The Eclogues of Virgil

by Virgil, David Ferry (Translator)

Overview

“Fresh-minted and sparkling . . . Ferry’s translation wonderfully preserves the exquisite harmonies of the mode while giving it a vigorous edge of reality.” —Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

Virgil’s great lyrics, rendered by the acclaimed translator of Gilgamesh . . .

The Eclogues of Virgil gave definitive form to the pastoral mode, and these magically beautiful poems, which were influential in so much subsequent literature, perhaps best exemplify what pastoral can do. “Song replying to song replying to song,’ touchingly comic, poignantly sad, sublimely joyful, the various music that these shepherds make echoes in scenes of repose and harmony, and of hardship and trouble in work and love.

Available in ebook for the first time, this English-only edition of The Eclogues of Virgil includes concise, informative notes and an introduction that describes the fundamental role of this deeply original book in the pastoral tradition.

“Direct, unmannered and fresh: a modern version of classical simplicity.” —Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

“Mr. Ferry is a gifted poet and much-admired translator . . . Those to whom the original is a sealed book will enjoy much of its charm through the medium of the author’s accomplished translation, while those who, like Shakespeare, have ‘small Latin’ can experience the additional pleasure of savoring, with Mr. Ferry’s help, the musical perfection of Virgil’s lines.” —Bernard Knox, The Washington Times

“Ferry has achieved a high degree of fidelity to what Virgil wrote . . . Simple, luminous clarity.” —Richard Jenkyns, The New Republic

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466894914
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
Lexile:	1060L (what's this?)
File size:	781 KB

About the Author

David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh, is a poet and translator who has also won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.
Virgil was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He wrote three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: TheEclogues, TheGeorgics, and TheAeneid.
 

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

ECLOGA I

* * *

[ MELIBOEUS / TITYRUS ]

MELIBOEUS

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena;
nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua.
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.

TITYRUS

O Meliboee, deus nobis haec otia fecit.
namque erit ille mihi semper deus, illius aram
saepe tener nostris ab ouilibus imbuet agnus.
ille meas errare boues, ut cernis, et ipsum
ludere quae uellem calamo permisit agresti.

MELIBOEUS

Non equidem inuideo, miror magis: undique totis
usque adeo turbatur agris. en ipse capellas
protinus aeger ago; hanc etiam uix, Tityre, duco.
hic inter densas corylos modo namque gemellos,
spem gregis, a! silice in nuda conixa reliquit.
saepe malum hoc nobis, si mens non laeua fuisset,
de caelo tactas memini praedicere quercus.
sed tamen iste deus qui sit, da, Tityre, nobis.

ECLOGUE I

* * *

[ MELIBOEUS / TITYRUS ]

MELIBOEUS

Tityrus, there you lie in the beech-tree shade,
Brooding over your music for the Muse,
While we must leave our native place, our homes,
The fields welove, and go elsewhere; meanwhile,
You teach the woods to echo 'Amaryllis.'

TITYRUS

O Meliboeus, a god gave me this peace.
He will always be a god to me, and often
The blood of a newborn lamb will be offered to him.
Because of him, as you can see, my cattle
Can browse in the fields as they please, and as I please,
I idly play upon my slender reed.

MELIBOEUS

It's not that I'm envious, but full of wonder.
There's so much trouble everywhere these days.
I was trying to drive my goats along the path
And one of them I could hardly get to follow;
Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor
And then, right there on the hard flinty ground,
Gave birth to twins who would have been our hope,
Back on our farm. I should have been able to tell
That something like this was going to happen to us,

TITYRUS

Vrbem quam dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putaui
stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quo saepe solemus
pastores ouium teneros depellere fetus.
sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos
noram, sic paruis componere magna solebam.
uerum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes
quantum lenta solent inter uiburna cupressi.

MELIBOEUS

Et quae tanta fur Romam tibi causa uidendi?

TITYRUS

Libertas, quae sera tamen respexit inertem,
candidior postquam tondenti barba cadebat,
respexit tamen et longo post tempore uenit,
postquam nos Amaryllis habet, Galatea reliquit.
namque (fatebor enim) dum me Galatea tenebat,
nec spes libertatis erat nec cura peculi.
quamuis multa meis exiret uictima saeptis,
pinguis et ingratae premeretur caseus urbi,
non umquam grauis aere domum mihi dextra redibat.

MELIBOEUS

Mirabar quid maesta deos, Amarylli, uocares,
cui pendere sua patereris in arbore poma;
Tityrus hinc aberat. ipsae te, Tityre, pinus,
ipsi te fontes, ipsa haec arbusta uocabant.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Eclogue I,
Eclogue II,
Eclogue III,
Eclogue IV,
Eclogue V,
Eclogue VI,
Eclogue VII,
Eclogue VIII,
Eclogue IX,
Eclogue X,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Glossary,
About the Author,
Also by David Ferry,
Copyright,

Interviews

David Ferry has tackled some of literature's most imposing giants. In a series of inventive, critically acclaimed translations, Ferry has published renderings of the odes of Horace, the epic of Gilgamesh, plus individual poems by Baudelaire, Goethe, Poliziano, and Hölderlin, that bring a poet's ear and a scholar's thoroughness to the classics. A respected Wordsworth expert, a professor at Wellesley College, and an extremely skillful poet in his own right, Ferry produces shapely translations that are first and foremost a good read.

