, they come to understand that Italy is the land of their ancestors. Therefore, Aeneas is returning to his ancestral land, which gives him a purpose for the voyage—his fatum, a reason to move away from his personal longings. In terms of logotherapy, such a purposeful voyage becomes a source of meaning in life, requiring him to sail through life’s vicissitudes between Scylla and Charybdis. So, ironically, such a purpose gives him the will to live and to confront the fate that has placed upon him the extraordinary burden of fulfilling pietas. Yet his voyage is never smooth, because fate makes it difficult for him to achieve his divine destiny; the suspense of the voyage makes his sacrifice, born from personal loss, all the more divine and glorious.

    My sense of Aeneas’s agony—that the gods do not favor him, given the hardships he must endure for the greater good—has not changed. In fact, the more I read about him, the more I begin to feel like him. Aeneas holds firm, trying to make his voyage as meaningful as possible. Fata viam invenient. The Fates will find a way. He is a reluctant warrior. He is the embodiment of humanity—imperfect, vulnerable, and beautiful.

  • Reading on A Review of the Aeneid, Translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, by Deborah Warren

    First, let me confess that I have not yet read the translation of The Aeneid by McGill and Wright. Maybe I will after I finish reading Robert Fagles’s translation. So, while it would be unfair for me to judge which translation better serves readers of the twenty-first century, I can say that Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s epic narrative of Aeneas reads like a prose poem to me, simply because its language and arrangement suit my taste.

    This essay is not for general readers but for readers with an academic background in Latin. Therefore, for general readers such as myself, its comparison of the original Latin with the English translations—in terms of metrical structures, the choice of words, and their juxtaposition—may not ring a bell. My interest in reading The Aeneid comes from a purely personal curiosity: I want to understand why Aeneas is the way he is, breaking the hearts of the women who loved him dearly. In that regard, Fagles’s translation chimes the bell of my heart and soul because his words are poetic and, at the same time, go straight to the heart. Take a look at these translations:

    Fagles:

    “Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,
    he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
    destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil.”

    Robert Fitzgerald:

    “I sing of warfare and a man at war.
    From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
    He came to Italy by destiny
    To our Lavinian shores,
    A fugitive, this captain . . .”

    McGill and Wright:

    “I sing of arms and of a man displaced
    by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy
    for Italy and its Lavinian shores.”

    Fagles’s version of “Wars and a man I sing . . .” clearly expresses Virgil’s intention to sing about a man destined to put duty before feeling. By placing the mainstay of The Aeneid—the fate of the man—at the beginning, Fagles conveys to his readers that Aeneas was not born to be a romantic figure, or even a heroic star, but to be a man torn between what he wants and what he must do.

    Through Fagles, we hear Virgil sing of Aeneas, a demigod and an excellent soldier: the embodiment of the Roman ideal, whose pietas and gravitas signify personal virtue as well as martial prowess. But Virgil was not a soldier; he was a poet. Bernard Knox, however—the classicist who wrote the introduction to Fagles’s translation—brings the crack of a horsewhip to it. A former U.S. Army captain and World War II veteran, Knox had literally followed in the footsteps of Antony and Octavian during the Italian campaign. He must have carried Euterpe and Calliope with him—the Muses who had also stood behind Virgil thousands of moons before.

  • The Aeneid — Book I Reading Note

    Version 1.0.0

    Book I begins in the middle of Aeneas’s journey to his fated destination of Italy. Virgil seems to sympathize with the man who surrenders his personal feelings to the public duty of building a new Troy, as arranged by the Fates. Gods can interfere but cannot change his fate. It’s a case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—but who is Zarathustra here? Aeneas, or Virgil speaking through him?

    If it’s Aeneas who speaks, then he does so through Virgil as his advocate for the glory of fulfilling pietas with gravitas. Cupid is not for him, but for Dido, who became enamored with a man whose vulnerability was braided with virility, clothed in beauty. Then Juno’s absurdly violent rage against the Trojan general, who laments his fate, forces him to wander across the seas through the vicissitudes of gain and loss, loss and gain. But that doesn’t mean Aeneas is a man of steel, because when Venus appears to him in disguise as a wanderer, he rebukes her for behaving like an immortal rather than a mother, even when she is trying to help her son.

    Book I presents Aeneas as a man who agonizes over the conflict between his desire and pietas, born of a mortal father and an immortal mother. It is the dual nature of man: physical and spiritual. This could later be applied to the Christian teaching that the will is strong, but the flesh is weak. In Virgil’s view—his imagination still cloaked in the Republican toga, albeit under Emperor Augustus—Aeneas was the model Roman man and soldier who placed honor and valor before beauty and love. He was Virgil’s kind of man, one who would build the grandeur of Rome.

    Book I ends with a scene in which Dido, the queen of Carthage—Juno’s beloved land—is infatuated with Aeneas after Cupid sprinkles powdered amour upon her. This is Venus’s machination to secure protection and refuge for Aeneas and the Trojans. Would this be a plot of Fate too? Then, does it mean that Venus is also a gambit in Fate’s chess? Then, what is the meaning of living a life in the mirage of hope?

  • Thursday, August 27, 2026 – Entering the Virgilian lottery (Reading Day)

    I am reading The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles. Today I set off for Italy as a ghost to find the faults of the man who was irresistible to women and to examine his fate: everything seems to exist to fulfill his destiny—to found a city that would one day lead to Rome, whose influence would last for thousands of years. But then I see the image of him carrying his old father on his back, with his young son Ascanius at his side and his wife Creusa behind him as they flee burning Troy. That is why I have always wanted to know more about him. Is he really an egoist or a victim of fate?

    But first, I needed to know about the whys and wherefores of the man, Troy, and Italy. Reading the introduction was necessary. This was unusual for me because I usually skip introductions and read the book with a tabula rasa in order to form my own understanding of its content. Not the Aeneid. Not Virgil. Not Robert Fagles. For me, The Aeneid, Virgil, and Robert Fagles form a trinity. The epic has survived for two millennia. A second trinity shaped Aeneas’s identity—pietas (duty), gravitas (seriousness and moral weight), and auctoritas (authority earned through public service). It is even tattooed into his very identity as pius Aeneas—“pious Aeneas.” This is not solely religious but also conveys a sense of duty toward values deemed admirable and essential to being an admirable Roman man and soldier.

    Knox told readers his own story about why the Sortes Virgilianae and Virgil’s work entranced him. He was also destined to become a reader and a soldier of Virgil, both literally and figuratively. As a U.S. Army captain during the Second World War, he and the Italian partisans marched through regions of Italy once crossed by the armies of Octavian and Mark Antony. King Charles I was no exception to the Virgilian way: during the civil war, he read Virgil and tried to discover his destiny by playing the Virgilian lottery. This involved picking a passage from The Aeneid at random and interpreting it in light of his own situation—a literary equivalent of bibliomancy. It was regarded not merely as superstition but as a guide to what might happen and what one should do. Of course Knox did it too.

    Now that I am finally aboard the ship with Aeneas as I begin Book I, I want to decide whether to try the Virgilian lottery and join the king and the captain. But first, I want to see whether Aeneas deserves my accusation that he is a heartless man who, under the aegis of his sacred pietas, makes the women who loved him—his wife Creusa and Dido—face their fates.