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.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
[…] In fact, as I learned from this excellent podcast interview with the poet David Ferry and the classicist Richard Thomas, the Georgics was probably not, even in its time, a functional manual. Farmers who could read Latin would sooner have resorted to manuals in prose. And, as Thomas notes, modern attempts at farming according to the Georgics have failed completely. When tried in the world, the poem’s testimony is not reliable. […]