The Eclogues of Virgil: A Translation

English translators of Virgil traditionally prize what they call ""accuracy"" over preserving the text's elegance and readability. Ferry, an American poet and translator (his 1997 rendering of Horace's Odes garnered critical acclaim), comes very close to the best of both worlds: his complete, bilingual edition captures the verbal texture of the original while retaining its deliberately archaic feel, sensitivity and wit, surpassing his recent predecessors (such as Paul Alpers and Guy Lee) in polish and faithfulness. Ferry's rhythmic, easeful prosody has much of the original Virgilian balance and regularity-- ""But the time has come to close the sluices, boys,/ For now the fields have drunk their fill of song."" Not restricted to the usual line-for-line format, Ferry sometimes will expand one line into two while retaining the original's feeling of compactness. Perhaps readers will be most grateful for his rendering of the famous Eclogue IV, with its messianic tone and ceremonial grandeur: ""The last great age the Sybil told has come;/ The new order of centuries is born;/ The Virgin now returns, and the reign of Saturn;/ The new generation now comes down from heaven."" An admirer of peacemakers in faction-torn Augustan Rome, Virgil's encoding of contemporary events has special resonance today: ""we must leave our native place, our homes,/ The fields we love, and go elsewhere""; ""For strangers, for others, we have farmed our land."" If his mournful shepherd's query--""what can music do/ Against the weapons of soldiers?""--still goes unanswered, it takes a masterful literary translation, looking toward the scale of renderings by Dryden, Valery and C. Day Lewis, to keep the classic fresh in our minds. (Aug.)