In his 1786 “Thoughts on English Prosody,” Thomas Jefferson praised “the excellence of blank verse” over rhyme, and muses that “as we advance in life … I suspect we are left at last with only Homer and Virgil.” With his agrarian ideals he must have particularly loved Virgil’s “Georgics,” and his praise of the superior morals of farmers over corrupt city dwellers reflected Virgil’s own “When Justice left the earth, / She left her footprint here, among such people.”

Translators of the “Georgics” – which, after all, purports to be nothing more than a treatise on husbandry, viticulture, and beekeeping – must quail before the superlatives that cluster around it. Montaigne called it “the most accomplished work in poetry”; Dryden, “that best poem of the best poet.” In choosing their meter, they will be haunted by Tennyson saluting Virgil, in a long and euphonious verse, as “Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.” Two of our finest translators have nevertheless endeavored to bring Virgil’s art to a new audience: Janet Lembke and David Ferry (from whom the blank verse quoted above was taken).

Mr. Ferry has presented a cornucopia of Latin renderings in recent years, giving us superb “Odes” and “Epistles” of Horace and the “Eclogues” of Virgil. Ms. Lembke returns to Latin after a long odyssey. Her first translation, “Bronze and Iron” (1973), exhumed the earliest fragments of Latin verse and made those bones live. She went on to translate Aeschylus and Euripides and also launched a series of vivacious nature books – “Shake Them ‘Simmons Down” (on trees of the American South); “Despicable Species: On Cowbirds, Kudzu, Hornworms, and Other Scourges”; and most enticing of all, “Skinny Dipping: And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human.”

The simultaneous appearance of versions of the same great poem by these two fine hands raises once again the large questions that have haunted American translators of Greek and Latin ever since the appearance of Richmond Lattimore’s “Iliad” (1951) and Robert Fitzgerald’s “Odyssey” (1961). How allusive should the diction and meter of a modern translation of the classics be to the centuries of English verse that precede it? The phrasing and meter of the “Georgics,” no less than its themes, allude to Lucretius’s Latin as well as to Hesiod’s and Homer’s Greek. Should the contemporary translator channel Wordsworth or Shakespeare to us as well as Virgil?

In 1912 Ezra Pound, H.D, and Richard Aldington threw down the imagist gauntlet by demanding “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,” and the phrases they had in mind were those of Greek meter, intended as a deliberate break from the iambic pentameters, tetrameters, and trimeters of the grand English tradition. Lattimore fashioned a new meter, the six-stress line, which struck readers weaned on modernism as at last adequate to Homer’s dactylic hexameter. His readers were thrilled to think that in his literal diction and vigorous six-stress lines (one line of English per one line of Greek) they were at last getting close to Homer in the original. It doesn’t sound like English, so it must be Greek!

Fitzgerald returned Homer to iambic pentameter in his “Odyssey,” but not the old Wordsworthian blank verse. He had sent Pound a draft of his Homer and received back a “salutary blast” scrawled on a postcard: “Too much iambic pentameter can kill any subject matter.” So Fitzgerald deliberately started roughing up his iambic pentameter, sometimes shortening it to trimeter or tetrameter; sometimes, like Yeats, throwing in extra syllables to make the iambic flow ripple. It is an enriched, glorious Homeric dialect. (Still it is worth mentioning that I once quoted Pound’s words to James Merrill, and he replied, without missing a beat, “Kill any subject matter it can’t revive!”)

Ms. Lembke, like Lattimore, attempts to match Virgil’s dactylic hexameter by a six-stress line. But, unlike him, she occasionally lets her line subside into five stresses or sprawl into seven. Mr. Ferry is content with iambic pentameter, but, more frequently than Fitzgerald, he lets extra syllables ripple among his iambs, so that, in extreme instances, a line is simply five-stress with a dactylic feel.

More is at stake in these choices than accuracy or felicity. Lattimore’s choice was modernism’s: to throw off the dead weight of centuries of English blank verse and try to encounter the archaic Greeks unmediated. Fitzgerald’s choice is that of those great formalists – Yeats, Auden, Frost, and in our time Wilbur, Merrill, Hecht – who in the teeth of the Poundian revolution sang on in the meters of the old English masters. Readers of Ms. Lembke’s translation with no Latin will imagine they are coming close to the feel of the “Georgics” in the original. Readers of Mr. Ferry, with Latin or without (the original is printed en face), will divine a whole host of other shades clustering around his pentameters – Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost.

