Georgics 2.475-486

Kelly Freestone

Latin:

Me uero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, 475
quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore,
accipiant caelique uias et sidera monstrent,
defectus solis uarios lunaeque labores;
unde tremor terris, qua ui maria alta tumescant
obicibus ruptis rursusque in se ipsa residant, 480
quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles
hiberni, uel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.
sin has ne possim naturae accedere partis
frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis,
rura mihi et rigui placeant in uallibus amnes, 485
flumina amem siluasque inglorius.

Translation:

For my part, may the Muses sweet beyond compare,
Whose sacred rites I, stricken by a great love, bear —
May they receive me first, to me may they reveal
The paths of airy heav’n and the stars’ great wheel,
The labours of the moon, eclipses of the sun, 5
And from what place the trembling of the earth does come;
What force makes high the oceans swell, their barriers break,
And fall back on themselves; why wintery suns all make
Such haste to sink into the sea, or what delay
Prevents the sluggish nights from giving way to day. 10
But if such realms of nature I cannot attain
— if chill blood ’round my heart makes all my effort vain —
Let countryside delight, let flowing rivers claim,
Let me love streams and woods, myself unknown to fame.

This translation is taken from a beautiful passage in the middle of the Georgics, in which Virgil calls upon the Muses to instruct and inspire his poetic endeavors. For my choice of meter, I followed the example of C.S. Lewis (Classicist turned English professor), who wrote a posthumously-published and not particularly well-known partial translation of the Aeneid in rhyming Alexandrines. As Lewis wrote, the long twelve-beat lines “give the v. Virgilian quality of sounding almost like prose in the middle” while the rhyming couplets at the lines’ end “keeps them in order” and has the tightening, almost cadential effect of the dactyl-spondee conclusion of a Latin hexameter.¹

[Editor’s note: A more detailed description is published here.]

Footnotes

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

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

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