rumor...

Has their ever been a better description of the devestation caused by gossip and rumor than that of our friend Virgil's?

Dido and Aeneas have just consumated their tragic relationship and Fama (Rumor) the goddess of fame and gossip carries the word... (from book four of the Aenied, Fagel's translation)

"Starightway Rumor flies through Libya's great cities,

Rumor, swiftest of all the evils in the world.

She thrives on speed, stronger for every stride,

Slight with fear at first, soon soaring into the air

she treads the ground and hides her head in the clouds.

She is the last, they say, our Mother Earth produced.

Bursting in rage against the gods, she bore a sister

for Coeus and Encladus; Rumor, quicksilver afoot

and swift on the wing,  monster, horrific, huge

and under every feather on her body-what a marvel-

an eye that never sleeps and as many tongues as eyes

and as many raucous mouths and ears pricked up for news,

By night she flies aloft, between the earth and sky,

whirring across the dark, never closing her lids

in soothing sleep. By day she keeps her watch,

crouched on a peaked roof or palace turret,

terrorizing the great cities, clinging as fast

to her twisted lies as she clings to words of truth.

Now Rumor is in her glory, filling Africs's ears

with tale on tale of intrigue, bruiting her song

of facts and falsehoods mingled..."

spiritual generosity...

This from Thomas Greene's " The Descent from Heaven" on reading Virgil...

"...he is...a poet of maturity rather than youth, because his work continues to educate as the understanding ripens. Fully to know him, one must know him long. If he teaches the schoolboy style, to the man he imparts nobility.

   Nobility in Virgil is concerned with authenticity, labor, and humility: it involves above all a spirtiual generosity and an incapacity for triviality..."

the emptiness of human suffering...

I am occasionally asked why I love Virgil as I do and the answer is complicated. The final line of Adam Parry's essay, "The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid," comes close to an answer and is, I think, appropriate on this, the day of the passing of Nelson Mandela. 

"The Aeneid," Parry wrote, "enforces the fine paradox that all the wonders of the most powerful institution the world has ever known are not necessarily of greater importance than the emptiness of human suffering."

Amen, and rest in peace...

making smooth the ruffled wave...

My "bucket list" has only two items, one of which is a visit to Sir Walter Scott's home in Scotland. The other is to learn enough Latin to read Virgil. I have started the latter though it is, to say the least, daunting. So for the foreseable future translations will have to do. Translation itself, of course, has its great virtues. I am, right now, reading the "Aeneid" book by book in four different translations:

John Conington's version using Walter Scott's poetic form

H.R. Fairclough's version, updated by Goold, (Loeb Library)

Allen Mandelbaum's version...and, finally, 

the newest translation by Robert Fagels.

This the first great "Homeric simile" in all four versions...Neptune has just calmed the raging seas, saving Aeneas from certain death...

Conington: "He...Makes smooth the ruffled wave, and rides

Calm o'er the surface of the tides.

As when sedition oft has stirred

In some great town the vulgar herd,

And brands and stones already fly-

For rage has weapons always nigh-

Then should some man of worth appear

Whose stainless virtue all revere,

They hush, they hist; his clear voice rules

Their rebel wills, their anger cools;"

Fairclough:  "Thus he speaks, and swifter than his word he calms the swollen seas...As when oftentimes in a great nation tumult has risen, the base rabble rage angrily, and now brands and stones fly, madness lending arms; then, if perchance they set eyes on a man honoured for noble character and service, they are silent and stand by with  attentive; with speech he sways their passion and soothes their breasts..."

Mandelbaum:  "But now the god himself takes up his trident 

to lift the galleys, and he clears a channel

across a vast sandbank...

And just as, often, when a crowd of people

is rocked by a rebellion, and the rabble

rage in their minds, and firebrands and stones

fly fast-for fury finds its weapons-if,

by chance, they see a man remarkable

for righteousness and service, they are silent

and stand attentively; and he controls

their passion by his words and cools their spirits..."

