Some kind of kinship: the Virgilian prefaces of David Ferry

             I will be gone from here and sing my songs

             In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,
             And carve in letters on the little trees
             The story of my love, and as the trees
             Will grow the letters too will grow, to cry
             In a louder voice of my love.

A friend of mine, living in Brooklyn

and awaiting at any minute the birth

of his first child, wrote to me of a 

scheme to recite from The Aeneid dur-

ing the interrupted nights he expects

from the nursery. Widely and learnedly

traveled as he and his wife are, it

seemed to me that some of the harbors

in that poem might be deferred for a

child's later contemplation, but that

the same poet could serve in the pas-

toral mode of his earlier writings.

I sense that it is next to impossible

to discuss the positively immortal

beauty of Virgil's poetry in our in-

teresting culture, without sounding 

a little arch. But this is not true

of everyone, and it is probably least

true of one man, who could say this,

in a preface to The Aeneid from one 

of the finest houses in publishing:

I love the way that opening line in

the Latin ends with "almam" . .

Aurora interea miseris mortalibus almam

Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light

In Fagles, this is "the light that gives

men life." In Ruden, it is similar, "nur-

turing." In Fitzgerald, it is "kindly."

Sadly, every single one of these associa-

tions is not what Virgil had in mind at

this moment of spectacular mourning. Yet

each of these translations is commendable

for its industry, learning, and modesty.

I live with these exemplary translations

in grateful companionship, but this poet

has not shaken the soul of our "living"

language, to be forsaken to immortality.

One thinks of a new child and her father in

the nursery late at night, as the least neg-

eligible of all respondents in communication.

The corresponding burden, although light,

is urgent, as heard in Rossetti's carol.

If I were a wise man, I would do my part.

But there is wisdom, and there is more. 

In this preface, and in the two he wrote

for Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, David

Ferry has quietly promulgated a manifesto

on translation which every reader will wel-

come in many ways - on meter, on vocabulary,

on literary structure. The problem, more to

be relished than ignored, is how arduous

the choices are, how infinitely demanding

of the inherent gifts of poetry, itself,

in both voices in translation's dialogue:

The effort is to achieve a representation, 

in the lines as they move forward, line 

by line, telling the tale, some kind of

kinship not only to the sense of the Lat-

in but also to the expressive complexit-

its of implicated discernment and emotion

in the lines. 

In so many ways, the poetry of Virgil

projects that protection and libera-

tion through form which bear the

least dissonance with the greatest

love. I cite David Ferry's translation

of these lines from Gallus' song in the

Tenth Eclogue, as some evidence for the

ardor living in the Latin for the Eng-

lish listener, to respond to disbelief 

that it can be done. This is no tour de

force, merely of linguistics. It is con-

duct of the highest moral liveliness,

by which, I should think, we are all

awakened. And so one goes on, singing,

in the very weather of one's own time -

          But I think it is not out of order for me to say

          that "completing" this translation of the work of

          such a great poet means a great deal to me person-

          ally, since I have previously translated his Ec-

          logues and his Georgics, and I am in love with his

          voice as I hear it in all these poems,

          telling how it is with all created beings, the very

          leaves on the trees, the very rooted plants, the

          beasts in the fields, the shepherds trying to keep

          their world together with song replying to song re-

          plying to song,

          the bees in their vulnerable hives, doing their

          work, the soldiers doing their work of killing and

          dying, the falling cities, and the kings and fathers,

          and their sons, and Dido, and Palinurus, and Deipho-

          bus, and Mezentius the disrespecter of gods, and the

          mortal son of Venus, the creature Aeneas, carrying

          his household gods to build a city, heroic and vul-

          nerable, himself subject to monstrous rage, himself

          not always unconfused. All of them, all of us, crea-

          tures, created beings, heroic and vulnerable, and

          Virgil's voice telling it as it is, in his truth-

          telling pitying voice.

David Ferry

The Eclogues of Virgil

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999©

The Georgics of Virgil

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005©

Virgil

  The Aeneid

University of Chicago Press, 2017©

Photography, here

Saturday commute xxviii: the farm vehicle

fortunatos nimium,
sua si bona norint
agricolas

Of Professor Highet's famous poets in a land-scape - and in truth, probably among all poets, although thankfully that is unnecessary to say - Virgil is the dearest to me, and most constantly in his Georgics. I live on a farm, and I derive the greater part of my living from farming; but I am not a farmer, except of other people's minds. This is the poet who has done the same with me; has shown me what that means, and that this is farming.


fortunate farmers, if
only they knew how lucky they are








Virgil
Georgics
37-30 BC


David Ferry, translation
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005©


Janet Lembke, translation
Yale University Press, 2005©


Kimberly Johnson, translation
Penguin Classics, 2009©


Gilbert Highet,
Poets in a Landscape
op. cit.