Two years ago, Ferry's The Odes of Horace made many poetry lovers happy, even if they found a line or two too much of a departure. This year, both Ferry's Of No COuntry I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations and his The Eclogues of Virgil, published in bilingual form, are being released. The two books offer a rare chance to think about how poetry and translation inform each other, and how the worlds of scholarship, writing, and translation converge.

In Ferry's capable hands, Virgil's Eclogues retain their multilayered character, their depth, and their songlike quality. Swings in mood and tone are preserved, but a 20th-century sensibility is added. Contemporary phrases like "put up or shut up" and unexpected words like "yokel" make the translation fresh and relevant. These short poems of love and longing are among the most influential poems in the history of literature, and after all these centuries, they are still funny, sorrowful, and true.

"Virgil invents this brilliantly organized pastoral form — the eclogue," Ferry says. "But that doesn't mean the pastoral tradition wasn't already there. The beginnings are probably an actual shepherd's song. But Virgil is such a brilliant organizer. He makes it so radiantly there."

Aviya Kushner talked with Ferry about Virgil's lasting power, a life in poetry, and the joys — and travails — of translating the greats. This interview, which fittingly touched on the pastoral tradition, took place in Ferry's tree-filled garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

barnesandnoble.com: There are often personal motivations behind translators' projects. Why did you decide to translate Virgil, and why the Eclogues in particular?

David Ferry: I just got hooked on the idea of translation. The Eclogues are so visible in the kind of English and American literature that I love, and my scholarly work is in Wordsworth — who is very Virgilian. The first and ninth Eclogues are particularly powerful for me, because I've done some writing about homeless people. (Dwelling Places, University of Chicago Press, 1993). The epic of Gilgamesh has that kind of material in it as well, so there are those kinds of connections.

bn: In your Introduction and detailed notes, you do a marvelous job of outlining Virgil's visibility throughout literature. "The Eclogues are everywhere," you write, pointing out that Milton, Keats, and even Frost drew on Virgil. Why are the Eclogues so exciting to so many writers throughout the centuries? And why are they exciting to you?

DF: The amazing thing to me is that Virgil made a book in which there's an astounding variety of difference between the poems — and yet it is really a book. Maybe nothing so artful and yet so true to life had ever been made, at least outside the epic and dramatic genres. Even though there were the idylls of Theocritus, Virgil really invents the pastoral genre. The pastoral genre is so artful and yet so true to life. The Eclogues are short poems. They seem like simplifications, but they stand for a lot. They seem to go back to the beginning of things — but they get at truth.

bn: How are the Eclogues artful?

DF: So artful, because one meter governs the distribution of tones of speech in all of them — and yet that meter and distribution have the widest range of different effects. So artful because the book is like a concert, song replying to song, a series of marvelous performances.

bn: Those are two interesting points. I'd like to hear more about meter as an issue here. How did you handle Virgil's meter? Did you choose to preserve it?

DF: The meter is hexameter in the Latin, and the English language equivalent is iambic pentameter. English works with a very different system. The hexameter in English is likely to break into halves because it is an equal number of feet, and it quickly loses its emphasis and runs the risk of becoming shapeless. Iambic pentameter provides more opportunities for a variety of pause. And so in both translating Horace and Virgil, I chose pentameter. I have a lot of anapestic substitutions for the iambic pentameter, but those are allowable substitutions within the iambic system.

bn: I'm curious about how you handled line breaks, which are so crucial in a poem. Did those present problems too?

DF: The danger of any long line is losing its character as verse, if the line ending isn't perceptibly marked. Rhyme is one way to do it. There are occasional rhymes in my translation, but not many. Latin in general didn't become a rhyming language until the Middle Ages.

bn: What else was difficult about translating Latin into English?

DF: I am not in any specific way trying to imitate the Latin meter or sentence structure, because Latin is so different from English and the behavior of Latin is different from English. Virgil is deeply involved in the nature of Latin. Trying to imitate it directly would be foolish. Given these differences between English and Latin, my aim was to be as faithful as I could to Virgil's meaning and to his figures of speech. Throughout, I'm trying to get at what's said. I'm trying to capture the tone and changes in the tone. In Eclogue II, for example, there is a mixture of pathos and comedy. And in Eclogue III, where the shepherds are sassing each other, I try to provide some equivalent. Virgil never says anything like the "hollering." (The passage reads: "I saw you / Trying to steal a goat from Damon's flock / While Damon's dog was barking and I was hollering, / "Look what's happening! Where's he running to? / Tityrus, round up the flock"!)

bn: You mentioned early on that The Eclogues are like songs. How so?

