Abstract

Miss Preston's Translation of the Georgics

Writer Harriet W. Preston's skills and success in translating the modern Provencal poets have been universally acknowledged, but when she undertook a metrical translation of the book, The Georgics of Virgil, she imposed upon herself a much more difficult task. The Georgics are, perhaps, the least translatable of any of Virgil's works, because their charm and meaning are the most subtle and local. The ancients looked at nature in a manner that is even more foreign to the modern mind than the way in which they looked at man or at the super-natural. Whereas in the modern poet nature excites curiosity, admiration, love, etc., in the ancient she awoke feelings of childish wonder, fear, credulity, superstition, apprehension, etc.