Books of the Day

Virgil in English Verse

The Georgics : a new translation. By C. Day Lewis. (Cape. is.)

TRANSLATORS fall into two classes : those who are poets in their own right, and those who are not ; and no one who has read Nabara or From Feathers to Iron can entertain any doubt of Mr. Day Lewis' standing. His translation of the Georgics, therefore, is to be judged not only as a rendering, but as a poet's exposition of a poet. As a rendering, it is remarkably exact and illuminating. I thought I knew the Georgics pretty well, but in a score of places Mr. Day Lewis has shown me points which I had missed, and brought into relief images which I had not properly visualised. It has often been said that the best commentary is a good translation, and a much better- equipped scholar than I am would often find, I think, that Mr. Day Lewis had taught him something that he did not know.

The real difficulty of translation from Latin into English is that the shape of words in the two languages s so different. It is like getting a legion into skirmishing order : and the scholar who has the sound of inexorabile fatum of non imitabile telum in his ears, is almost certain, unless he struggles hard, to slip into what Mr. Day Lewis not unfairly calls a Latinised pidgin-English. But the struggle may force him out of the track into an unseasonable colloquiality, and the poetic idiom of today leans of itself towards a rather ostentatious and jaunty popularism. There are passages, for example, in Mr. Stephen Spender's verse which always remind me of the private school- boys' conversation: " Now we're alone, let's talk filth." " Yes, let's." " Stomach!" And when Mr. Day Lewis renders

immunisque seders alien ad pabula fucus :

and the drone gate-crashes their dinner: I feel inclined to ask : " Did you say gate-crash because you thought it is what Virgil meant, or just to show us what a brave boy you are? "

One can no more strip Virgil of his rhetorical training than one can strip Milton of his Biblical learning : some of his greatest passages—like the excudant alii and red neque medorum—are composed in strict accordance with the canons of the Schools. And one of those canons was appropriateness: having determined

the level on which your theme was to be treated,. you selected your words accordingly. Before Mr. Day Lewis girds himself— as I hope he will—to translate the Sixth Aeneid, I hope he will consider this ; and as an example of where he seems to me to have gone wrong for not considering it, I take his rendering of :

Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis Mane salutanium wtth vomat aedibus undam : True, no mansion hall with a swanky gate throws up In the morning a mob of callers:

Now, you could say swanky in Latin:

0 Colonia, quae cupis ponce ludere magno,

means exactly that : and I think it quite possible when Virgil goes on

illusasque auro vestes, Ephyreiaque aera,

that he had this meaning of ludere in his mind. But he has not said it here : and the association of superbus forbid one to slip the notion in. On the other hand, in this passage regnisque horreret in arvis—carduus

the shockheaded thistle sabotaged fields:

the word sabotage, startling as it is, does give, to a hair's breadth, what Virgil means : the thistles prevent the fields from getting on with their job : and our language, which has adopted buccaneer into its poetic idiom, may some day domicile sabotage. It is by such audacities that the diction of poetry is kept alive and growing. Elsewhere Mr. Day Lewis has a rendering of great charm : at latis otia fundis :

the broad ease of the farmlands:

I doubt if the eighteenth century would have admitted farmland. It would have sounded too practical, too suggestive of rent-day and leases for lives. But it is a very good word, sand, unless O.E.D. has deceived me, no one has ever used it before.

As I have said, the physical difference between the two languages makes it impossible for any translation from the Latin to sound like the original. But then the question- arises—shall we make it sound like something of our own which we already know and recognise as. poetry, or like something of itself? Mr. Day Lewis has invented a measure which sounds at first hearing like a much resolved and rhymeless Alexandrine, with Sigurd the Volsung and The Courtship of Miles Standish occasionally bubbling up, and a most felicitous use of half lines for variety. It is not always successful. But it moves, it is readable, it carries the diction well. Here are two specimens long enough to show its quality. This from one of the loveliest passages Virgil ever wrote.

I remember once beneath the battlements of Oebalia, Where dark Galaesus waters the golden fields of corn, I saw an old man, a Corycian, who owned a few poor acres, Of land once derelict, useless for arable, No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines. But he laid out a kitchen garden in rows amid the brushwood Bordering it with white lilies, verbena, small-seeded poppy.

His the first rose of spring, the earliest apple in autumn: And when grim winter still was splitting the rocks with cold, And holding the watercourses with curb of ice, already This man would be cutting his soft-haired hyacinths, complaining Of summer's backwardness and the west winds slow to come.

The other in the Cave of Cyrene, and I own that till I read Mr. Day Lewis I had not realised how magnificently imaginative Virgil's conception of the world below the waters is.

The water

Stood up on end in a mountainous curve, stood all around him, Laid him in its huge lap, and bore him beneath the surface, Marvelling now at his mother's home, and aqueous kingdom, The pools enclosed in caverns, the sighing woods of weed— He went along: the enormous passage of waters dazed him, For he viewed all the rivers that glide below great earth Far and wide, Phasis, Lycus,

The source of Father Tiber and the flowing Arno,

Eridanus, than which through fertile land's no river Rushes with more momentum to the pansy-purple sea. - Surely there is more than a hint of Leonardo in that picture : is not Eridanus the river that flows behind the Virgin of the