John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the...
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Feb 03, 2010
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 th
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Sep 26, 2010
Matt
rated it: 
Time for some brutal honesty. Can you read Latin? Do you have a Master’s in English… or at the very least some layman’s understanding of linguistics? No? Me neither. And that means that The Georgics probably won’t really be appreciated by us.
I bought the bilingual edition because I wanted to see the original Latin. Seeing as the Latin pages are roughly half as long as the English translation on the opposite page, it’s not hard to see that something is lost in translation. Whet More...
I bought the bilingual edition because I wanted to see the original Latin. Seeing as the Latin pages are roughly half as long as the English translation on the opposite page, it’s not hard to see that something is lost in translation. Whet More...
May 15, 2009
I’d not read the Georgics or the other lyrics of Virgil. I find them strange, strange. Not quite as fun as I thought they might be. Not quite as thick with oddity. These are such strangely instructive poems. The drive behind them really feels to me so much like instruction, so little like poetry. How much of this is translation? In this Ferry translation the Latin was alongside, which I like very much. You can see how much needs to be added -- lines upon lines to get us where we need to go
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Sep 02, 2011
Kathleen
rated it: 
I read this while also reading Playing the Farmer by Philip Thibodeau, which greatly improved my enjoyment of The Georgics by giving it some context. Virgil did for farming what Thoreau did for living in the woods - made it seem a noble and meaningful, for former city dwellers pining for the "good old days" of hanging out at the senate and other such fun activities in Rome.
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