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Pastoral poetry at its very best!
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Eclogues & Georgics
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"Eclogues" and "Georgics" of Virgil <> Paperback <> Virgil <> JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,-0038
This edition
- Format
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176 pages, Paperback
- Published
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October 1, 1990 by Johns Hopkins University Press
- ISBN
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9780801841118
- ASIN
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0801841119
- Language
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English
About the author
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born 15 October 70 BC
died 21 September 19 BC
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid, an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aeneas.
Work of Virgil greatly influenced on western literature; in most notably Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
died 21 September 19 BC
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid, an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aeneas.
Work of Virgil greatly influenced on western literature; in most notably Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
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Community Reviews
Rating(4 / 5.0, 76 votes)
5 stars
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76 reviews All reviews
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(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.
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.
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3.5/5
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I enjoyed this book as accomplishing the discovery of Virgil's views and its beautiful language.
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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.
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.
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I barely understood what was happening in this wow
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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.
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I appreciate "the pastoral this and the pastoral that"; Ecologue X where we can accredit the notion "love conquers all" is probably the only thing i'll remember though.
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