Extended Description of Georgics Translation

This is an extended description of this translation.

C.S. Lewis wrote a posthumously-published partial translation of the Aeneid in rhyming Alexandrines, and I decided to attempt the same meter for my translation of Georgics 2.475-486. The decision borrow Lewis’s poetic choice was highly questionable for two reasons. First, I have never seriously attempted to write anything in English meter before; I didn’t even know what Alexandrines were before I first encountered Lewis’s translation. Second, among C.S. Lewis scholars, C.S. Lewis has the same reputation for poetic (in)ability that Cicero does among Cicero scholars. Using him as a poetic model seems a risky choice at best–but perhaps his reputation as a bad poet is (like Cicero’s?) ill-deserved.

In any case, the editor of Lewis’s translation quotes Lewis’s own explanation for his choice of meter, found in his correspondence with a family friend: “I’d like to do the Aeneid into rhyming Alexandrines but without a regular break in the middle as classical French has. This wd. give the v. Virgilian quality of sounding almost like prose in the middle while the end of each line keeps them in order.”¹ No doubt I’ve been influenced by reading this explanation, but I tend to agree with Lewis’s assessment of the quality of the meter. The long, 12-beat lines feel substantially Virgilian, and the rhyme at the end gives the tightening, almost cadential effect of the dactyl-spondee conclusion of a Latin hexameter. Beyond this, I think the metrical requirements of the long lines, as well as Lewis’s own diction, give a sort of grand, old-fashioned but not outdated (one might say, classical) quality to Lewis’s translation. At any rate, I like the overall effect, so decided to create my own very poor imitation.

I have never seriously attempted to write anything in English meter before, and three things became immediately apparent to me: 1) English words have natural stresses that I am not consciously aware of but that have a huge impact on where they can be placed metrically; 2) it is infinitely easier and more natural to write English into pentameter lines than into lines with six stressed syllables (my first, most natural draft of lines often ended up having five feet); and 3) coming up with rhymes that actually add to the meaning of the poem and move it forward is difficult.

Having said that, my priority quickly became “fitting a tolerably accurate translation into the correct meter with reasonably sensical rhymes.” While I could have attempted my own wildly poetic imagery (as Lewis does at some points in his translation²), I honestly lack the creativity for that, and my first non-metrical decision, by default more than intention, was to stay as close as possible to the Latin in sense and order. In some cases, I think this resulted in preserving the emphasis of the Latin lines; in others, I think it changed the emphasis slightly, and perhaps not optimally. Additionally, while I started the whole project by translating the lines myself, I also ended up borrowing some of the phrasing from the Loeb translation at various points where I thought it captured the Latin better than I had.

The first three lines provide a good example of this decision making or lack thereof. In the opening line, I began by imitating the order of the Latin, even though an English sentence can’t start with a direct object the way Latin can. I kept the Latin order by default initially, but ended up thinking that required repetition of “may the Muses–may they” actually reflects the emphasis of the delayed verb in the Latin. The “sweet beyond beyond compare…I bear” rhyme was taken from the Loeb translation.

I fleshed out lines 4-6 a little more than Virgil does; I added “airy” to heaven for metrical reasons and expanded sidera to “the stars’ great wheel” for the rhyme, but ended up really liking it as a circumlocution for the constellations. Thomas goes so far as to call the whole phrase caelique vias et sidera a hendiadys meaning “the paths of the stars in the sky,”³ so the extension seemed reasonable and even helpful here. I added a similar expansion in line 10 with “from giving way to day,” which clarifies in what sense the noctes are tardae.

In line 5, I ended up not including the Latin’s varios because the strain on the meter didn’t seem worth the relatively weak change in meaning; perhaps the lack of an article before “eclipses” produces a similar effect. In line 6 I think my translation overplays and perhaps even incorrectly emphasises the Latin by giving the tremor terris a whole line, rather than the somewhat cursory mention it receives in the original.⁴

At line 6, I borrowed Thomas’s suggestion that the alta should be treated adverbially; it’s a bit of a stretch for English word order, but the ambiguous meaning of the word at first glance reminds me of the experience of reading Latin poetry. Line 10 includes the explanatory expansion already mentioned above; the delay-give way-day rhyme is a bit much, but I thought the strength of it closed off the section nicely, especially since the break-make rhyme in the previous couplet feels weak after the enjambment in lines 8-9. Line 11’s “realms of nature” is another phrase taken from the Loeb.⁵

I ended up cutting out description of the rivers “watering/flowing in the valleys” at 2.485 entirely, just because it was taking too many English words to explain and would have required an extra line, leaving me with a hanging couplet. If I were translating the entire book I would expand these two lines to translate more of the Latin, but I wanted to wrap this passage up and treat it as its own contained unit for the purpose of this project. The translation of rigui as “flowing” I found in the Loeb. In line 13 I left out “me” as the direct object of the verbs in my translation, just to keep the line moving and to keep it within one line; obviously it should read something like “Let countryside delight (me), let flowing rivers claim (me as their poet).” Finally, I again used the Loeb’s translation of inglorius as “unknown to fame”–it seemed a fittingly dramatic way to end.

Footnotes

1. Quoted in C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, A.T. Reyes, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 5-6.

2. For example, he translates Georgics 2.481, which is repeated at Aeneid 1.475, as “and wherefore to ^2^ his Ocean bath / Sol with such haste descends in his midwinter path,” which I find rather amusing.

3. Thomas, Georgics I-II (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), 251.

4. I think this is slightly problematic because in my opinion greater emphasis should fall on the preceding line about the sun and moon, both because it takes up a full line in the Latin and because it will be reiterated in the Aeneid, where the contrast between the sun and moon (and Apollo/Aeneas and Diana/Dido) becomes thematically important.

5. The Loeb actually prints pratis, rather than partis, for the Latin, which quite confused me and which I suspect is a mistake, since they include no note on a textual discrepancy.

Kelly is a PHC alumna who graduated in 2020. She majored in Classical Liberal Arts.

Read more of this author's articles.