The measure of these contrasting achievements can be made on different scales – the phrase, the line, the paragraph, the extended purple passage. On the level of the phrase Ms. Lembke holds her own with Mr. Ferry, and often with a distinctive spunkiness worthy of the author of “Skinny Dipping” and “Shake Them ‘Simmons Down.” Grafting, she writes, can produce a new tree that “tickles the belly of heaven.” Her Virgil advises us to “prune the rambunctious vines,” as though they were kudzu. If Ms. Lembke’s distinctive note is spunky, Mr. Ferry’s is either tender or grand. He writes of “the little tendrils / of the young vines,” and, borrowing from Prospero, of the bees’ “little lives.” But he can also make you catch your breath at his grand style: “The high gate of the dark kingdom of Dis.”

Moving up the scale from phrase to line, how do the two contenders fare? At their best each can be ravishing – exploiting to perfection the resources of sound and rhythm of the chosen verse form. Ms. Lembke instructs us to plow up clods in spring and then let “dusty summer bake them under its powerful suns” – the “u” assonantal in four of the six stressed syllables); Mr. Ferry, “to turn the earth, and then / Let it lie waiting for summer’s heat to bake it” – with the “a” assonantal between “waiting” and “bake” and the alliterating l’s and t’s throughout. Here Mr. Ferry actually captures the alliterating l’s and t’s of the Latin: pulverulenta coquat maturis solibus aestas.

It is when one moves up to the verse paragraph, and the extended passage, that Mr. Ferry is clearly il miglior fabbro. For every line of resonant sixstress, Ms. Lembke gives us another close to mere prose, nothing one really wants to sing. Mr. Ferry’s individual pentameters, by contrast, are always euphonious, often singable, and sometimes magnificent – truly worthy of the best poet’s best poem. In the architecture of his verse paragraphs – the play given enjambments, the sustaining of sonorities – he fashions great wholes. We thrill to hear once more the great monologues of Shakespeare, the organ peal of Milton, Wordsworth’s pensiveness, Yeats’s “syntax of passionate speech,” or the Yankee cunning of the deliberately humble Frost.

Telling the story of Orpheus – a hero whose name begins with precisely the melancholy syllable ‘OR’ – Mr. Ferry writes:

Alone he ROAmed the HyperbORean
NORth…
until the enraged
Ciconian Bacchantes, in a nocturnal
Ritual ORgy, tORE his body to pieces.

Poe deemed the repetition of “OR/ORE/OAR” the most melancholy combination of vowel and consonant in the English language. Now let Milton’s “Lycidas” echo back:

What could the Muse her self that ORpheus bORE,
When by the rout that made the
hideous rOAR…
His gOARy visage down the stream
was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian
shORE.

Milton, thou art with us at this hour. Serpents slither through Mr. Ferry’s “Georgics” in the sinuous words and rhythms of Milton’s Satan. We hear the “Chorus” of “Henry V” when his Virgil starts up the last book with the story of the bees, “Which tells about a marvelous tiny scene, / And I’ll in order speak of magnanimous captains.” Like Yeats’s old men, in a stallion too old to do stud service “A great fire rages, and rages to no avail.”

How much is at stake in both translators’ choices is clear even in the humble matter of rendering place names. Out of a simple pentameter of three antique place names – “Acroceraunia, Rhodope, or Athos” – Mr. Ferry summons up the mighty learning of “Paradise Lost” – “Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond.” Ms. Lembke has made the opposite choice: “Mount Athos, a range in Thrace, or Caucasian peaks.” She tells us on the first page of her introduction, that she chose to use “the present-day names of some geographic features” “in an effort to bridge the gap between then and now.”

And sometimes her verse is the more riveting for it. On one occasion she brings into startling focus how the imperial concerns of Augustus, for whom ultimately Virgil wrote, may or may not be like our own. Hewing close to the Latin, Mr. Ferry has Virgil praise Augustus thus: “And now you have driven the cowardly Indian off.” Ms. Lembke’s Augustus “keeps the unwarlike Middle East from our Roman hills.”

The Middle East? Yes, the Middle East: the Latin “India” includes parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The great appeal of the “Georgics” – for Italy to end its divisions by turning victorious shows of force abroad into an occasion for renewing ancient values of its own land – is ripe to be pondered in our present historical moment. I would choose the David Ferry as the better poetic work, but in either of these two translations you will have as your guide a Virgil well worth the heeding.

Mr. Mullen teaches Latin and Greek at Bard College.