read in tandem with the penguin editions of the poems, because i'm insane! (also because two different friends got me two different editions for my birthday last year. glad to have a reputation.) not much to say about the text that i haven't said there, so i will shout out this edition for focusing less on the directness of the translation and more on the beauty and clarity of the english--i turned to it frequently when i didn’t know what the fuck the other editions (which replicate latin syntax more closely) was saying. also the footnotes were more helpful here. also also, props for making the songs in the eclogues rhyme; that's fun!

Not to deaf ears I sing, for the woods echo my singing.

I enjoyed this book as accomplishing the discovery of Virgil's views and its beautiful language.

Virgil was a good writer. I wish I could say that this was interesting, or edifying, or entertaining. My rating is low, but less because of Virgil's product and more because I wasn't able to use it well. Give it a try! Perhaps you will appreciate it more than I did.

Not my favorite translation. Notes are decent, though.

In Virgil’s pastoral poetry, he addresses themes of song, love, and country. The characters are shepherds who sing and mourn together in the fields while tending their flocks. The Eclogues and The Georgics are wrote in meter. Virgil takes care to call on muses, invoke the gods, and illustrate the Italian countryside.

Grande fan des Bucoliques mais plutôt déçue par les Georgiques.

Oliver Lyne, the editor of this translation of Virgil's first two works, seems not to like the translation very much, criticising Cecil Day Lewis for being unclear or misleading at least three times in the introduction, which seems like a bad marketing idea.

CDL's verse translation is not metrically regular, usually I think iambic but with a lot of flexibility, and the lines are very long, from 11 to 16 syllables each, and very often enjambed in a way that disguises the line ending, so it sometimes has a prosy feel. It's conversational, accessible, with a few colloquialisms and contractions, but there are lyrical parts that as a result stand out a lot.

In Eclogue III he rhymes 'ditties' with 'titties' which kind of ruins the immersion for me, as they say. Kind of hard to come back from that, but here's a good passage from the final Eclogue:

But I shall go and set to music for the Sicilian
Shepherd's pipe the poems I write in Chalcidic verse.
I shall live hard in the forest, where wild beasts have their lairs--
My mind is made up--and cut the name of my loved Lycoris
Upon the young trees' bark: my love will grow as the trees grow.

I greatly enjoyed these, the Eclogues make me realize whence Robert Herrick and many other poets got their inspiration. The Georgics are a beautifully poetic description of the life of a farmer, his labors, concerns, and disappointments.

Agradezco a Alianza que haya sacado las dos juntas, ya que las Geórgicas suele ser más complicado pillarlas editadas (sin que sea Gredos). La traducción es un poco... pues eso, tres estrellas. Suenta todo un poco ripioso y cursi en las bucólicas y un poco densísimo en las Geórgicas. Pero bueno, seré yo que no sé. Y el problema no es Virgilio. Hiperión hizo una edición de las Bucólicas mucho más respetuosa y lírica, pero hay que agradecer el esfuerzo a Alianza.

The Eclogues and Georgics are the other two major works of Virgil, more famous for his Aeneid. The Eclogues, a collection of ten poems, were written around 38 b.c. Virgil modeled this collection off of the Greek Bucolic tradition, as exemplified by Theocritus.

Bucolic poetry, which generally involves shepherds frolicking around the pastoral countryside and singing to each other, is really (really) not my genre of choice. Eclogues II, IV, and X were the strongest of the bunch, in my opinion. Eclogue IV is also historically notable, as you get to watch a young Virgil suck up to Octavian (i.e., the future Augustus Caesar) by mustering all the propaganda he can handle. So there's that. But give me Horace's Odes over these pastoral poems six days a week and twice on Sunday, so 3 stars for the Eclogues. I know, I'd be a terrible shepherd. Let's just move on.

Happily, I enjoyed the Georgics a great deal more. Published around 29 b.c., the Georgics is one long poem split into four books. With 2,188 verses, it is not a short work. Like the Eclogues, the Georgics spends a lot of time discussing livestock & agriculture. But the tone of the Georgics is much more majestic, and the poem soars as a result:

“[A]nd the time will come when there anigh, Heaving the earth up with his curved plough, Some swain will light on javelins by foul rust Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike On empty helmets, while he gapes to see Bones as of giants from the trench untombed.” Book I.

Now that's the kind of agricultural poetry I can get into! Alternately, listen to Virgil describing the King of Bees:

“[H]im with awful eye they reverence, and with murmuring throngs surround, in crowds attend, oft shoulder him on high, or with their bodies shield him in the fight, and seek through showering wounds a glorious death.” Book IV.

Does the Georgics quite reach the heights of the Aeneid? I don't think so. But it isn't terribly far behind, and if you enjoyed the Aeneid the Georgics is definitely worth a read. 5 stars for the Georgics, leaving us with a grand total of 4 stars for the book as a whole.

Note: I read the Dryden translation, which is justly famous. If you liked the lofty language above, I would highly recommend it. It's old, so at times you may need to slow down and re-read something to understand what the hell he is talking about, but worth it in my opinion.

(Oxford World's Classics edition translated by C. Day Lewis. Excellent introduction by R.O.A.M. Lyne.)

5 stars: I loved it.

The didactic poem The Georgics in particular was my favorite. Longing for a life just out of reach, The Georgics had much to say about things that matter: the Roman values of work and duty, the weakness of the individual, the harsh beauty of nature, and the harsh consequences of war. Book IV's bees as a metaphor for the ideal state blew my mind. Such strength and resilience come at a cost: no passion, no art, no individuality. The reader is left wondering which life to choose.

The Georgics is not just a moral and political work under the guise of an agricultural handbook, however. The mood, metaphors, imagery, and descriptions were beautiful. This was a pleasure to read.

The pastoral poems of The Eclogues were pleasant, but less impactful to me. I suspect I did not get out of them all that Virgil intended.

i loved the beginning with the gay shepherd and the end with orpheus. the were same plants and bees in the middle. what am i even saying, i gave this 4-stars? well that's 'cause both virgil and day lewis are brilliant poets.