Photo Bruce Weber

Christmas Eve Dryden, revisited

I think a scan of precedents will
find that my custom of reading in
John Dryden on Christmas Eve has
been inspired by his brilliant 
translation of Aeneid. I haven't
any inhibition against admitting,
I love Dryden, because he's safe
from superfluous reprisals. That
said, as stoutly as I've champi-
oned to myself, at least, the 
music of his Aeneid, this year
in America, as this year in my
aging, has found me this evening
grateful for his lovely phrasing
of Virgil's bucolic masterpiece,
Georgics. There is not a poem be-
fore Pope's which I revisit more
constantly, or one which better
typifies my respect for music.

This year, I need the great mig-
ration of the priceless treasure
more, even than Aeneas' searches.
Say what one will, for defaults
in our study of Latin, that we
had such conduits as Pope and
Dryden to absolve us in their
mercy is, to me, a gift of God.
The night can withstand another.

Oh, fortunate farmers, he

famously had begun, in the

2nd book of Georgics, and 

every schoolboy will smile

to recognize, Shakespeare:

         O happy if he knew his happy state!

            The swain who, free from business and debate,

            Receives his easy food from nature's hand

            And just returns of cultivated land!

            No palace with a lofty gate he wants

            To pour out tides of early visitants.

            With eager eyes devouring as they pass

            The breathing figures of Corinthian brass.

            No statues threaten from high pedestals;

            No Persian arras hides his homely walls

            With antique vests which through their shady fold

            Betray the streaks of ill-dissembled gold.

            He boasts no wool, whose native white is dyed

            with purple poison of Assyrian pride.

            No costly drugs of Araby defile

            With foreign scents the sweetness of his oil.

            But easy quiet, a secure retreat,

            A harmless life that knows not how to cheat,

            With homebred plenty the rich owner bless,

            And rural pleasures crown his happiness ..

                    Ye sacred muses, with wise beauty fired,

            My soul is ravished and my brain inspired.

John Dryden

1631 - 1700

Selected Poems

  The Country

  [fragments]

1697

Steven N. Zwicker

  and David Bywaters

  editors

Penguin Classics, 2001©

  

If you see St Annie, please tell her thanks a lot

If this is not your first visit to red mug, blue linen, I appreciate that you have come to a page where it is not necessar-ily possible to negotiate more than one of its worlds at once; and where even the world that you thought you could trust, is not necessarily what it had seemed.

It's a page in favour of quiet money, but which objects to money's quiescence to the debauchery of the institutions it built; it's a page in favour of egalitarian opportun-ities but which objects to setting the denominator as low as our culture has been conditioned to want it; it's a page which does not admire luck as breeding or privilege as justified, without embracing the obligation to share them as broadly as possible. It's a page which offers no ease to the leisure class, except in the conservation and propagation of the finer legacies of the human mind, and which asserts the inspiration of the beautiful at every turn.

But beyond question, what drives high numbers to this page is its essentially continuous layering with an erotic imprint. The first reason this is the case, is to demonstrate how inextricable from every contemplative act, the aspirations of the erotic are; and the second is its corollary, and this is that the erotic charge is infinitely far from being limited strictly to engendered functions. This page simply turns the tables on Truman Capote's quip on low remarks always offered on the homoerotic gentleman who has just left the room; it populates his room with those who know better.

Self-described aesthetes are charged by the plain meaning of the word with knowing this; self-anointed arbiters of taste are tasked by their acquisitiveness to account for their hunger. We did not invent this logic; insecurity and phoniness underly fastidiousness when it comes to its exercise against the patently delectable. Then taste, whatever its ostensible antecedent, is nothing but an expression of constraint, rather than of embrace; love is nothing more than a response to authority, not to desire. We cannot pass along any doctrine of liberty on this basis; we cannot pass along any doctrine of justice, without a visceral sense of its fundamental nourishment.