Fagels: "...As the god himself whisks them up with his trident,

clearing a channel through the deadly reefs, his chariot

skimming over the cresting waves on spinning wheels

to set the seas to rest. Just as, all too often

some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising,

the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion,

rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms

but then, if they chance to see a man among them,

one whose devotion and public service lend him weight,

they stand there, stock-still with their ears alert as

he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion..."

a grim subsistence...

I think the most powerful thing that I have come away with after a re-reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Fagel's translation) is how Homer (or, as Mark Twain said, some other guy named Homer) used similes to make the almost unimaginable violence of the war not only comprehensible but real for people who will, God willing, never partake of such horrific stuff.  I am fairly sure that I will never "cleave" anyone and, again, God willing, will never be "cleaved." Yet, Homer's similies make such scenes comprehenisble and much more human. My favorite from the Iliad...the two armies have dug in against each other, neither giving up an inch of ground.

"Many were wounded, flesh ripped by the ruthless bronze

whenever some fighter wheeled and bared his back

but many right through the bucker's hide itself.

Everywhere-rocks, ramparts, breastworks swam

with the blood of Trojans, Argives, both sides,

but still the Trojans could not rout the Argives.

They held tight as a working widow holds the scales,

painstakingly grips the beam and lifts the wieght

and the wool together, balancing both sides even,

struggling to win a grim subsistence for her children"

Not only is the struggle of the armies "humanized," but the reality of the battle that is real, daily life is elevated.

the belly is a shameless dog...

After another narrow escape, Odysseus finds himself at a feast and when questioned while eating replies...

"...I could tell a tale of still more hardship,

all I've suffered, thanks to the gods will.

But despite my misery, let me finish dinner.

The belly's a shameless dog, there's nothing worse.

Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget-

destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,

sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding.

Eat, drink!' It blots out all the memory

of my pain, commanding, 'Fill me up!'

("The Odyssey" Fagels' translation)

a dubious moral authority...

This from the Fagel's translation of the Odyssey...

"Zeus harangued the immortal powers:

'Ah how shameless-the way these mortals blame the gods,

From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,

but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,

compound their pains beyond their proper share..."

True enough, though the moral authority of the gods is dubious at best...

hearts that can endure...

This from the end of "The Iliad" (Fagel's translation.) Apollo speaks to the other Gods about the rage of Achilles who keeps and parades the dead body of Hector each day.

"The Fates have given mortals hearts that can endure."  One can only hope...

a glib and twisty thing...

This from the Fagel's translation of "The Iliad"...Achilles and Aeneas  meet after Achilles has returned to the fight. He taunts Aeneas who has come to meet him. Aeneas responds:

"Come, Achilles, no more bragging on this way like boys,
standing here in the thick of a pitched battle,
Plenty of insults we could fling against each other,
enough to sink a ship with a hundred benches!
A man's tongue is a glib and twisty thing...
plenty of words there are, all kinds at it command-
with all the room in the world for talk to range and stray.
And the sort you use is just the sort you'll hear."

weak as men are now...

This from "The Illiad of Homer" (Fagels translation)...

"Aeneas sprang down with his shield and heavy spear,
fearing the Argives might just drag away the corpse,
somehow, somewhere. Aeneas straddled the body-
proud in his fighting power like some lion-
shielded the corpse with spear and round buckler,
burning to kill off any man who met him face to face
and he loosed a bloodcurdling cry. Just as Diomedes
hefted a boulder in his hands, a tremendous feat-
no two men could hoist it, weak as men are now,
but all on his own he raised it high with ease,
flung it and struck Aeneas' thigh where the hipbone
turnes inside the pelvis, the joint they call the cup-
it smashed the socket, snapped both tendons too      
and the jagged rock tore back the skin in shreds.
The great fighter sank to his knees, bracing himself
with one strong forearm planted against the earth,
and the world went black as night before his eyes."

fatal beauty...

   I am as close to a pure pacifist as one can be without being a...well...pacifist, but I was struck by this from Bernard Knox's introduction (especially in light of my last post) to Fagles' translation of "The Iliad."

"The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental,to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has it's own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage, and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers,and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter."

Thought provoking, that...

the reality of the world...

