"Phyllis's fiery loves you would sing or the quarrels of Codrus,"
but "your passion for Phyllis, your invectives against Codrus," "ignes" being used far more becomingly for a man's love than for a woman's. So, again, "pro purpureo narcisso" cannot mean what nature never saw, "purple daffodil," but the white narcissus. In Eclogue VIII. "Sophocleo tua carmina digna cothurno" is turned by what is obviously a lapsus calami, "worthy of Sophocles' sock." A scholar like Sir Osborne Morgan does not need reminding that the "sock" is a metonymy for Comedy, as Milton anglicizes it in L'Allegro, "if Jonson's learned sock be on." In the exquisite passage in Eclogue VIII. 41—
"Jam fragiles poteram ab terrâ contingere ramos"—
to translate "fragiles" as "frail" is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, "I could just reach the branches from the ground and break them off"; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be "brittle." Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words
"quâ se subducere colles
Incipiunt, mollique jugum demittere clivo,"
do not mean "where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain," but the very opposite: i.e. "Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain," the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet
"Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,"
the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into "a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets," for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to "Anser" totidem literis, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: "Ferulas" is not "wands of willow" but "fennel."