DF: They are often explicitly singing contests, and the pretense behind it is that parts of the Eclogue are sung. One idea behind it is that song is pleasing, and The Eclogues are there for pleasure. Song is a condensed form, and the truths that the Eclogues convey can be given in this particularly intense form. Virgil writes: "What can music do against the weapons of soldiers?" Music is seen as a civilizing force that's very beautiful but also very vulnerable, and vulnerable to the powers outside it. Power is a theme that repeats in The Eclogues. My book's cover is a 16th-century illustration of the first Eclogue. There's a castle in the background, symbolizing that power can be beneficent or malevolent. But in any event, it's unpredictable. And so, in Eclogue IX, they are losing their property but forgetting the song.

bn: Let's walk through one of The Eclogues — number two, excerpted here. What is the poem "about," and what were the tough parts in translating it?

DF: I am uneasy in any poem about saying that there is a central subject. I think the subject of the poem is getting from one tone to another and making it both moving and entertaining. If you can say that there is a central subject, it's the attitude toward love. At the end of the opening passage, "and flung out his hopeless ardor in artless verses." In that line, the word "ardor" is both taken seriously and not. That's true throughout the poem. In the case of this particular poem, what I found really hard is learning in a way not to worry, to trust Virgil's moving from one tone to another. For example, when he says spitefully: "And maybe I'll give them to her, since it's clear / How little you think of the gifts I offer you," and right in the next line he says "Oh beautiful Alexis." What was difficult was learning not to get overanxious about taking care of these shifts.

bn: I noticed that you mentioned several friends in the acknowledgements. You thank fellow poets, several classicists, and other scholars. What is the importance of friends when working on a translation?

DF: [Chuckles] It's very important to have friends who know the stuff I'm translating — and I have a lot of them!

bn: How do your translation projects affect your poetry? Does reading another writer so closely have a strong effect?

DF: Sometimes with a poem of my own, like those about the homeless, I deliberately went looking and asking for poems in other languages that might be related. For example, there is a translation of "Les Aveugles" ("The Blind People") by Baudelaire and I deliberately looked for such a poem...so part of it is the act of looking. Part of it is that I'm the same person and I am likely to be attracted by material that I read in the same way that I'm attracted to material to write about. When any writer has read a great writer in his own language — say, Shakespeare — that little writer can't become Shakespeare, but that writer knows more about what language can do. I don't know if that's any different with translation. I have no hope of becoming Horace or Virgil, but I know more about what's possible in a poem.

bn: Tell me about your New and Selected Poems, due out from University of Chicago Press in October.

DF: The book is very close to a collected poems, rather than a selected poems. Because the book is so near to being a "collected," it's a little scary, because I don't want to feel that this is it, because that's how anyone who puts together a collected is bound to feel.

bn: What's next for you, in translation projects?

DF: I'm translating the Epistles of Horace right now, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

bn: Exciting?

DF: Oh, absolutely.

Editorial Reviews

David Ferry has tackled some of literature's most imposing giants. In a series of inventive, critically acclaimed translations, Ferry has published renderings of the odes of Horace, the epic of Gilgamesh, plus individual poems by Baudelaire, Goethe, Poliziano, and Hölderlin, that bring a poet's ear and a scholar's thoroughness to the classics. A respected Wordsworth expert, a professor at Wellesley College, and an extremely skillful poet in his own right, Ferry produces shapely translations that are first and foremost a good read.

Two years ago, Ferry's The Odes of Horace made many poetry lovers happy, even if they found a line or two too much of a departure. This year, both Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations and his The Eclogues of Virgil, published in bilingual form, are being released. The two books offer a rare chance to think about how poetry and translation inform each other, and how the worlds of scholarship, writing, and translation converge.

In Ferry's capable hands, Virgil's Eclogues retain their multilayered character, their depth, and their songlike quality. Swings in mood and tone are preserved, but a 20th-century sensibility is added. Contemporary phrases like "put up or shut up" and unexpected words like "yokel" make the translation fresh and relevant. These short poems of love and longing are among the most influential poems in the history of literature, and after all these centuries, they are still funny, sorrowful, and true.

"Virgil invents this brilliantly organized pastoral form -- the eclogue," Ferry says. "But that doesn't mean the pastoral tradition wasn't already there. The beginnings are probably an actual shepherd's song. But Virgil is such a brilliant organizer. He makes it so radiantly there."

—Aviya Kushner

bn.com

We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness . . . [These poems] can take one's breath away.-- The Threepenny Review

Rosanna Warren

...[M]ay be the most influential collection of short poems by one author ever written...."The Eclogues," Ferry says in his introduction, "are everywhere."
— The New Republic

Richard Jenkyns