Description
John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., the best poem by the best poet. The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature.
The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance.Author: David Ferry
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 05/02/2006
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9780374530310
ISBN10: 0374530319
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | Ancient & Classical
About the Author
David Ferry is the translator of Gilgamesh (1992), The Odes of Horace (1998), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), and The Epistles of Horace (2001), winner of the Landon Translation Prize--all published by FSG.