Having already been severely wounded during the Spanish Civil War, the great classicist Bernard Knox participated in WWII where:

"After D-Day he was parachuted into Brittany as part of Operation Jedburgh to coordinate elements of the French Resistance. Later he was sent to northern Italy to lead a group of Italian partisans and took part in heavy fighting during the Gothic Line and Po Valley campaigns.

It was in Italy that he rediscovered his love for classics. Holed up in a bombed-out farmhouse, he chanced upon a copy of Virgil's Georgics and opened it at random to read a passage which began: "Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil."

As he later recalled in Essays Ancient and Modern (1990): "These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war." He resolved that, if he survived, he would go back to the classics and study them seriously."

liberty and discipline...

L. P. Wilkinson points out what is, for me, the crux of the "Georgics" power...

"The Ciceronian and the Augustan ages have always been recognized as of more than passing significance, standing out in high relief on the frieze of history. We see in them most clearly what happens when there is liberty without discipline, and what when there is discipline without liberty. The Georgics is the poem of the transition."

the object...

L. P. Wilkinson writes of Virgil's art...

"I believe that Virgil came to realize through reading Lucretius that an accumulation of detailed observations, however commonplace in themselves, may compose a great panoramic picture, and that the framework for this could be a didactic treatise. It is not the imperative verb but the object that is significant..."

build up your honeycomb...

L. P. Wilkinson continues his discussion of modern translators of the "Georgics" with this about L.A.S. Jermyn's "The Singing Farmer."

"Jermyn's experience," he writes, "is...significant; for his version was a cura invigilata that kept him alive during years when, an elderly civilian caught in Singapore, he was interned by the Japanese in Changi gaol and Sime Road Prison camp.For most of the day he was too weak through undernourishment to do anything. But the evening meal contained a small meat-content which gave him the strength to devote half an hour every night to build up his honeycomb:

tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis."

natural piety...

The art of translation is both fascinating and, in my reading of Virgil, a deep necessity as I have no Latin (though I am working on that.) It is, of course, an art that engenders strong feelings. One of Virgil's great translators was C. Day Lewis, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 till his death. I have been listening to his reading from his translation of the Georgics available at Amazon.

   L. P Wilkinson relates "how he (Lewis) felt as he worked at his version in the west country at a time when the bombs (of WWII) were beginning to rain on our cities.  'I felt more and more the kind of patriotism which I imagine was Virgil's-the natural piety, the heightened sense of genius of the place, the passion to praise and protect one's roots. Or to put down roots somewhere while there is still time, which it takes a seismic event such as a war to most of us rootless persons."

carve out your own territory

This from the Second Book of the "Georgics", Loeb Classical Library...

"...whenever the vineyard has shed her autumn leafage, and the North Wind has shaken their glory from the woods-already then the keen farmer extends his care to the coming year, and pursues the vine he had left, lopping it with Saturn's crooked knife and pruning it into shape. Be the first to dig the ground, first to bear away and fire the prunings, first to carry the poles under cover: be the last to reap. Twice the shade thickens on the vines; twice weeds cover the vineyard with thronging briars. Heavy is either toil: "Give praise to large estates, farm a small one." (10)

(10) note in the Loeb edition: "An old adage already used by Cato. It is more profitable to till a small farm well than a large one badly.

Carve out your own territory and work it hard...

the grief and sin of idleness...

My previous quote from Virgil's "Georgics" lines 197-204, put me in mind of this from Herman Melville:

"Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness."

but for a moment relax...

This from David Ferry's translation of the Georgics...

"I have seen seeds, no matter how carefully
Selected and with many pains examined
To be the best, degenerate nevertheless,
Unless, year in, year out, over and over,
Men labor to find the largest seeds again,
All things by nature are ready to get worse,
Lapse backward, fall away from what they were,
Just as if one who struggles to row his little
Boat upstream against a powerful current
Should but for a moment relax his arms, the current
Would carry him headlong back again downstream."

toil, relentless toil...

The English Schoolmaster and Classical Scholar Thomas Ethelbert Page has this to say about the "Georgics."

