Virgil's Georgics Book

The Georgics is a long, didactic poem about agriculture. It is not sexy. In fact, it's almost defiantly unsexy, like a bull dyke in flannel. But it doesn't care what you think. It has nothing in common with you. It doesn't watch home makeover shows. It's not down with your favourite bands. It's a supremely humane and civilized poem written at a time when your ancestors and mine were still painting themselves blue and grunting over a fire. So don't tell me it's not cool. It isn't, but that's not the point. And don't tell me it's boring. It is, but only in the way that everything's boring if you don't understand it. Mozart's boring too if your highest conception of musical genius is Nickelback.

As long as I'm being an asshole, here's another obnoxious pronouncement: don't even bother reading the Georgics in translation. Total waste of time. I've checked out a good half-dozen versions and they're all excruciating. I don't blame the translators; I blame the English language. If Latin is a demure and delicate brunette (which is how I like to think of her), then English is a big, blowzy, prolix blonde who drinks too much and sweats a lot. Don't get me wrong: I love the old broad, but expecting the grace and clarity of Virgil to come through in English is like asking Dame Judi Dench to play a willowy ingénue.

Let me stop speaking in this annoying, ex cathedra manner and try to show you what I mean. The facing translation in my edition of the poem is by David Ferry, who's probably the best of a bad lot as far as translators go. He avoids most of the lyrical wankery of his predecessors and captures some of the toughness of the original. But even he gives in to the sheer sprawl of English idiom, routinely stretching out two of Virgil's lines into three or four of his own. So when Virgil writes:

tum pingues agni et tum mollissima vina,
tum somni dulces densaeque in montibus umbrae.

what this literally means is something like:

Then [in spring:] are plump lambs and mellow wines,
Then are sweet sleep and dense shadows on hills.

But that sounds odd to an English ear, so Ferry pads it out:

Spring is the season when lambs are plump,
The season when wine is mellowest,
The time of year when sleep is sweetest of all,
And the shadows on the hills are at their softest.

Notice that Ferry needs 34 words to say what Virgil says in 14. That doesn't necessarily prove Virgil is better, but take my word for it, he is'much, much better. (And since I'm geeking out here, what the hell happened to Ferry's iambic pentameter in the last line? Looks like it got into some of that mellow wine and went all flaccid.)

I don't know whether it's age or what, but I've reached a point where most of the stuff I read strikes me as bullshit (little of this gets reviewed because I fling it away after a page or two). I have an abiding prejudice against abstract ideas (bullshit); I loathe most forms of "fancy" writing (bullshit); approximately 90% of poetry makes me retch (bullshit). Virgil is a lot of things, but he isn't bullshit. I read him and think: here's a man who spent a lot of time just walking around, looking at the world, being alive. His images'his simple, homely images'still quiver with life after two thousand years: the panicked swallows flying in circles around their pools before a storm, the plough blade polished to a shine by the abrasion of the soil, the old housewife skimming the foam out of her boiling pot with leaves. None of this means anything beyond itself; it's not symbolic. It's there because it's there, just as the world is there.

See, I've almost talked myself into loving this poem. The truth is, I've only read the First Georgic and I'm planning to take a break from Virgil, being pretty much Lattined out (hence the lack of a rating). But I have a feeling I'll be dipping into the Georgics for the rest of my life'not every day or anything; just whenever I have an urge to sluice off some of the bullshit. Virgil's refreshing that way.