Note: This program was broadcast on April 8th 2007 on WGBH.
Click here to read a review of the interview on PRX.
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.
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 (29 minutes).
Click here to listen to a lecture by David Ferry on his Georgics translation at the Harvard Book Store.
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Ilan Stavans, the renowned critic of Latino and Latin American literature and culture, and the author of the controversial dictionary, “Spanglish,” is also a perpetual outsider. A Mexican-Jewish-American, Ilan lives simultaneously in many cultures, while truly belonging to none. He calls himself a chameleon, and perhaps this status is just what it takes to be a true critic.