Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia by M. Owen Lee (review)

HUMANITIES 101 (Editions de 1'Acadie 1987; The Island Acadians 1720-1980, 296, $19.95), translated by Sally Ross. This is an informative work of social and cultural history. It would seem appropriate to add a note concerning the reviewing of translations in the Canadian press. Translators are often distressed at the tendency for reviewers either to neglect all mention of the translator or on the contrary to have a field day picking holes in the carefully woven text he or she has put together. Nothing is easier, really, than to find fault with a translation. It is more difficult for a critic to understand the orientation that the translator has attempted to give the work (and prefaces are useful here) and to measure the performance, in part, against this project. With some luck, the continued growth of translation studies (and especially the study of its cultural dimensions) will give us the concepts and the vocabulary that will allow us to give a better account of the specific contribution of translations to Canadian literature. Humanities M. Owen Lee. Death and Rebirth in Virgil's Arcadia State University of New York Press. xii, 140. us $10.95 Virgilian pastoral is sometimes presented as a genre of escape and nostalgia. True, the countryside offers a vivid contrast to the bustle and ugliness of the time-kept city. But on entering Eclogue 1 we learn that in this idyllic landscape violent and horrible things are happening. Herdsmen are being evicted by veterans returning from the civil war. Some, indeed, have been spared; but others are now destitute wanderers. So the world of the Eclogues, like those of the Georgics and the Aeneid, is an amalgam of weal and woe. Eclogue 1 was not the first to be written, but the ten poems cannot be accurately dated. All we know is that 2 and 3 preceded 5, that 4 belongs to 40 BC, and that 10 came last. We would expect the more Theocritean pieces (2, 3, 5, 7, 8) to be early (though we should perhaps reserve judgment on lines 6-13 of Eclogue 8), and the more complex and innovative pieces to be late (4, 6, 9, 1, 10). But except for the points noted above, single poems cannot be positioned within their groups. This is regrettable but not serious. We can still enjoy the individual poems. (The rural pictures, the music of the verse, and the corresponding patterns of the shepherds' songs far outweigh the occasional difficulties of thoughtsequence and our ignorance of the figures and events referred to.) Beyond that, we can study how Virgil took overa bucolic convention from Theocritus whereby two herdsmen meet, exchange banter, agree to a song-contest, fix stakes, find an umpire, retire into a locus amoenus, sing in 102 LETI'ERS IN CANADA 1989 rivalry on the topics of love, nature, and music, and then hear a decision; and how he then put more and more non-Theocritean and non-pastoral material into that bucolic framework (e.g. the political prophecy in 4 and the evictions in 1) until it ceased to be offurther service. Then we find him taking over another framework, from Hesiod, and exhausting that; and finally adopting the biggest framework of all, from Homer himself. The successive transformations of these three genres represent the development of Rome's greatest poet. Father Lee's study 'is not a book for scholars'; it is meant for 'the reader who wants both an introduction to the Eclogues and an interpretation of them.' For writing such a book Lee has a most important asset: he loves the Eclogues. He is sensitive to that world in which joy and beauty are so fragile and precarious; unlike more prosaic interpreters who have complained about 'artificiality,' he appreciates the symbolic nature ofthe shepherd and his landscape; he writes in a warm and lucid style; and he is characteristically generous to other critics. Some reservations are in order. The parallel with nostalgic pieces like Leacock's Mariposa, Housman's 'Into my heart an air that kills,' and Yeats's Innisfree has already been queried. The general use of the name 'Arcadia' is of doubtful validity. (That country of...