Virgil’s song of the earth

David FERRY’S translation of the enchanting “Georgics” is for poetry lovers like a drink of water from a country spring on a summer day. It’s refreshing, invigorating, almost intoxicating in the pleasure of discovery it offers.

Where has Virgil’s great work been all this time? Shoved aside in the canon of poetry as the study of Latin (and Greek) is taken up by fewer and fewer hands. And the “Georgics” were never the first of Virgil’s poetry to be introduced to students of Latin. That place of honor was reserved for the “Aeneid,” Virgil’s epic of the founding of Rome, the relevance of which was taken for granted by the pedagogues of that later empire, the British, along with their imitative American cousins.

The “Georgics,” four books written just before the “Aeneid” in about 30 BC, are in the same hexameter, but rather than the long, stately pull you hear and feel from that great epic, its verse is quick and precise and may be understood more easily by modern ears.

Ferry, a poet himself, has given us fine translations of Horace’s “Odes” and “Epistles” and Virgil’s “Eclogues.” This collection, with the Latin and English on facing pages, may well, in its vividness, in its exactitude, be his most winning and impressive translation yet.

In his illuminating introduction, he points out the many echoes of the “Georgics” in English and American poetry -- in Milton’s “Lycidas” and “Paradise Lost,” in Spenser, in Shakespeare’s songs, in James Thomson, in Keats and especially in the works of Wordsworth, Frost and William Carlos Williams, all of whom wrote in what Ferry calls the tradition of the pastoral of hard work.

For the “Georgics” are Virgil’s tale of the fall of man from perpetual ease, from a time when wine flowed in the streams to the sweaty and painful reality of hard work. Its title, from the Greek, roughly means “the working of the earth,” akin to Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” and it tells how the god Jupiter has given man the signs of the coming storms and trouble, which is the world’s lot since Jupiter overthrew his father, Saturn.

“In Virgil’s great myth of the fall of man,” Ferry writes in his introduction, “it is not through man’s own fault, as in the Judeo-Christian myth, but simply because this is how things are, and are going to be, for all creatures, the hills and seas, the fields, the grain, the vines, the beasts and birds, the bees, and the creature man himself.”

To step into Virgil’s work is like opening a door that gives onto a landscape that looks familiar in all its particulars -- grass, trees, goats, streams, bees, clouds, hills -- but is fundamentally different. No struggle between man and God, no singular fault of man and woman has made it this way; it just is.

Here is Virgil, followed by Ferry’s translation, on bees:

Si quando sedem angustam servataque mella

thesaurus relines, prius haustu sparsus aquarum

ora fove, fumosque manu praetende sequacis.

illis ira modum supra est, laesaeque venenum

morsibus inspirant, et spicula caeca relinquunt

adfixae venis, animasque in vulnere ponunt.

Whenever you think it’s time to open up

Their narrow houses to get at the honey treasure

They’ve hoarded there, first you must freshen your mouth

With a little water, and hold out a smoking stick

In front of you in your hand as you reach in:

Do this to sedate the bees and keep them calm.

The raging of the bees when they’re disturbed

Is more than violent; their bite’s suffused

With poison, and they leave their stingers fixed

In the veins they attack, and give up their lives to do it.

A modern beekeeper will recognize his trade in these lines, which are equally matter of fact in both languages. Ferry’s English-modified iambic pentameter handles Virgil’s Latin hexameter with finesse and flexibility. But Virgil would not be the “wielder,” as Tennyson called him, “of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man” if he could not swiftly rise from a plain style to the grand. In speaking of the warning signs of change that Jupiter has provided, he writes:

continuo ventis surgentibus aut freta ponti

incipient agitata tumescere et aridus altis

montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe

litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur.

Just when the wind of an impending storm

Begins to blow, perhaps in the inlet channel

There are signs of swelling and heaving in the water,

Strange echoing noises in the coastal cliffs,

Or maybe, far away, in the high mountains,

A sudden loud crash is heard, or the murmur of trees

In the neighboring wood all of a sudden sounds different.

To produce in articulated English verse the total effect of Virgil’s condensed, compact Latin, Ferry in this passage uses seven lines to Virgil’s four, and 62 words to Virgil’s 24. He has made what is perhaps latent in Virgil tangible in English.

Ferry’s translation is in tune with modern sensibilities when he emphasizes the sadness deep in things, to which Virgil turns as regularly as the seasons come around. “The beautiful high-stepping horse grows old and sick ... the bees sicken and die ... sudden winds rip up the barley plants ... putrid fungus builds on the wick of the oil lamp.... Yet into this imperfect world man comes, and must learn to work it, over and over again”:

Labor omnia vincit

Improbus, et duris urgens in rebus egestas

Everything

Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.

Ferry also has supplied an indispensable glossary of ancient references, along with a useful set of notes.

From time to time, Virgil retells one of the mythic tales. His account here of how Orpheus lost Eurydice forever in the underworld when he disobeyed instructions and looked back to watch her following him is one of the most affectingly beautiful versions ever written.

Mostly, though, the “Georgics” are about the natural world and the daily life of man and the other creatures in it. Virgil’s attitude toward his subjects is one of acceptance and joy.

To glorify, to sing of things just as they are, was Virgil’s great task in the “Georgics.” Ferry’s task has been to present to the modern English reader Virgil’s great and affecting epic poem in all its grandeur and simplicity.