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.

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.

This book of pastoral poems is a classic, and therefore difficult to dismiss off-handedly. What I found interesting were other reviews on Goodreads. One stated: "I have hardly any clue what I actually read". Virgil reads like Shakespeare, although the work is translated from Latin, so I share the sentiments of the other reviewer! It took me some time to read the poems, as I had to research the various characters and Greek and Roman gods to make sense of it. Even then, the background story of the civil wars and political instability in Rome is difficult to discern simply from the poems' text. The imagery of the text is evident in Naomi Mitchison's book n  Cloud Cuckoo Landn, but the difference between Roman and Greek ideals about pastoral life are significant. While Virgil applies Greek imagery to the Italian landscape, the images belie the true story. In Virgil's time, rich Roman families dominated the farms and used slave labour to operate them. According to David Quint, writing in n  The New Republicn, it was the Roman equivalent of what has happened in agribusiness in the United States, where the virtues of the rural life on the family farm persist, yet 'big business' owns most of the farms. The Georgics are didactic in that they provide guidance for farming, interspersed with metaphors for the birth of Rome. I found Georgic IV, which concludes the book, to be inspiring. We are hoping to keep bees, and bee-keeping is the subject of the poem (if one puts aside the birth-of-Rome metaphor). So there is some joy to be found for the virgin reader, much like one might find in a Shakespearean sonnet. However, without the background information, one might read and not absorb a word of what one had read. This brings me to this particular Dover Thrift Edition. I enjoy the size and price of this series, but sometimes I wonder whether a more substantial text with notes would be useful. Of course, there is the tendency, like in the Penguin version of Franz Kafka's n  The Metamorphosisn, to have longer notes than the actual work, and this can be worse. Nevertheless, this reading was useful as I steel myself for tackling Homer, Milton, and Dante.

I decided to take a break from Mishima and relax with a bit of pastoral poetry. The Eclogues were quite beautiful in their evocation of a idealized country life while the Georgics were at times tedious due to their agricultural theme. I found Hesiod's Works and Days that had the same topic much more entertaining due to Hesiod's entreaties to his good for nothing brother which made it humorous at times while the Georgics interspersed agricultural advice with allegory and mythological ruminations of a perhaps darker nature(I'm particularly thinking of the end of book III here).

Much like the Aeneid, I felt the tone of the Georgics to be a bit too affected for my liking. I liked the Eclogues where Virgil is more playful in his content and imagery a lot more.

Тяжело читать переводную рифму, она как-будто нелепая. Плюс надо постоянно переходить на сноски - это отвлекает от истории

I like the eclogues in the Day Lewis translation.
The Georgics are very bizarre. I really only like the end of number four.
20 some years ago when I read these (in a different translation) I liked the Georgics and thought the Eclogues were vapid nothings. I think it is funny that now in my 60's I think the reverse.

Excellent book!!!

3.5/5

This wasn't the edition I read; mine was in Latin. I had to translate the Eclogues into English for a course. Maybe they would have been better had the class not met at 8 a.m.

Grande fan des Bucoliques mais plutôt déçue par les Georgiques.

1 pour la participation

I can't say I'm particularly interested in the accumulated wisdom of Roman farmers, but Day-Lewis' translation of Virgil vividly evokes the sounds and patterns of rural life.