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Featured Book, Episode 53
One of my listeners advised me to check out this translation, and I’m glad he did. I bought it on his recommendation. A few days later, before having read any of Johnson’s translation, I happened to look up a quote in her version of the third Georgic while researching something else. I read a couplet. Then half a dozen more lines. And a dozen after that. And I dropped what I was doing, and finished the poem, reading all the way to the 566th line! Kimberly Johnson’s The Georgics: A Poem of the Land is something special – an ingenious poet translating another ingenious poet, and transposing his language into English with all its sonority and consonance and assonance. The Johnson translation is an incredibly beautiful composition, filled with strange, haunting words you didn’t quite remember that you knew, sometimes stepping into contorted rhythms of Hopkins, and at others, unfolding with the warm spontaneity of Whitman. You can open this book to any page and smile at the shimmer of any given line – Johnson has such a stupendous ability with crafting texture and sound in poetry that she makes it easy to slow down and enjoy the imagery of Virgil’s poem, page after page. Every single detail of this translation is wonderful – it’s like watching Jascha Heifetz or Art Tatum play the violin or piano. And additionally, Johnson’s notes are thorough and considerate, too! Both for L&H and for personal fun I read a lot of translations, and I have some teacherly requirements about endnotes, and the ones in this book are there when you need them, time after time after time. So, if you want to support a brilliant modern poet while reading one of the most beautiful poems from antiquity, you should pick up a copy of Johnson’s The Georgics: A Poem of the Land .
Featured Book, Episode 53
You really can't read too much Hesiod - either Works and Days or the Theogony. From end to end of my programs on Greco-Roman literature, I kept reaching for these two poems, even as I moved the podcast forward into the crescendo of Golden Age Latin poetry in Ovid's Metamorphoses. I loved Kimberly Johnson's translation so much that when I went back and re-tracked my two episodes on Hesiod recently, I worked some of Johnson's new translation into the recording. In translating Hesiod, a scholar has to evoke both the rustic, conversational tone of Works and Days, as well as the magisterial epic voice of the Theogony, with all of its glittering details. Johnson, already a poet who could write about paint drying on a wall and make tears come to your eyes, makes Hesiod's two very different works come alive in very different ways. This is a beautiful book, and a terrific introduction to Archaic Greek literature. If you're a total newcomer to Ancient Greek literature, this book should be your starting point, and even veteran classicists will enjoy this new rendition of Hesiod's all-important poems.