Georgics on my mind.(Virgil's Georgics)(Book Review)

Virgil's Georgics, translated by Janet Lembke. Yale University Press, 114 pages, $50

Translating Virgil these days is either eccentric or ... well, there really is no "or." It is eccentric. Virgil is the archetype for what were called in the heyday of the culture wars "Dead White European Males." After all, Publius Virgilius Maro was the author of the Aeneid, an explicitly pro-imperial epic that praised Roman arms and Rome's success in bringing law and civilization to the barbarians. Not the sort of thing, in other words, to garner support at an MLA meeting. Perhaps a new translation that emphasized Virgil's "ambiguous attitude" toward empire would be more acceptable to sophisticated audiences, or one that placed Dido, the wronged queen of Tyre, at the center of the action. But here, Janet Lembke has eschewed the martial for the agricultural and has produced a graceful and supple translation of the Georgics, Virgil's great paean to rural life, whose four books are concerned, respectively, with crops, vines, livestock, and finally bees. What is more, Georgics is an explicitly Roman poem, extolling the virtues and products of the Italian farmer and praising the military victories of Augustus.

The poem is a perfect fit for Lembke, who has translated a number of other classical works and is also a distinguished naturalist, but it presents a number of challenges for a translator. First, like all of Virgil's extant poetry, it is written in the epic meter of dactylic hexameter, a verse form not readily translatable into English. Not surprisingly, Lembke has not kept to the original meter, but the English lines are generally congruous to their Latin originals, and Lembke is able to maintain a solid rhythm of five beats per line, which moves the poem at a proper pace. Second, the poem is full of obscure or arcane farming and husbandry terms, with which even dedicated students of the classics may be unfamiliar. Indeed, with some of these items (such as a common Roman plow), we do not even know what they look like.

Lembke adopts the sensible approach of using contemporary American usages when applicable, and dropping antique phrases or Britishisms adopted from an earlier generation of translations. Lakes Larus and Benacus, for example, are given their current names of Como and Garda, and various nymph names are transliterated into colorful renderings such as Woods Girl and Fancy Leaf; my favorite, perhaps, is calling the wine-god Bacchus the "Body-Relaxer" after one of his Greek names, Lyaeus, which derives from the verb meaning "to loosen." Purists may object, but Lembke obviously has deep knowledge and love for the Latin language, and the names Lembke provides serve the same purpose for us as the originals did for the Romans: as a visual cue to the powers of the deities or topographical features--and, for the most part, they succeed.

The Georgics continues an ancient tradition of agricultural poetry that focuses on, among other things, the unremitting nature of farm labor: "[m]oving in great circles," Virgil writes, "work revisits the farmer as the year wheels around in its own tracks" (redit agricolis labor actus in orbem/atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus). Yet despite this labor, the farmer cannot control everything, and must still try to appease the gods to avoid disaster. The poems balance a coldly realistic view with a wistful look back at a utopian "Age of Saturn," during which labor was not needed to stave off starvation.

Hesiod's Greek poem Works and Days was the standard for this sort of poetry, and was a model for Virgil as he composed the Georgics; Virgil's other surviving poems also demonstrate his deep knowledge of Greek models. The Eclogues, an earlier collection of ten short pastoral poems, has Theocritus as a model, and of course the ...