Excellent book!!!

“Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly
From hapless mortals; in their place succeed
Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore
And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.”, p. 69

Georgics book IV is a gem even if it gives really bad beekeeping advice.

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.

The intros and commentary are incredibly academic and off-putting to a novice like me, but the translation of the works is very readable. Eclogues 2, 3, 4 were my favorite parts. At times Georgics reminded me of Whitman's Song of Myself.

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

Agriculture and husbandry

Yes, the above, and nature, and politics, and mythology - and glorious pastoral verse. The Georgics had, for me, too much practical farming, but both works are imbued with Virgil's poetic genius in a translation which respects his hexameters.

Not my favorite translation. Notes are decent, though.

I enjoyed the Eclogues, particularly: I, II, III & VII.

The Georgics were not to my taste, although I suspect this may partly be due to the translation.

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.

Cecil Day Lewis is an excellent translator who does justice to the Virgil’s entrancing and vivid imagery of nature and mythological figures. Book 4 with the bees and the river prophet had me entirely under its spell.

Pagan pastoral poetry. If only I was as educated as a first century Roman shepherd, I might have understood (and liked it) more.