Rude Woods by Nate Klug

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 to