Translator's Note

Translating pastoral poetry in the early 21st century requires a translator not only to adapt generic equivalents in contemporary poetry such as Seamus Heaney’s evocations of a lost rural world in Electric Light (2002) but to summon pastoral’s literary-historical-generic context. For me, alongside Virgil’s Latin, such is comprised of Keats’ Odes (to a Grecian Urn, the Nightingale, Autumn, Melancholy), Milton’s “Lycidas,” and Yeats’ “Easter 1916.”

The sound and the words and the rhythm of these poems were all in my mind while working on bringing Virgil’s Eclogues into English.

Milton’s pastoral elegy—“Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more”—most overtly echoes Virgil’s motifs and themes down to mentioning Amaryllis—Tityrus’ beloved in Eclogue 1—the Muse, Orpheus and, indeed, Lycidas (in Eclogue 9). Keats’ language thick with a replenishing of vowel sounds and syntactical patterns (“To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more”) was even more present in my choice of words and why, at times, the wording is dense and complicating, words piling up on words. Yeats’ shorter line in “Easter 1916” is what I was hearing while writing the dialogic lines between Menalcas and Mopsus, between Lycidas and Moeris, and, as well, the songs of Daphnis dying and the agonistic repartee of Eclogue 9. I was also seeking to capture the repressed emotion—the rage, the passion, unbending sorrow—that I hear in Yeats’ poem (“Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart. / O when may it suffice?”) and to infuse it into the translation.

This is all to say, the method behind my translation praxis in these Eclogues is the echo of the poems that I was reading while learning how to read Latin poetry when I was in high school and working through books 1, 4 and 6 of the Aeneid in the “purple Vergil” (the book with the commentary by Clyde Pharr), prepping for the Advanced Placement examination and after finishing up my homework for Calculus and Chemistry and European History and French.

If the language of these Eclogues tends towards the overwrought, it is to capture how Virgil’s Latin, in these first of his poetic works, is, finely turned, carefully constructed (to a fault), highly (albeit quietly) conscious of how others would receive the words written. These conceits all play below the surface of Virgil’s Eclogues and are a quality I try to evoke in my own working of his first outing of poetry, before the well-wrought creation that is the Georgics and the programmatizing epic power of the Aeneid. Virgil composing the Eclogues was, while confident in what he could do as a poet of dactylic hexameters in the manner of Theocritus, endowed with a comfortable ease in displaying those poetic gifts that are more carefully limned in his later works. This translator offers these versions of Virgil’s first poetic sorties when she is a year beyond the age that he himself lived to before dying in 19 BCE in Brundisium, and years after when she produced her first version of Virgil’s work, his Georgics, begun in the previous millennium. So these Eclogues, the poems of the youth of her poetic forebear and even Muse have become a work of a middle period when the translator’s own boy (my son Charlie; he is nearing 24 years old, severely autistic with intellectual disabilities, and it has been almost that long we have been living while learning his way of understanding the world through colors and shapes and without language)—is young as Daphnis and pulcher (= “beautiful, handsome”), and with a song to keep on singing.

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Kristina Chew