"Another charm of the poem is the strong sense of the necessity and dignity of labor which breathes through it from beginning to end...he grasps the great idea that what might seem to have been a curse upon the ground is in reality a blessing in disguise, sent designedly by heaven, that men, by overcoming difficulties, might win strength, and courage, and wisdom."

David Ferry puts it thus:

"The Georgics is always there in what might be called the pastoral of hard work..."

A key text from Georgics 1 (the Fairclouth translation)

"The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not run smooth, who first made art awake the fields, sharpening men’s wits by care, nor letting his kingdom slumber in heavy lethargy. Before the reign of Jove no tillers subjucated the land: even to mark possession of the plain or apportion it by boundaries was sacrilege; man made gain for the common good, and Earth of her own accord gave her gifts all the more freely when none demanded them. Jove it was who put the noxious venom into deadly snakes, who bade the wolf turn robber and the ocean swell with tempest, who stripped honey from the leaves, hid fire from view, and stayed the wine that once ran everywhere in streams, so that experience, from taking thought, might little by little forge all manner of skills, seeking in ploughed furrows the blade of corn, striking forth the spark hidden in the veins of flint. Then first did rivers feel upon their backs boats of hollowed alder, then the mariner grouped and named the stars, Pleiads and Hyads and Lycaon’s daughter, the radiant Bear. Then was discovered how to catch game with traps, snare birds with lime, and how to encircle vase coverts with hunting dogs. Already one man is lashing a broad stream with his casting net, seeking the bottom, while another trawls through the sea his dripping meshes. Then came unyielding iron and the blade o the rasping saw (for primitive man used wedges to cleave wood until it split), and art followed hard on art. Toil triumphed over every obstacle, unrelenting Toil, and Want that pinches when life is hard."

Or as David Ferry translates the last line:

"Then followed other arts; and everything
was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need."

happy birthday...

Aelius Donatus tells of the birth of Virgil...

   [Virgil] was born on the ides of October, during the first consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus [i.e., 15 October 70], in a region called Andes, not far from Mantua. 3. While she was pregnant with him, his mother dreamed that she gave birth to a laurel branch, which struck root when it touched the earth and sprang up on the spot, so that it looked like a full-grown tree, stuffed with diverse fruits and flowers. And the following day, while she was making for the neighboring fields with her husband, she turned aside from the path, threw herself into a ditch, and disburdened herself by delivering the child. 4. In this manner they say that the child was born, and did not cry, so mild was his countenance; that even then, he gave men no small reason to hope that his birth would prove to be auspicious. 5. Another presage was added to this, when the poplar sprout that is immediately planted in the same place by women who have given birth (according to the custom of the region) actually grew up so fast that it stood level with the poplars sown long before. It is called on that account the "tree of Virgil," and prayers for childbirth and safe delivery are still offered with the greatest reverence there by pregnant women and new mothers.

our fallen world...

Another from David Ferry's introduction to his translation of the Georgics...

It is remarkable how in this great work the triumphs and sufferings of the creatures other than man are fully meaningful and substantiated in themselves; they're never merely background for, nor merely metaphors for, the story of men. The dignity of what they are is never exploited as pathetic fallacy; there is no condescension in the poem toward those who share our fallen world with us.

pietas...

This from Karl Galinsky on Augustus and the republican constitution:

   Above all, the republican constitution was a system of values and principles. That was behind the senate's awarding Augustus a golden shield on which four cardinal virtues were inscribed: (1) virtus itself, which means courage and leadership in both civilian and military life; (2) clemency...(3) justice, which is essential for any good ruler and good government; and (4) pietas, which is the recognition that gods, res publica, and family are more important than one's self and that good leaders act accordingly. Renewed emphasis on these and other values, and not legalistic minutiae, was a central aspect of the restoration of the republic.

how things are...

The poet and great translator of Virgil (Eclogues and Georgics) David Ferry, says of Virgil:

  " In Virgil's great myth of the fall of man, 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...The poem is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in the difficult circumstances of the ways things are...


   This idea and others are discussed beautifully in this interview with Ferry and the Virgil Scholar Richard Thomas.

http://thoughtcast.org/history/virgils-georgics-2/