A Log Cabin Out of Stone: - Dartmouth College

furrow their smooth foreheads to get it right,
but cannot know what we know, you and I
Tityrus says It all: “Fool that I was,
I used to think the city they call Rome
was like our market town, but bigger.”
Its not.
A little later on, you can hear him groan,
Dead. The Latin dead, his groan is alive,
aloud, along the fields he saved for a while:
“What else could I do? There was nowhere else to go!
There was nobody else to turn to, no other way…”
Tityrus old boy, we know how it is. We know.
And we have seen Meliboeus turn away,
polite, sympathetic, but walking down the road
with the precious little he’s salvaged out of his ruin
into those hills where shadows have started to fall.
Clearly, this is not a typical translation. Or is it even a translation at all? I do
respect Slavitt for making no apologies –he is not and will never be Vergil, nor will he
ever be able to speak for Vergil. Instead he accepts fully that he can only translate this
poem from his own perspective, and that is not Vergil’s. He asks us to read his poetry in
an open, receptive way, letting ourselves be led, paying attention not only
to the poem but to our own responses, which have been, after all,
manipulated and programmed by the poet. That the expository material
about agriculture doesn’t necessarily seem like pretext and that it is
convincing on its face only demonstrates Vergil’s impressive proficiency.
The magician’s left hand is busy with flourishes and passes, and while our
attention is thus distracted, the right hand is occupied with the production
of the gold coin, or the endless handkerchief, or the live pigeon. 23
Slavitt’s approach to this translation is very bold. He strays tremendously from
the text, he barely even translates the original situation. Slavitt reconstructs the
entire setting of Eclogue 1. This is probably because he sees Vergil’s poems to
represent something very specific to its original readers, and he chooses to
23
Slavitt David, Eclogues and Georgics of Vergil Translated by David Slavitt, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), xxiii.
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