African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil's Eclogues

Abstract

African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues presents a fresh and unexpected version of the ten pastoral poems that comprise the Eclogues of Virgil (70–19 BCE). Although these poems focus on the lives of shepherds and goatherds, Virgil makes their seemingly circumscribed existence a mirror of the wider world, a world that is both his and ours. The Eclogues deal with subjects that remain vital in the twenty-first century: erotic passion of many varieties, transformation and metamorphosis, the torments of unhappy love, and the nature and power of poetry (represented by different kinds of pastoral song). With striking originality, Virgil also allowed contemporary power politics to erupt into the world of his herders and small-scale farmers, as they face confiscation of their grazing lands and fields.

South African classicist and translator Richard Whitaker has produced eminently fluent and creative versions of Virgil’s Eclogues. He reimagines the poems in an African landscape and evokes the troubled history of land dispossession in southern Africa, introducing local equivalents for much of Virgil’s Mediterranean flora and fauna and making frequent use of words drawn from indigenous languages that have enriched his country’s variety of English.

African Pastoral includes stunning images by South African artist William Kentridge, which interact with the versions of Virgilian pastoral in multiple ways, complementing and illuminating the poems, as well as raising points of contrast and difference between ancient and modern contexts.