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The Eclogues and The Georgics are Virgil's pre-Aeneid poetry. Let's take a moment to note that until today - when I was finally paying attention - I thought they were called The Ecologues and the Georgeics. (Shakes head in despair.)
The Eclogues are ten poems building on the bucolic template of Theocritus' Idylls. They're not as funny as Theocritus' work, but I think that is because - and here I'm disagreeing with Lyne is his introduction - Virgil has a more didactic reason for writing these poems. They're partly his response to the end of the Civil Wars. The victor, Augustus, has to reward his soldiers and he's giving them land by confiscating it from the existing tenants. Part of Virgil's intent is to speak on behalf of those people, but because he's not an idiot he chooses to do so ambiguously. Virgil is smart enough not to burn bridges. They're translated - in 1964 and updated in 1984 - by Cecil Day Lewis. He makes the decision to give us tunes for the songs of the duelling shepherds, which he's picked from traditional Scottish/British folk songs. I tried to get it to work, using Eclogue V (which Day Lewis says is to the tune of 'The Lark in the Clear Air'. I have a wonderful version of that by Cara Dillon. I couldn't quite get it to work, but I'm not a musician.
The Eclogues are fine. There are moments of real beauty. One part of Eclogue V reminded me of W H Auden's 'Stop All the Clocks':
"'Cruel stars and gods!' his mother cried,
clasping the poor corpse close in her arms.
No one drove his oxen to the stream,
no beast ate or drank at all from sadness:
Even Afric lions roated their grief,
forest and hill keened Daphnis dead."
The Georgics are four longer poems that are effectively poetic lectures on making a living in the countryside. Interestingly none of these poems talk much about slaves. The implication is that the reader Virgil is addressing will be doing the work themselves.
Georgic I covers - basically - arable farming, star lore and the seasons. Georgic II is trees, vines and olives. Georgic III is sheep, goats, cattle, horses and ends with a delightful section of pests and pestilence. Georgic IV is bees. I think my favourite was Georgic IV. I heard someone else refer to it as twenty pages of boring poetry about bees. But I really liked it.
I'll confess that there are patches of dullness here and I suspect anyone following Virgil's instructions would end up with a lot of dead animals and crops but again I think Virgil is using these poems as a moral guide: that the Gods reward hard work and that combining that with peace and stability one can have a good life in the country. The country perhaps standing not just for the soil but for Rome itself? This is sometimes more obvious than at other points. He does also take time - when talking about pests and pestilence - to point out that one can live a good life but still be hit by disasters. But you deal with those and move on. I'm not sure how much of a Stoic Virgil was but you get that outlook does seem to be here. Also bits of Georgic II sound like they could have come from the milder sections of Juvenal's Satire III.
The Georgics in this book are based on Cecil Day Lewis' 1940 translation, which I found weirdly inconsistent. Overly poetic here, clunking contemporary reference there. He refers to a part of north west Scythia as Ukraine at one point and then uses the Roman name for the region later on. He randomly drops in a couple of short French phrases at one point. I found myself doing something I never, ever do normally. I referred to another translation I have, also by Oxford World Classics, this one the 2004 translation by Peter Fallon. I even myself referring to the original Latin and trying to work out what was being said myself, which was something of a struggle as I failed Latin A-Level over 30 years ago. But it was worth it. I felt I made a real effort to understand Virgil's own words and not just rely on the translator for once.
Day Lewis in his introduction says, "...while there is seldom any insuperable difficulty discovering what Virgil meant, it is all by impossible to convey how he said it." I might argue that both seem quite difficult. There's an ambiguity about Virgil's work that hides some of the more political/satirical notes behind a respectable screen of bucolic/rural good sense.
I'm going to read Peter Fallon's translation of the Georgics now. Let's see if what Virgil meant and said are possible to convey.
The Eclogues are ten poems building on the bucolic template of Theocritus' Idylls. They're not as funny as Theocritus' work, but I think that is because - and here I'm disagreeing with Lyne is his introduction - Virgil has a more didactic reason for writing these poems. They're partly his response to the end of the Civil Wars. The victor, Augustus, has to reward his soldiers and he's giving them land by confiscating it from the existing tenants. Part of Virgil's intent is to speak on behalf of those people, but because he's not an idiot he chooses to do so ambiguously. Virgil is smart enough not to burn bridges. They're translated - in 1964 and updated in 1984 - by Cecil Day Lewis. He makes the decision to give us tunes for the songs of the duelling shepherds, which he's picked from traditional Scottish/British folk songs. I tried to get it to work, using Eclogue V (which Day Lewis says is to the tune of 'The Lark in the Clear Air'. I have a wonderful version of that by Cara Dillon. I couldn't quite get it to work, but I'm not a musician.
The Eclogues are fine. There are moments of real beauty. One part of Eclogue V reminded me of W H Auden's 'Stop All the Clocks':
"'Cruel stars and gods!' his mother cried,
clasping the poor corpse close in her arms.
No one drove his oxen to the stream,
no beast ate or drank at all from sadness:
Even Afric lions roated their grief,
forest and hill keened Daphnis dead."
The Georgics are four longer poems that are effectively poetic lectures on making a living in the countryside. Interestingly none of these poems talk much about slaves. The implication is that the reader Virgil is addressing will be doing the work themselves.
Georgic I covers - basically - arable farming, star lore and the seasons. Georgic II is trees, vines and olives. Georgic III is sheep, goats, cattle, horses and ends with a delightful section of pests and pestilence. Georgic IV is bees. I think my favourite was Georgic IV. I heard someone else refer to it as twenty pages of boring poetry about bees. But I really liked it.
I'll confess that there are patches of dullness here and I suspect anyone following Virgil's instructions would end up with a lot of dead animals and crops but again I think Virgil is using these poems as a moral guide: that the Gods reward hard work and that combining that with peace and stability one can have a good life in the country. The country perhaps standing not just for the soil but for Rome itself? This is sometimes more obvious than at other points. He does also take time - when talking about pests and pestilence - to point out that one can live a good life but still be hit by disasters. But you deal with those and move on. I'm not sure how much of a Stoic Virgil was but you get that outlook does seem to be here. Also bits of Georgic II sound like they could have come from the milder sections of Juvenal's Satire III.
The Georgics in this book are based on Cecil Day Lewis' 1940 translation, which I found weirdly inconsistent. Overly poetic here, clunking contemporary reference there. He refers to a part of north west Scythia as Ukraine at one point and then uses the Roman name for the region later on. He randomly drops in a couple of short French phrases at one point. I found myself doing something I never, ever do normally. I referred to another translation I have, also by Oxford World Classics, this one the 2004 translation by Peter Fallon. I even myself referring to the original Latin and trying to work out what was being said myself, which was something of a struggle as I failed Latin A-Level over 30 years ago. But it was worth it. I felt I made a real effort to understand Virgil's own words and not just rely on the translator for once.
Day Lewis in his introduction says, "...while there is seldom any insuperable difficulty discovering what Virgil meant, it is all by impossible to convey how he said it." I might argue that both seem quite difficult. There's an ambiguity about Virgil's work that hides some of the more political/satirical notes behind a respectable screen of bucolic/rural good sense.
I'm going to read Peter Fallon's translation of the Georgics now. Let's see if what Virgil meant and said are possible to convey.
