Robin BeckerTimely Engagements: Summer and Sustainability in
The Georgics of Virgil: A Translation by David Ferry
The Georgics of Virgil
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005. Bilingual Edition.September 2006
Time--the bonanza at the close of the academic year--calls with a seductive voice.
The schoolgirl in me leans a forehead against the glass window of the yellow bus, yearning for summer.
Some writers I know pocket slivers of Time all year and inhabit them fully. I'm waiting for June, July, and August--a pasture of Time whose far fence I can't see. Or I will myself not to see.
This summer, David Ferry's translation of The Georgics of Virgil provided a capacious opportunity to consider Time. An iambic pentameter almanac of how to do everything rural--prepare a field, breed horses, raise bees--The Georgics combines the best of an informative non-fiction book, verse from a praising poet's eye and ear, and an epic meditation on how work constructs and confers meaning. Because the academic year organizes my work life, I experience Time differently from the farmer or agricultural worker. Nevertheless, in the fallen world, Time and work shape animate life. The noun "georgic" originates in the Greek words for earth (geo) and work (ergon), and in his introduction, Ferry names poets he identifies as engaged in "the pastoral of hard work." He includes Milton, Spenser, Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, and Frost. (To this list I'd add Dylan Thomas, whose "Fern Hill" feels distinctly georgic.) Echoes from these poets and others surfaced as I read. Much of the text details seasonal agricultural work, but readers will recognize the Edenic paradise Virgil evokes before "Jupiter himself ordained / That the way should not be easy" in the fallen world.
Before Jove's time no farmer plowed the earth;
It was forbidden to mark out field from field,
Setting out limits, one from another; men shared
All things together and Earth quite freely yielded
The gifts of herself she gave, being unasked.
It was Jupiter who put the deadly poison
Into the fangs of serpents ...Serpents. Floods. Blight. Particularly appealing to me is Virgil's belief that the oracle of Zeus and the gods, not the humans, chucked paradise and brought Time as we know it into being. Our blaming, sin-ridden, guilt-inducing pieties have no place in Virgil's tale. The gods fought, and now humans and animals must live where the gods "Turned off the flow of wine that everywhere / Ran in the streams."
In the farming community where I live, workers labor through the summer to fill local farm stands and stores with produce. This annual harvest of lettuces, blueberries, peaches, tomatoes and apples gestures towards an earlier paradise while providing us with an earthly one. We now live where "want should be / The cause of human ingenuity," and Ferry rejoices in that ingenuity. Lyrical passages on Time mediate this celebration of human effort, as in these lines that prefigure Ecclesiastes:
... The time for harvest, the time for planting seeds,
The time to brave the unfaithful sea with oars,
The time to fell the pines with which to build them ...Repeatedly, Virgil references the time-bound and the timely. He emphasizes the importance of paying close attention to the natural world, of living harmoniously with animals and plants by practicing good stewardship. He upbraids ("No storm comes on without giving you any warning") and, in the First Georgic, he cautions "there are days / That are right for doing certain kinds of work / And days that are wrong." People must "pay heed to the months and stars," to Ceres, Jupiter, Minerva and Neptune who, as adversaries and helpmates, make appearances in the mortal sphere. ("Above all else / Be sure to pay due reverence to the gods.") Virgil's convictions originate in close observation; he draws his rules of practice from experience. An opposing force, however, lies in the potent hold of superstition, evident in animal sacrifice:
So, as is right for us to do, we'll sing
Our rustic songs in honor of the god,
And, taking the goat by the horn, we'll lead him up
To the sacrificial altar, and afterwards roast
The rich goat meat on spits of hazelwood.Happily, in the fallen world, everyone and everything animate is educable. Trees will "give up their wildness, and, with frequent tilling, / Be ready to learn whatever you want them to learn." Explaining the differences between stock-grafting and bud-grafting in spring, Virgil observes a tree "exulting in its boughs" at the propagation of unfamiliar fruit. However, a susceptibility to injury or attack gives The Georgics its poignancy. Behind each instruction lies the accident, the illness, the storm, the weevil. Near the close of the Second Georgic, Virgil declares: "That man is blessed who has learned the causes of things, / And therefore under his feet subjugates fear / and the decrees of unrelenting fate ..." Here Virgil reaches toward scientific inquiry, seeing in it how knowledge may subdue dread and occupy a mind brooding over its destiny.
