Reviews for The Georgics

The average rating for The Georgics based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-14 00:00:00 Keri Valdez GOD PERVADES ALL THINGS - EARTH AND SEA'S EXPANSE, AND HEAVEN'S DEPTH. Virgil, Fourth Georgic INTENSE CONFLICTS, IF RESOLVED SUCCESSFULLY, LEAVE BEHIND THEM A SENSE OF SECURITY AND PEACE WHICH IS NOT EASILY DISTURBED. C.J. Jung Many Early Christian apologists at the height of the Roman Empire - in view of the awful Roman Genocide of Roman Martyrs in the first centuries after their Divine Advocate taught and was crucified - see Virgil as the forecaster of their Faith. As, also, is the case with his Aeneid (check out my review). Why? This work is in fact a bucolic Roman farmer's manual, isn't it? Not really... This long poem, written as a Paean to the Emperor Augustus, also works - like all great literature - at a secret, subconscious level. And at that level, said Carl Jung, we are dealing with universal, subconsciously shared myths. As in Joseph Campbell's epochal book The Masks of God... Dr. Campbell says the story of a Risen Saviour is common to all primitive religions. And C.S. Lewis knew that fact as a young man, using it as a building block to his own Christian Faith. If the ancient myths said THAT, Lewis reasoned, perhaps, then, they prefigure the life of Jesus. As the Georgics do also. Aristaeus (O nobly-born - As the Buddha might say) is a Roman beekeeper. But all his bees are gone. In intense anguish, he pleads his case to Cyrene, the Demi-goddess who bore him to the god Apollo. She tells him he must ask Proteus the reason - but must first keep that monster quiet - For he is a mythic figure who can continually change his form. (C.J. Jung would say Proteus is a symbol of the Shadow - our Dark Self or Daemon.) So Aristaeus goes to Proteus' lair. He tries, forcefully, to get him to speak and reveal the crime for which he is being punished through the banishment of his bees. Virgil says, "when you hold him with chains or fetters, he will confuse you with many forms of wild beasts." Such are Cyrene's words. Thus, driven by his own Daemon, Aristaeus succeeds and chains Proteus. Proteus then spills the beans... He tells the young beekeeper of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (recently popularized by Virgil's friend Ovid in The Metamorphoses) and tells Aristaeus, "YOU killed Eurydice, and must pay!" Turns out one of his stray bees BIT her, while evading Aristaeus' lustful advances... To atone, now, and restore his bees, Aristaeus must in penance sacrifice one of his best bulls, beat the carcass, and place the remnants in a pen. Naturally, he does this faithfully. In other words he KILLS his own primitive shadow, and buries the body. And, lo - from the dead body, swarms a reborn colony of BEES. See the meaning of that? In order to be reborn, like Jesus, we must SACRIFICE our primitive Self and rise again, TO NEWNESS of Life. Not an easy task, by any means... But this is what Virgil has done with his Dark Side. At the end of this cycle of poems, we leave Virgil alone, in Peace, while Augustus heaves his sword in faraway wars. Augustus gets his share of praise, of course - And Publius Maro Virgilius? - "Et in Arcadia ego..." I sit alone in Paradise... Enjoying the Spoils of Victory over his Old Self.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-29 00:00:00 Terri Hines 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.