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[ SOLD OUT ] VIRGIL, (VERGILIUS), The Georgics. Translated with an introduction by Robert Wells. Carcanet New Press, Manchester, 1982. 95p. Cloth. Small personal library mark and name on free endpaper. (Rare). 'As Wells says of the Georgics: 'I wanted to get as close to the poem as I could, to know that I had read it, and to see (as a record of my reading) what I could make of it in English.' Virgil's poem is, on one level, a manual on how to work the land. Throughout there is a faith in the idea of communal experience, of common knowledge, as each of the poem's four books gives advice on different kinds of farming - ploughing, growing vines and olive trees, maintaining livestock and, finally, beekeeping. Wells points out in a note that Virgil's own father had been a farmer, and the translation emphasises the sense of a voice drawing on personal memories: 'One man I think of especially who stays up late, / Cutting torches with his knife by winter firelight.' In the clarity and resonance of the imagery and the restraint and balance of the language, Wells's version is fuelled by this sense of a voice speaking urgently out of the midst of landscape.' (CHARLES BAINBRIDGE, The Guardian, 17-10-2009). (Antiquarian) (approx. delivery time: undeliverable)