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REVIEWS News of the World The Georgics of Virgil
The Irish Times described its publication as ‘something of an event’. RTE television produced a 30-minute profile to mark its publication, and the national radio station devoted two complete programmes to it. In The Examiner (Cork) Tom McCarthy celebrated ‘a major presence in Irish poetry for the past twenty years. No one has done so much in a practical sense to influence the shape of our poetic world… The quiet understatement, the poet as a kind of poker-player with the soul has become a Fallon trademark. Dealing well even with a mean hand is part of his radical excellence.’ ‘For one who has occupied such a central place in Irish letters, Fallon’s oeuvre is surprisingly, and refreshingly, lacking in self-conscious literariness… The maturity of this poetry is evinced by a careful, seldom uncritical investment in the local and natural… An important and rewarding volume.’ (The Irish Times) ‘His is an individual voice, a quiet presence that has grown steadily through the years, marking out a geographical, rural centre as its own, connecting with it, speaking for it and to it, absorbing its solid values, using its colloquial expressions, creating its figures, and at the same time moving towards a greater poetic mastery in which the language of the poem is richer, truer to its own aesthetic. The later poetry of Peter Fallon, the new poems of this collection, are fully rendered, beautiful creations in themselves, whether set in Meath or Maine. Each is an exact embodiment, a carefully disciplined development, precise in rhythm, clear in image, something to be cherished.’ (Books Ireland)
The Georgics of Virgil
In April 2005 RTE (the national radio) broadcast Peter Fallon’s reading of the poem each night for a week in its Book On One series. ‘To read this great work is to feel earthed as well as engrossed. Peter Fallon handles The Georgics (a poem completed c.29 BC, comprising four books that deal with crops, trees, livestock and bees) with the expertise and empathy of a poet conversant with farm life. Each individual line glistens like a newly-turned furrow. Both the fact-filled plains and the sublime heights of Virgil’s work are compellingly rendered and the poem flows so freely and lyrically one soon forgets it is a translation… Vigorous and meticulous, The Georgics of Virgil is a restorative read, full of fascinating lore but also tinged with resonances for our imperilled planet.’ (Poetry Book Society citation) ‘… bountiful, faithful and frolicsome, a big achievement, in fact, a new poem living its own vivid life in English… It is this combination of truth to the words Virgil wrote, natural vernacular speech and a general at-homeness on the land that makes Fallon’s an inspired translation… Taken in parts or as a whole, it says, “Glory to the world.” And the glory is renewed for our time in Peter Fallon’s translation.’ ‘Ground – the working of the earth, the cycle of the seasons, the smells and textures of farm and field – is alive and in good hands in the Irish poet Peter Fallon’s supple and assured new translation of The Georgics of Virgil. ‘Tough, unsentimental, practical, knowledgeable, affectionate, and above all readable as a novel, Peter Fallon’s version of the Georgics is a lovely piece of work... It renews the Latin classic in an idiom of remarkable immediacy and concreteness – now plain, now garnished with its specialised knowledge, now intense and lyrical… Fallon’s vivid sympathy with his text and its relish of country matters animates his rendering, allowing him to capture its timeless qualities in a language that seems effortlessly rooted in our own time… One of the major satisfactions of Fallon’s version is the way it manages, without apparent strain, to do rich justice to the holistic texture of Virgil’s poem, to its various levels of meaning… how well the poem shifts emotional gears – intimately practical one minute, and the next managing the operatically tragic lament of Aristaeus over his bees, that leads in turn to the narrative tour-de-force of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and its terrible aftermath. What we have here is a great poem richly reclaimed, and it is cause for celebration.’ ‘… magnificent… The language of his version is at once wonderfully easy and energetic… Fallon is the perfect translator for The Georgics, as is borne out on every page… realizing that no work is all high points, he slowly developed a language to deal with the whole, and has done so with spectacular success… brilliantly versatile… responsive to the different registers necessary for this extraordinarily various work. There are great predecessors for this venture, from Dryden to Day Lewis; but Peter Fallon’s version will live with the best.’
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