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 Aeneid takes up where Homer ended. Closer to home were the Roman treatises on agriculture and the vivid similes of the natural world in Lucretius’ great poem of Epicureanism, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). As a devotee of Epicureanism, Virgil was no doubt deeply familiar with Lucretius. In the Georgics, however, there is little direct appeal to the gods to protect the farmer against nature: labor remains more important. Book III closes with a horrific scene of disease and plague striking down animal and human alike, despite prayers or even work. Interestingly, Virgil’s view of politics is seemingly different: by the time he gets to Aeneas, piety, the Roman virtue encompassing proper respect for ancestors and the gods (throughout the epic, Aeneas is repeatedly described as “pius”), becomes the more important virtue.

Virgil lived from 70 to 19 B.C., one of the most tumultuous periods of Roman history. By the time he moved to Naples as a young man from his native Mantua (in what is now Lombardy), Rome had already suffered through decades of civil war. Reformers of the previous generation, such as the Gracchi and Marius, had largely failed to restructure the Roman social system, which turned in part on the protection of the food supply and the difference between citizen and non-citizen. Indeed, the basic privilege of citizenship to those living outside the city of Rome was granted only grudgingly. (Virgil himself, for example, did not become a citizen until the age of forty.) The republic was slowly dissolving under pressure from the new powers in the city, such as Sulla and the young upstart named Julius Caesar. There would be more years of fighting until 31 B.C., when Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, collected all power to himself after defeating Mark Anthony in the battle of Actium, which Virgil celebrated in his last poem, the Aeneid. The Georgics is believed to have been completed earlier, in around 30 B.C., when the fighting had finally ceased, perhaps for good.

What does all this have to do with farms and beekeeping? Actually, a lot. While primarily concerned with agriculture and husbandry, the poem is not without its political referents. It is a lament for the destruction the civil unrest was causing to the traditional ways of Roman agriculture. The years of civil war had disrupted farming, destroyed crops, and dispossessed the farming classes of the Italian peninsula, including (it is thought) Virgil’s family. The proem in Book I combines his two concerns:

Quid faciat laetas segretes, quo sidere terram
vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites
conveniat, quae cura boum, qui cultus habendo
sit pecori, apibus quanta experientia parcis,
hinc canere incipiam.

What makes the crops rejoice, Maecenas, under what stars
To plow and marry the vines to their arbor of elms,
What care the cattle need, what tending the flocks must have,
How much practical knowledge to keep frugal bees—
Here I start my song.

But few lines further down, Virgil suggests his second theme. He calls upon Caesar (Octavian, now styled Augustus), for approval to begin his work, and he asks that the emperor “with me feel compassion for country people unaware of their way” (ignarosque viae mecum miseratis agrestis). This is a clear reference to the veterans of Caesar’s armies who were given land formerly belonging to farmers, and in whose amateur hands the land had suffered. And he closes the poem with a tribute to “great Caesar’s lightning struck in war by the deep Euphrates and he, as victor, gave laws to eager people and gained the path to Olympus.” There is that pro-empire sentiment again, combined with an argument for rural landholders and traditional Roman folkways: the Roman red states, perhaps. Better call the MLA.

Gerald Russello is a fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University.