Beautiful reading and a reference in literature.

Prefer Lembke's translation; recall Bk III, ln 245 ff. on indistinct love

No one makes me want to sit down and learn Latin as much as Virgil. This is a great translation, but you can feel the full feeling of the poetry hidden by the adaptation.

I really enjoyed the Eclogues. Each of those short poems about music, love, and life in the Italian country made me smile. The Georgics were fine, but harder to get into since it is at its core an agricultural manual. Still the life it paints is charming and desirable.

I enjoyed the Ecologues (mostly). The Georgics, not so much. I hesitate to give it only 3 stars since it’s considered a classic, so I assume the problem lies with me.

2020-02-15 Read David Slavitt’s “commentary/translations,” essentially positing that Virgil was the 1st century B.C. answer to Woody Allen

Not my favorite translation. Notes are decent, though.

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.

Poetry is cool. I didn't know that Virgil wrote tragic poems about Shepherds before reading this. I thought he was just into boring history. But apparently not.

Pastoral poetry at its very best!

"l'âge emporte tout même la mémoire Souvent, il m'en souvient, lorsque j'étais enfant, je passais de longues journées à chanter : maintenant j'ai oublié tous ces vers" ... (in Méris)

Não recomendo como primeira leitura uma edição em espanhol. Eu lerei novamente no futuro, a presente edição possui um excelente trabalho de comentários e notas.

Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics precede his more well-known work The Aeneid and far surpass it it quality. The ten pastoral poems and the four books of agricultural prose that constitute this work show the poet in his true element and are what gained him the initial popularity. Stephen Harris seems to indicate the Eclogues and Georgics were well-received by the Romans of the day who may have been nostalgic for the agrarian lifestyle romanticized in these works of poetry. This initial popularity lead to writing the later work, which he (like me) felt to be garbage. On his deathbed he ordered the Aeneid to be destroyed, which was unfortunately prevented by emperor Octavian (I'd personally question his taste not only on this but also on taking severe offense to Ovid's classic work Metamorphoses).

This translation is a little archaic, following the King James Bible style and its use of "Thees" and "Thous", but that didn't seem to get in the way. This this isn't a work of theology and doesn't hold the expectation for the reader to introspectively absorb and ponder esoteric principles; this is a work of poetry and as such is concerned with using rhythm and lyric to put the reader in a mood to appreciate beauty. And since the subject matter itself is simple in comparison to the layers of a spiritual concept, it's much easier to see the world through the poet's eyes.

The Eclogues paint a picture of shepherds as lighthearted romantics who pass the time composing songs and recapitulating the simple issues of their herds. A few eclogues are structured as a conversation and some are narrated. Though some of it went over my head it was still beautiful verse and the type of flowery prose that's hard to regret reading.

In the Georgics, Virgil created a brilliant blend of myth, poetic praise of the many fruits of the land, and practical insight and how-to's for farmers. It's impressive how he can start by praising Bacchus, then citing examples of the fruits of the vine for which to rejoice, finishing then with tips on how to know whether the soil is better fit for planting vines or for growing corn or grain, and all this laid out in a smooth poetic rhythm. The first book in Georgics sings the praises of Ceres (the Roman name for Demeter) and the fruits of her harvest (though Minerva's olives and a few other deities related to staple crops are cited). The second book is centered on Bacchus (Dionysus) and the fruits of the vine. The third book wasn't specifically centered on a crop or fruit, although it did focus somewhat on tending to the livestock. The fourth book is centered on honey, beekeeping and the admiration a good Roman citizen should have for the bee colony. He points out that the bee colony far outlasts the lives of the drones and draws many parallels meant to politically inspire his fellow Romans. He finishes the fourth book with a somewhat unrelated but excellent recap of the tale of Orpheus.

I wasn't expecting to like this work based on my last experience reading Virgil, but it is so unique and well-executed that I couldn't help falling in love with it. Equally heart-warming was the knowledge that the citizens of a culture two-thousand years removed from my own can similarly find themselves exhausted by the strain of urban life and need a good dose of a highly imaginative and romanticized agrarian daydream.