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Title: Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil by David R. Slavitt ISBN: 0-8018-4111-9 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Giving Life Back to a Dead Language and a Dead Poet
Comment: Slavitt's translation of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics is alive in a way most translations aren't. He has put the humor and the intelligent vulgarity back into these poems. Centuries of overly "respectful" (or, rather, puritanical) translators have sterilized Virgil's playfulness and energy. Slavitt brings it back with style.

Rating: 2
Summary: Strange adapted translations of Virgil's poems.
Comment: I only read Georgics in this book, but I'm not sure what to make of it. To give you an idea, here is how Georgics starts in another version: What makes the corncrops glad, under which star to turn the soil, Maecanas, and wed your vines to elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks, all the experience thrifty bees demand - such are the themes of my song.

Compared to how it begins in this translation: Okay, Maecenas, whatever you say; farming it is; hints for happier cornfields, "The Compleat Plowman's Calendar"; "Your Vines and Mine"; something on flocks - "Herding Together," or "How Now, a Cow"; and "Bees in Your Bonnet" or maybe "Going Apiary."

You get the idea. Not recommended for seekers of a proximity to Virgil's original. That is why this gets the rating it does. Certainly influenced because it was translated in 1971 the work is punctuated with four-letter words. However, it might get another star if it were consistent since it is often very poetic, and might get even a further star if it were titled "Ecolgues & Georgics of Slavitt". The best translation I've heard was done by C. Day Lewis that I have on record, but as far as I know is not in print.