Reading/Q&A/book launch of South African poet Richard Whitaker’s new translation of Vergil’s Eclogues, on November 4, 4:15-5:30 pm in Gilman 108, sponsored by JHU Classics.

Vergil’s 39 BCE poem, composed as Rome’s empire was succumbing to civil war and autocracy, already meditates on land rights, displacement, forced migration, colonialism, slavery, and the environment. Dr Whitaker’s open-access translation of Vergil’s Latin for the first time into South African English — with illustrations by the internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge — opens the poem into powerful dialogue with modern global legacies of settler-colonialism, exploitation, and inequality.