The Georgics of Virgil

"This is the best poetry of Ancient Rome, rendered by the best translator of modern America."—Peter Campion, Poetry

 

 

"Ferry's translation of the enchanting Georgics is for poetry lovers like a drink of water from a country spring on a summer day. It's refreshing, invigorating, and almost intoxicating in the pleasure of discovery it offers. Where has Virgil's great work been all this time? Shoved aside in the canon of poetry as the study of Latin (and Greek) is taken up by fewer and fewer hands. And the Georgics were never the first of Virgil's poetry to be introduced to students of Latin. That place of honor was reserved for the Aeneid, Virgil's epic of the founding of Rome . . . The Georgics, [a poem of] four books written just before the Aeneid in about 30 B.C., are in the same hexameter, but rather than the long, stately pull you hear and feel from that great epic, [this poem's] verse is quick and precise, and may be understood more easily by modern ears . . . [This work might] well, in its vividness, in its exactitude, be [David Ferry's] most winning and impressive translation yet . . . In his illuminating introduction, [Ferry] points out the many echoes of the Georgics in English and American poetry—in Milton's Lycidas and Paradise Lost, in Spenser, in Shakespeare's songs, in James Thomson, in Keats, and especially in the works of Wordsworth, Frost, and William Carlos Williams . . . The Georgics are Virgil's tale of the fall of man from perpetual ease, from a time when wine flowed in the streams to the sweaty and painful reality of hard work. Its title, from the Greek, roughly means "the working of the earth," akin to Hesiod's Works and Days . . . To step into Virgil's work is like opening a door that gives way to a landscape that looks familiar in all its particulars—grass, trees, goats, streams, bees, clouds, hills—but is fundamentally different. No struggle between man and God, no singular fault of man and woman has made it this way; it just is . . . From time to time, Virgil [herein] retells one of the mythic tales. His account here of how Orpheus lost Eurydice forever in the underworld, when he disobeyed instructions and looked back to watch her following him, is one of the most affectingly beautiful versions ever written . . . The Georgics [primarily concern] the natural world and the daily life of man and the other creatures in it. Virgil's attitude toward his subjects is one of acceptance and joy . . . To glorify, to sing of things just as they are, was Virgil's great task in the Georgics. Ferry's task has been to present to the modern English reader Virgil's great and affecting [work] in all its grandeur and simplicity."—Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

"Ravishing . . . [Ferry exploits] to perfection the resources of sound and rhythm . . . Always euphonious, often singable, and sometimes magnificent—truly worthy of the best poet's best poem."—William Mullen, The New York Sun