Translation Theory into Practice

For Jacques Delille, whose translation of the Georgics is explored in this chapter, Virgil was more than a poetic influence; he was the fons and origo of poetry itself. In the age of Enlightenment with its rising interest in agricultural treatises, Delille’s translation of the Georgics acquired a wide appeal. His life-long work on his Géorgiques displays Delille’s aspiration to emulate the Virgilian text and to appropriate his poetics in the quest to intertwine, in his own poetic work, the physical, the aesthetic, and the moral worlds. In that quest, however, as Romani Mistretta shows, Delille’s Virgil becomes not only the herald of agricultural wisdom but also a master of poetic harmony, and the translator manages to blur the lines between ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’ as he contextualizes antiquity within the cultural framing and the cultural craving of his own epoch.