The Georgics of Virgil Translated by Peter Fallon: "Georgic", the dictionary will tell you, comes via Latin from georgos, the Greek word for farmer, which is why Virgil's didactic poem about life on the land in Italy in the first century BC is known to us as 'The Georgics', says Seamus Heaney.
Virgil was born on a farm in northern Italy in 70 BC and died 51 years later, in 19 BC, in the southern port of Brundisium. His adult life was thus lived during those years of civil war that saw the end of the Roman republic and the emergence of Julius Caesar's protégé, Octavian, as the head man, the princeps who would eventually allow himself to be revered as Caesar Augustus.
The last time an Irish-born poet translated 'The Georgics' was in 1940, during the second World War, when people were being urged to "dig for victory". With the land of England under threat, and the rationing of food a daily reality, Cecil Day Lewis was very conscious of the poem's staying power. It was a reminder, for a start, of the centrality of agriculture to the survival of the population, but it also reinforced a belief - which must have been shared by Virgil in his own war-torn times - in the centrality of poetic vocation:
the poet's search for a right soil
Where words may settle, marry and conceive an
Imagined truth.
Peter Fallon, a poet who has not only lived on a farm but has done the work of a farmer, shares this conviction about the salutary nature of his two callings and has produced a translation that is bountiful, faithful and frolicsome, a big achievement, in fact, a new poem living its own vivid life in English. From the first to the last of its lines, which number more than 2,000, it is driven by what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower", and also by the force of literary intelligence and sheer linguistic resource. All you have to do is read the opening lines in order to feel yourself - and the earth - coming alive all over again:
What tickles the corn to laugh in rows, and by what star
to steer the plow, and how to train the vine to elms,
good management of flocks and herds, the expertise bees need
to thrive - my lord, Maecenas, such are the makings of the song
I take upon myself to sing.
"What makes the cornfields happy", Day Lewis begins his translation, "under what constellation/it's best to turn the soil," and his words give an excellent classical rendering of the original in a metre that keeps step with the Latin: "Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram/vertere". The glossaries will provide you with the English meanings for these words - "segetes", crops; "laetas", happy; "faciat", makes, and so on - but no glossary can help you make the leap from lexical correctness to poetic rightness. Only a body stored with remembered sensation and a head full of language wired up to those memories can do that, and luckily Peter Fallon has what it takes:
What tickles the corn to laugh in rows, and by what star
to steer the plow . . .
The feel of morning sunlight on a field of deliciously greening young corn is all of a sudden present in the verb "tickles", and the strength of arm required to keep a plough steady in the furrow is lodged deeply and naturally in the alliteration of "star" and "steer".
It is this combination of truth to the words Virgil wrote, natural vernacular speech and a general at-homeness on the land that make Fallon's an inspired translation. The original poem is a mixture of aisling and handbook; at times it reminds you of the realism of Breughel, at times of the exquisite landscapes of Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. It belongs at one and the same time in Arcadia and in the fields at the back of the house, and speaks a language that is equally flexible, able to shift between the technical, practical idiom of farming and heightened, cadenced voice of poetic tradition.
Peter Fallon succeeds because he has found a way of maintaining this combination of idioms, so that what you are hearing at one moment is speech that might be heard any day from a man on a headrig or a tractor, and at the next it's the lyric excitement of Fallon's own voice or the back-echo of other poets and poetries. I loved his countryman's talk of land "in good heart", of milk being "stripped", of "feed" for the soil, and his personal touch when he talks of hares with long lugs, of the "old grumpy sounds" frogs make in swamps, and of "hefty carts" loaded with sheaves.
John Dryden called 'The Georgics' "the best poem by the best poet", an unexpected judgement given the status of 'The Aeneid'. Virgil began his epic in or around 29BC, the year when he is reputed to have finished 'The Georgics' and to have read its four constituent books over four days to Octavian, fresh from his victory at the battle of Actium. Understandably, therefore, imperium, the triumph of Rome, was the theme of the new work: 'The Aeneid' is a poet's hommage to the cool-headed, if somewhat cool-hearted princeps, the leader who will reconstruct an ordered society out of the ravaged republic. But where The Aeneid begins with an invocation of "arms and the man", 'The Georgics' begins with the crops and the stock because here the theme is not imperium but patria, love of the land, the physical ground that is the people's home ground, the ground Virgil will stand up for as a poet and will keep standing over.
Such a work was bound to appeal to Peter Fallon, whose own poetry could be described in similar terms. In his poem 'Winter Work', for example, he presents himself as somebody ready to keep bogging into the tasks, out in the yard, "my feet on the ground,/in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit". But The Georgics appealed to him also because he was taught bits of it at school, and one of the bonuses of the new book is the way his "Afterwords" testify to the lifelong value of great poetry encountered early on. In manhood, a deeper, more fervent understanding of the place of art work and farm work has emerged, so the translator can now ask the question that is implicit everywhere in Virgil's original: "How can you revere the gods if you don't love the world?" And further, he can state without sanctimoniousness that what Virgil presents is "the picture of happiness the moral life may bring."
Poetry has been defined as "a dream dreamt in the presence of reason", and 'The Georgics' would fit that description. Unsentimental, holistic, as careful of the gods in the heavens as of the Italian ground, it was Virgil's dream of how his hurt country might start to heal. After two millennia of technical improvements in agriculture and no improvements whatever in the war- mongering activities of the species, it doesn't sound old. It can be read as a series of great set pieces, the paean to the ideal commonwealth of the bees is here, for example, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice - or it can be admired as a sustained, slightly mysterious performance. Taken in parts or as a whole, it says, "Glory be to the world." And the glory is renewed for our times in Peter Fallon's translation.
The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles' Antigone, was published by Faber last spring
The Georgics of Virgil Translated by Peter Fallon Gallery Press, €20 hbk, €13.90 pbk