Book Review : Revisiting the Poet Who Defined the Pastoral for the Ages : THE ECLOGUES OF VIRGIL; Translated by David Ferry; Farrar, Straus & Giroux $24, 102 pages

Shepherds, nymphs, sheep and goats gather under shady trees. A shepherd declares his love for a nymph. Two more shepherds engage in a contest, piping songs on their rustic flutes. Another shepherd laments the death of his friend. On the surface, the pastoral seems the simplest and earliest of literary genres, the most rural and rustic, the most idyllic.

Yet down through the centuries of literary history, the pastoral has served as one of the most deliberately self-conscious, literary, allusive and sophisticated of genres, as poets from almost every European literature continued to revisit, revive and revise it. In English literature alone, generations of poets--Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold--echoed in their works that famous but unattributed declaration, “Et in Arcadia ego” (“And I too was in Arcadia.”)

The origins of the pastoral go back to the Sicilian Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote his “Idylls” in the 3rd century BC. But it was the great and glorious author of “The Aeneid,” Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC), commonly known as Virgil, whose “Eclogues” defined the pastoral for almost everyone who came after him. Virgil’s “Eclogues” emulated Theocritus’ “Idylls,” yet he also transformed what had been a relatively down-to-earth portrait of bucolic life into something both broader and deeper. As Virgil’s latest translator, David Ferry, notes in the introduction to his bilingual edition of the “Eclogues”: “There’s nothing in those ‘Idylls’ of Theocritus that corresponds to the way Virgil makes us aware of the world of politics, economics and war, whose pressures are felt within and upon his pastoral world.”

Indeed, the first of the 10 “Eclogues” is a dialogue between two shepherds, one of whom has just been dispossessed of his pastures, a situation reflecting what was actually happening in Virgil’s time, when Augustus Caesar--Virgil’s great patron--decided to reward the soldiers who had supported him in the civil wars with parcels of land confiscated from their former owners. Fifteen hundred years later, such poets as Spenser and Sidney would revive the pastoral as an allegorical means of writing about contemporary English court politics.

To read the “Eclogues”--whether in Ferry’s fresh and lucid translation or in the original Latin--is to experience the strange sensation of revisiting familiar territory, even if one is reading them for the first time. When we hear Corydon woo Alexis, “O come and live with me in the countryside, / Among the humble farms. Together we / Will hunt the deer, and tend the little goats. . .,” we may well recall Christopher Marlowe’s famous poem beginning, “Come live with me and be my love.” The majestic and noble strains of the fourth Eclogue, prophesying the return of a golden age, “The Virgin now returns, and the reign of Saturn,” presage the lines from Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew / The golden age returns,” and later echoed by Yeats: “The Roman empire stood appalled: / It dropped the reins of peace and war / When that fierce virgin and her Star / Out of the fabulous darkness called.”

*

But to read the “Eclogues” is also to partake of a world in which a shepherd is equally free to fall in love with a lovely maiden or a handsome youth; indeed, the same shepherd can decide to bestow on the youth the very same gifts and blandishments he offered the maiden the day before. The rural setting--goats, sheep, bees, mountains, rivers, grainfields, orchards, pears, figs, grapes, olives, cheese and wine--is a salutary reminder of the agricultural basis upon which even a civilization as grand and highly developed as Rome must ultimately rest. For although the pastoral is in many ways one of the most literary and artificial of genres, it is also a celebration of the sustenance gained from living in close contact with the natural world.

Ferry, a poet, critic and distinguished translator whose previous works include an edition of Horace’s “Odes” and a much-admired English rendition of the ancient Sumerian epic “Gilgamesh,” gives us Virgil’s “Eclogues” in language that is direct, unmannered and fresh: a modern version of classical simplicity. He is willing to sacrifice literal meaning in the interest of clarity and elegance, and since this edition features Virgil’s original Latin alongside Ferry’s English, readers can easily compare the two to see how much has been lost in translation, but also how much has been elucidated and preserved.