The human capacity for creating social discord gets pointed lines in The Georgics, when Virgil turns his attention to the political/social sphere. For example, those fortunate enough may avoid "experience of the iron / Hard-heartedness of the law, the Forum's madness, / Insolence of bureaucratic office." Ferry's diction permits the timelessness of these lines to resound. Summer-dwelling, I hear in these lines my own brief reprieve from the public sphere and Whitman's declaration from Song of Myself about animals (and therefore about human beings):
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.Images of war (and war's shadow, the Olympic Games) introduce the Third Georgic, but Virgil quickly turns to his true subject, the care and breeding of animals. Here, again, a universalizing statement claims a potent veracity:
All living creatures on earth, no matter whether
It's human beings or other kinds--fish, cattle,
Beautiful birds--they all rush into the fire:
Love is the same for all ...While humans generally control the fates of cow and ox, here Virgil eliminates such distinctions. And, in the fifty lines that follow, he relishes the shared biological processes and the mysteries of organic desires humans share with other creatures. I'm reminded of our contemporary pastoralists--Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry and others--who, in this age of genetically-engineered food, habitat loss, and environmental degradation write about rural places and subjects from a sustainability perspective. Illness, too, yokes all creatures. In an unusual moment, philosophical in tone, Virgil considers the plight of animals dead from plague. On the life of the ox: "What was the use of all the work he did? / What good was it that he turned the heavy earth / With the plowshare he was yoked to?" An existentialist Virgil sounds a despairing note, brief but suddenly totalizing in its rhetoric.
Ferry's respectful attention to Virgil's detail fixes our attention on the consequences of particular farming practices. These include methods promoted by the contemporary movement for sustainable agriculture:
... saturate the soil
With the rich dung of beasts, and scatter the sooty
Ashes left from your household fires last winter.
Changing the crops is restful for the fields;
Sometimes they're not ungrateful not to be plowed;
They need to rest ...Virgil's advice to compost manure anticipates that of sustainability advocates who view the soil as a living ecosystem. He eschews monoculture and acknowledges the importance of crop rotation in ensuring diversity (and resisting disease). To develop drought-resistant farming systems, sustainability proponents recommend no-till plowing or not planting at all, as Virgil suggests above. To assist the soil in holding and absorbing water, Virgil advises "rake it lightly, trying to keep what little / Moisture that may be there from drying out." He suggests sowing "the slender vetch" and "the lupine," plants that fix nitrogen in the soil for subsequent crops and provide organic amendments. The poet appears to know the dangers of salt accumulation and the need to minimize high saline levels in crops: "Then there's the salty soil known as the 'bitter,' / Unhappy for crops, untamable by the plow." Virgil even celebrates reduced-volume irrigation by praising the farmer who "induces water to flow down from his brook / Through channels toward his planting." (Of course, superstition also governs, as when Virgil admonishes readers to "Avoid the fifth of the month.")
The Georgics moves nimbly about the calendar, accounting for farming practices in all seasons. Readers will feel Virgil's affection for animals as he advises on their breeding, care, treatment, and training. In a passage concerned with equine reproduction, Virgil says this about the care of brood mares:
... pasture them
In quiet forest glades, alongside quiet
Rivers full to the brim, where the greenest of grass
Grows on the riverbanks, and where there's moss
For them to graze on, sheltering grottoes ...Having selected good genetic stock, Virgil demands a responsible (sustainable) approach to animal care, concerned with water availability, herd health and nutrition, shelter. On the "special care for the calves," Virgil advocates a pasture-based approach with the animals "left to browse in the green meadows." Aware of the dangers of disease, unwelcome pests, and waste management, Virgil maintains, "It's important that you fumigate your stables." Grass-based farming, a basic principle of sustainable agriculture, undergirds Virgil's care for cattle, horses and other grazing animals.
Virgil celebrates bees, especially, by seeing in their community "the rule of law." In his search for evidence of an enterprising "nation," he observes a collective of like-minded individuals in "rhythmic order," raising their young kibbutz-style. Charming, inaccurate, determinedly optimistic, Virgil claims:
And you will be surprised that the bees are never
Known to indulge in sexual intercourse; they never
Dissipate or enervate their bodies
By making love; they do not bring forth children
By labor of birth; instead, they gather them
By plucking the little babies with their mouths
From the leaves of trees and from the sweetest herbs.He describes the hive's loyalty to a heralded male, a prince upon whom they shower attention and protection. Today we know that the queen is the only sexually productive female; that she mates with the drone in flight, aloft; that her daily egg-laying output is extraordinary. While Virgil does not imagine a female in command of the colony, he speaks with respect and tenderness about the work of honeybees. Ferry describes the building of "their palaces and waxen halls," their winter preparations, and the means by which humans may "get at the honey treasure."
So, the empire of summer gives way to autumn. (Keats' Ode articulates and consoles with its lush sounds and imagery.) We leave the sensual pleasures of sun on skin, the ocean swim, afternoons on beach or boulevard with a good book. I gird myself for the coming cold, grateful for David Ferry's translation of The Georgics. Virgil studied the great shaping forces--"All things by nature are ready to get worse, / Lapse backward, fall away from what they were"--mining his empirical investigations for useful information. In his propagation of wise stewardship practices, he seeds the future, one means of securing Time as it carries us along. Ferry amplifies Virgil's observations with his own generous humanity and sympathy. If conscious human labor asserts a counter-force in the fallen world, this musical translation represents such a force.
In 2006 the University of Pittsburgh Press published Robin Becker's sixth collection of poems, Domain of Perfect Affection. Professor of English and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she serves as Poetry and Contributing Editor for The Women's Review of Books, which publishes her column on poetry called "Field Notes." Becker's poems and essays appear frequently in APR.
