Fourth Eclogue: A Parody

Latin Learning Latin
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Hi all,

I recently read - and immensely enjoyed - Virgil’s fourth eclogue, probably the most famous of them all, which predicts the return of the golden age under the auspices of a boy whom many later identified with Christ.

For those interested, here is the Latin version:
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/ec4.shtml
Here’s Dryden’s verse translation: http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/eclogue.4.iv.html
And one prose translation:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl04.htm

What I’m posting here is an imitation (note: not translation) I’ve begun in English heroic couplets (rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter). Actually, it might be more accurate to call it a parody, since I alter Virgil’s tone considerably. Anyway, here’s my translation of the first 17 lines, occupying rather more than that in English.

Any thoughts?

Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue: An Imitation (in progress)

I’ve sung pastoral songs, but now’s the time
to find a fitter subject for my rhyme.
They’re not for everyone, my homely shrubs,
and all this talk of vineyards surely rubs
the audience a little raw. So please,
if I’m compelled to speak again of trees,
I’ll find you trees well worthy of your honor.

Enough already—the Sibyl’s end’s upon her,
The last days pass, and now returns at last
the glorious age. The generations past
Are born again as generations new.
The tired Virgin stumbles into view,
And here’s old Saturn with his tarnished crown.
Now high heaven’s descendent tumbles down.
Be nice to the boy, Diana. It’s his birth
that’s gonna drive the wicked from the earth
and give the suckers with their hearts of gold
All the happiness that their hearts can hold.
(A moment—is it requisite to say
This finest moment, this, our proudest day
Would sink to smut, and booze, and prostitution
Without our sponsors’ faithful contribution?—
Of course it’s not.) Our sinful degradation
Can’t stop the moral cleansing of the nation!
Back to the boy. He’ll live the life of gods,
See the powers that be, and when he nods
They’ll nod and smile at him. He’ll rule the land
Made docile by his father’s iron hand…

-David

[edited to fix a few mistakes]

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I liked the bit about sponsors. Bona fide Latin word as well! By the way, was your model Pope? (I mean Alexander, not the Vatican).

Your slightly disrespectful tone vis-Ã -vis the Great Prophecy perhaps led me to notice for the first time in reading this eclogue the hilarious humour a little later in the poem where lambs gambol in scarlet fleeces in order to relieve tailors of the need to dye their cloths. If Vergil anticipated anything, it was the Modern Music Video or Computer Graphics or Gene (Kelly?) Manipulation. A kind of pre-Anno Domini Singing-in-the-Rain Lucky Guess. :laughing:

Cheers,
Int

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Thanks for reading my poem! Those Pollio references get on my nerves, and I had to vent my steam a little by rendering them in the only modern equivalent I could think of.

a kind of pre-Anno Domini Singing-in-the-Rain Lucky Guess

I’d never thought about Vergil, with all of his somber thoughts about war and fate and spurned love and such, as a proto-Gene Kelly! But the Eclogues and Georgics have a lot more humor (intentional and otherwise) than the Aeneid, with which alone I had been previous acquainted. Also check out the “ante cerui aethere pascentur” section of Eclogue 1 for a passage that, when I first read it, struck me as a bit odd. Looking back - and comparing it with the technicolor sheep of Eclogue 4 - I wonder whether it might not be a little comical as well.

It’s something like, “And deer will graze in the pastures of the sky, yes, and the waves desert the fish left bare on the sand, before the image of the god leaves my heart,” just past the middle of the poem. (There’s a similar passage in the Aeneid book IV that I will try to find later…)

-David

PS - Page has a particularly scornful note regarding the sheep that I shall quote in full:

“43. ipse sed…] The wool, that is, of sheep will of itself grow purple, yellow, and scarlet. There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous and Virgil has here decidedly taken it. According to Spinoza’s famous formula ‘Art’ may no doubt be sometimes best defined as ‘that which is not nature,’ and this picture of an earthly paradise bespeckled with purple, yellow, and scarlet rams might have suggested a warning to much mediaeval and modern extravagaance which has parodied nature under the name of Art.”

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By the way, was your model Pope? (I mean Alexander, not the Vatican).

I didn’t have a conscious model, but I have read a lot of John Dryden (in particular, his translation of the Aeneid. Which is a LOT of Dryden). That probably influenced my heroic couplets.

-David

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Or according to Spenser: “Nature made the world brazen. Only the poets deliver a golden one.”

Good parody, btw.