Overview

Virgil wrote The Georgics in the 30s BCE at a time of political uncertainty in the Roman state and although country matters are to the fore in the selections chosen and translated in this chapbook, there is also from time to time an underlying sense of unease. The passages from Books 1, 2 and 3 have an agricultural theme, dealing respectively with raising crops, raising trees, and breeding livestock and horses and from Book 4, with bee-keeping. The chapbook ends with the concluding passage of Book 4, Virgil's beautiful telling of the story of Orpheus and Euridice. This lively and entertaining translation from the Latin by the poet Fred Beake brings Virgil's original poem into such sharp focus for the reader of today that it is hard to believe that it was written over two thousand years ago.

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9781911469889

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Virgil was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. Virgil's work has had great influence on Western literature, most notably Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Virgil appears as the author's guide through Hell and Purgatory. Virgil has been traditionally ranked as one of Rome's greatest poets. Fred Beake grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire, spent some time as a full-time writer near Whitby before moving to Bath where he worked as a bookseller, van driver, gardener etc. as well as being a hands-on parent. In the 80s and 90s he edited, then co-edited, The Poets Voice, and ran Mammon Press,, publishing a number of books and pamphlets by writers including Jon Silkin and Fiona Pitt Kethley. He was the first Chairman of the Avon Poetry Festival in the mid 1980s before going back to university at Bristol in 2000 where he gained a degree in Classics. In 2003 he moved to Torquay 2011 where he became an active member of the Poets Torbay Group. He published a number of pamphlets in the 70's and 80's and since then has published five full-length collections, most recently New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Old Outlaw( Shoestring 2011). Two of his translations are in the W.W.Norton anthology World Poetry. His modern French versions from Char, Desnos etc are collected in The Bees of the Horizon (Etruscan 2005).

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