Jacques Delille
He purchased his personal safety by professing his adherence to revolutionary doctrine, but eventually quit Paris and retired to his wife’s birthplace at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, where he worked on his translation of the Aeneid.
There he was under the patronage of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, whose descriptive poem The Passage of the Mountain of Saint Gothard was published in Delille’s translation in 1802, the year he returned to France.
[2] He was granted an impressive funeral procession and entombed in Père-Lachaise Cemetery,[3] where the Bonapartist politician, Count Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély, spoke his eulogy.
[5] In 1817 his collected works began to be published as a set and in 1821 Louis-Michel Petit designed a portrait head of the poet for the Great Frenchmen series of bronze medals.
In a late panegyric to coffee – "To Virgil unfurnished, adored by Voltaire" – Delille had substituted for the word 'sugar' the elaborate paraphrase le miel américain, Que du suc des roseaux exprima l'Africain (that American honey pressed by Africans from the cane’s sap), there being no suitable Virgilian formula to cover such a novelty.
Two decades later he elaborated his thoughts on the moral worth and self-improvement that involvement with the countryside brings in French georgics of his own, L'Homme des champs, ou les Géorgiques françaises (1800).
Though there had been earlier translations of Virgil's poem in both verse and prose, what Delille brought to it was the finished quality of his alexandrines wedded to a search for equivalence of effect in the source language that sometimes sacrificed literal accuracy to it.
[17] There the humble products of the vegetable garden protest their displacement by Delille's aristocratic taste for the ornamental and exotic: The elegant Abbé turns a bit red in the face At the mere thought that in his verse’s urbanity Cabbage and turnip should ever merit a place.
Descriptive rather than didactic, the poem is a celebration of nature that recommends development of the estate by the introduction of foreign and exotic species and living in the country as the route to self-improvement.
"[24] The article quoted copious extracts from the poem, both in the original French and in the reviewer's own translation, rendering Delille's L'Homme des Champs as "The Country Gentleman".
But then in the following year, John Maunde published a complete translation of the work under the title The Rural Philosopher, or French Georgics,[25] which also received flattering reviews.
[27] It was followed by further Georgiques francaises in twelve cantos by the agronomist fr:Jean-Baptiste Rougier de La Bergerie (1804), recommending agriculture to the troops returning from the wars.
[33] The Edinburgh Review dismissed the poet as "a hackneyed mechanist of verses" and found in his 'Three Kingdoms of Nature' only "a curious medley of plagiarisms" in a work reminiscent of nothing so much as the popularised science in Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants.
In dedicating a section to the poet in his Imaginary Conversations (1824), Walter Savage Landor presented him as "the happiest of creatures, when he could weep over the charms of innocence and the country in some crowded and fashionable circle at Paris".
[35] Later, the article on him in the Encyclopædia Britannica concluded that Delille had attempted more than he could accomplish after his promising beginning; and that, "with all his beauty of versification and occasional felicity of expression, he yet shows, in his later works especially, a great ignorance of the line of distinction between prose and poetry.
