African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil's Eclogues

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by Richard Whitaker

Contributors William Kentridge

FORTHCOMING Fall 2026

African Pastoral: Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues presents a fresh and unexpected version of the ten pastoral poems that comprise the Eclogues of Virgil (70–19 BCE). Although these poems focus on the lives of shepherds and goatherds, Virgil makes their seemingly circumscribed existence a mirror of the wider world, a world that is both his and ours. The Eclogues deal with subjects that remain vital in the twenty-first century: erotic passion of many varieties, transformation and metamorphosis, the torments of unhappy love, and the nature and power of poetry (represented by different kinds of pastoral song). With striking originality, Virgil also allowed contemporary power politics to erupt into the world of his herders and small-scale farmers, as they face confiscation of their grazing lands and fields.

South African classicist and translator Richard Whitaker has produced eminently fluent and creative versions of Virgil’s Eclogues. He reimagines the poems in an African landscape and evokes the troubled history of land dispossession in southern Africa, introducing local equivalents for much of Virgil’s Mediterranean flora and fauna and making frequent use of words drawn from indigenous languages that have enriched his country’s variety of English.

African Pastoral includes stunning images by South African artist William Kentridge, which interact with the versions of Virgilian pastoral in multiple ways, complementing and illuminating the poems, as well as raising points of contrast and difference between ancient and modern contexts.

About the Author

Richard Whitaker studied Greek and Latin language and literature at the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Oxford, and St. Andrews and he is now Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Cape Town. Whitaker has published extensively on Roman love poetry, oral poetry, and the influence of the classics on twentieth-century literature. His published translations include Catullus: Selected Lyric Poems (uHlanga Press, 2020), with the poet Douglas Reid Skinner, and southern African-flavored renderings of Homer’s Iliad (New Voices Publishing, 2012) and Odyssey (African Sun Press, 2017). Whitaker has also published travel books on South Africa with AA Travel (UK) and National Geographic. He is currently a contributing editor of the poetry magazine Stanzas.

Born and residing in Johannesburg, South Africa, William Kentridge is an internationally renowned artist, filmmaker, and theater and opera director. His artworks can be found in the collections of major art galleries worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Zeitz MoCAA (Cape Town), Haus der Kunst (Munich), MoMA (New York), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MAXXI (Rome), National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Tate Modern (London). Kentridge presented the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, the Slade Lecture Series at Oxford, and has received honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale, London University, and Columbia University.