Rude Woods

Poetry. In his Eclogues, Virgil offers the reader poems about responding--listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song. Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS is an inspired, modern response--a… Lue lisää Poetry. In his Eclogues, Virgil offers the reader poems about responding--listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song. Nate Klug's RUDE WOODS is an inspired, modern response--a new translation that blends talkative elegance with lyric intensity. In a manner that is as successful as it is surprising, notes W. R. Johnson in his introduction, Klug has devised a conversational idiom that relies on spare diction and spare syntax, on a pure clarity of sight and sound to give us superb poems that give Virgil's pure lyricism a genuine 'answering form. 'Translation tends to be either a conspicuous aid to comprehension or that other thing: a strangely impure art form that both mimes and contends with an other. At its best it makes you think and not think about the original; it carries you along in a state of belief even as you remind yourself that there is an older text behind the new song. If the translator-poet strays too far from the colloquial the text hardens, seeming too much like another language; if he or she is too modish it seems as though the earlier poet exists solely to promote the work of the later one. Virgil himself was a modeller of the work of others, as we all are to some degree. It's a delicate balancing act performed well by only the best translators. Nate Klug is of this noble band. 'He cares about poetry' and his Virgil has a lightness of touch that only the best can manage. --Laurie DugganNate Klug's RUDE WOODS renders Virgil in an idiom as honest and appealing as 'ripe apples, cooked chestnuts, and cheese. ' Ezra Pound's Propertius comes immediately to mind. These selections evince the same careful attention to the natural rhythms and movement of speech--perfect for a poetic escape into simple pleasures. Yet Klug doesn't skirt an important lesson of the Eclogues: escape is fleeting. Loss, longing, and exile dog even the shepherds in this idyll. They ease their own troubles and 'make the way / less painful, singing and walking, / walking and singing together like this. ' Nate Klug confidently reaffirms the abiding comfort of these poems. --John Tipton