And we can not teach. We cannot implant into, we cannot elicit from anyone the possession of the true or the beautiful without transmitting their energy. I correspond with a man who is experiencing the shock of no longer teaching; I respect that this must be extremely onerous. He will find a way to renew that experience, I am certain. He has been touched by the hunger to know. Felix qui potuit rerunt cognoscere causas, Virgil says; fortunate is the man who knows the causes of things. But he can never lay that knowledge down because he cannot lay those causes down. And he will not.

But that's all sort of by-the-way, because what I really felt like doing today, was to celebrate quiet money, for which I don't think the 190SL is any worse a token than some good guy's Buick. I hope, that is, because in its antiquity the "ladies' car" has really come to grow on me, for being a fairly intelligible and pleasingly responsive little mechanical device, not an ultimate driving machine of loud money and buzzy electronic controls. I think we have to learn to be nicer about our harmless luxuries; it's a good thing, for pleasure to have a simple cause.














Bob Dylan
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
1965


Virgil
Georgics
  Book II
ca 46 B.C.

Pomp and circumstance

.. I must essay a path by which I too

may rise from earth a triumph fluttering on the lips of men.

I first, if only life prolong, into my country returning

will lead the Muses from the Aonian mount,

and in the green field a marble temple plant

at water's edge, where in slow turns wanders

great Mincius fringing its banks with supple reeds.

In its nave I will have Caesar, and he will have its dominion.

In his honour I, a victor dazzling in Tyrian purple,

will drive a hundred quadrigs along the river.

  ..

  Meanwhile it flies,

  time flies irretrievably,

  while captivated with love

  we ramble through minutiae.

Virgil

Kimberly Johnson, translator

Georgics: A poem of the land

  Book III, 8-18, 284-285

Penguin Classics, 2009©

"Sitting on a wooden bench, looking out"

It is a summer afternoon in October.

..

The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily,
The increase in the breeze becomes the mild
Dominant event, compelling with sweet oblivious
Authority alterations in light and shadow,
Alterations in the light of the sun on the water,
Which becomes at once denser and more quietly
Excited, like a concentration of emotions ..

He is alert to savor minute distinctions.
In Lake Water, an extraordinary reflection
within the exceptional collection, Bewil-
derment, we read also of a breeze perfect-
ly steady and persistent / Blowing in to-
ward shore from the other side / Or from
the world beyond the other side; and this
is revealingly consonant with the poet's
nature as a Classicist-translator of Vir-
gil. Indeed, Lake Water follows upon both
a passage from The Aeneid between the hero
and his father, and from Georgics on Or-
pheus and Eurydice, and continues beyond
this fragment to a parting of his own, as
a figure of speech. I cite Ferry often,
and today to comprehend a picture I found
and simply like. Maybe two. Every time, I
reclaim a grounding one can recognize.



























David Ferry
Bewilderment
  New Poems and
  Translations
  Lake Water
  [fragments]
  2007
University of Chicago Press, 2012©

Édouard Boubat
Untitled lake photograph
1950s

Origins of Wednesday xiv: Short sorties we attempt

 This will have been the first

 entry encountered in this pub-

 lication after its millionth

 reading. If a lot has changed,

 a lot has continued as it all

 began; and this is an occasion

 for recalling a couple of the

 strands one likes the best. I

 like discovering resemblances.

 I like the surprise of mastery,

 the triumph of the fair.

Worn out, the young ones drag themselves home far into

  night,

legs thick with thyme. They feast on arbutes all around,

on grey-green willows, on cassia and red-flecked crocus,

on the sappy linden and dusky hyacinths.

Together their rest from labour, together their labour:

at dawn they rush out their gates, no dilly-dally; and when

  at last

the evening star exhorts them quit their forage

afield, then they head for their hutches, then restore their

  bodies.

A buzzing: they murmur around the doors and on the

  doorsteps.

Later, when they've tucked themselves into their chambers,

  hushed

is the night, well-earned sleep overtakes their tuckered

  limbs

..

but on all sides, safe beneath the city's ramparts, siphon up

  water

and attempt short sorties, and often take up pebbles, with

  which,

as a skiff unsteady on the tossing wave takes on ballast,

they balance themselves through flimsy cloud.

Virgil
70 - 19 BC
Georgics
  Book iv, 176 - 195
  [Bees]
Kimberly Johnson
  translation
Penguin Classics, 2010©


Otto Umbehr
Night in a Small Town
1930
Princeton University Museum of Art
The Life and Death of Buildings
23 July - 16 November, 2011©