Virgil's Georgics [29:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Note: This program was broadcast on April 8th 2007 on WGBH.

Click here to read a review of the interview on PRX.

David Ferry

Noted Cambridge poet David Ferry has recently translated Virgil’s Georgics, and on ThoughtCast he joins Virgil scholar Richard Thomas, the chair of Harvard’s Classics Dept., for a detailed examination of this beautiful and insufficiently known poem. It is said to have taken Virgil 7 years to write, from about 36 to 29 B.C.

Richard Thomas

As such, the Georgics was written during a period of political instability and chronic civil war, and inevitably reflects Virgil’s dark, often pessimistic outlook on human nature. But at the same time, The Georgics — which means “agriculture” in Greek — is a celebration of nature and its ceaseless beauty. As Virgil describes the cycles of crops, the seasons, the weather — the birth, death and rebirth that mark the natural world, he provides us with a complex, realistic, painful but enduringly uplifting poem.

Click here to listen to a lecture by David Ferry on “The Art and Practice of Literary Translation” on the WGBH Forum Network.

 

 Astrophysics [14:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Noreen Grice

As part of the Cambridge Science Festival, Noreen Grice, the operations coordinator of the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston, hosted a series of presentations that feature new research in astrophysics taking place in Cambridge. Specifically, she highlighted the work of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in Kendall Square, two scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — Dr. Margaret Geller and Dr. David Charbonneau — and Dr. Sara Seager and Dr. Richard Binzel, two scientists from MIT.
Click here: for Noreen Grice’s presentation at the planetarium (30 minutes)
Click here: for an interview with Noreen Grice (15 minutes)