Virgil's Eclogues - (Paperback)

About the Book

This new translation by poet Len Krisak of Virgil's classic of pastoral verse captures both the meaning and meter of the original. The text features the English and original Latin on facing pages and an introduction by Gregson Davis.

Book Synopsis

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B.C.), known in English as Virgil, was perhaps the single greatest poet of the Roman empire--a friend to the emperor Augustus and the beneficiary of wealthy and powerful patrons. Most famous for his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, he wrote two other collections of poems: the Georgics and the Bucolics, or Eclogues.

The Eclogues were Virgil's first published poems. Ancient sources say that he spent three years composing and revising them at about the age of thirty. Though these poems begin a sequence that continues with the Georgics and culminates in the Aeneid, they are no less elegant in style or less profound in insight than the later, more extensive works. These intricate and highly polished variations on the idea of the pastoral poem, as practiced by earlier Greek poets, mix political, social, historical, artistic, and moral commentary in musical Latin that exerted a profound influence on subsequent Western poetry.

Poet Len Krisak's vibrant metric translation captures the music of Virgil's richly textured verse by employing rhyme and other sonic devices. The result is English poetry rather than translated prose. Presenting the English on facing pages with the original Latin, Virgil's Eclogues also features an introduction by scholar Gregson Davis that situates the poems in the time in which they were created.

Review Quotes

"The translations in this volume succeed in achieving the all-important musicality of effect, while sustaining a delicate balance between the pedestrian and the formal, the mundane and the sublime-the style that [Virgil's] fellow poet Horace famously characterized as 'molle atque facetum' ('refined and witty')."-- "from the Introduction, by Gregson Davis"

"This is by far the most readable and accessible version of the Eclogues I know, and the most engaging as a poem in its own right. . . . Outstanding."-- "Bryn Mawr Classical Review"

About the Author

Len Krisak has published several books of poetry and a complete translation of the odes of Horace. He has won several poetry awards, including the Richard Wilbur Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize, and the Robert Frost Prize. Gregson Davis is Professor of Classics at New York University.