More specifically, I argue that this quotation in the Memorial Museum exemplifies the tension between the allure of antiquity and the impossibility of controlling its meaning, as Virgil’s promise of eternal remembrance occasions larger concerns about time and memory that leave the signification of its words unstable and erase borders between texts and audiences. While some aspects of the verse’s original setting complicate its memorializing function in the Memorial Museum, a fuller exploration of its ancient and modern contexts reveals the power of quotation as a form of appropriation that demands a new interpretation. While these reactions focused on the challenges posed by the relationship between ancient and modern contexts, they left unexplored consequential issues of appropriation and commemoration that reorient the interpretive possibilities of the contexts of Virgil’s words and subtend the dynamics of nearly every act of quotation.ĢIn this article I explore how this single act of appropriation compels the consideration and reconsideration of these words’ relationships with their ancient and modern contexts.
9 11 IN REMEMBRANCE QUOTES SERIES
This elegant translation of the Latin phrase nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo, 1 line 447 in the ninth book of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid, sparked a series of conversations in newspapers and magazines about the appropriateness of transferring a Virgilian epitaph for two mythological soldiers to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Emblazoned on the central wall of Memorial Hall, the sentence “No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” attributed simply to Virgil, stood high above the museum’s visitors. 1 All Latin quotations come from the Mynors edition.ġWhen the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014, a quotation from the Aeneid thrust its 2,000-year-old author into a contemporary debate about honor and remembrance.
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