First Book (Preference given to maintaining, as much as possible, line-to-ine faithfulness)
1 I am inspired and directed to sing of changes of
2 bodies into others completely different. O gods, you, yourselves
3 presided over them: grant me then your favour to guide my poem
4 in the disclosure of the world from its origin to my present day.
5 Before the sea, the earth, and the heavens that cover them all existed,
6 the universe had one unique and indistinct aspect,
7 which was called Chaos; a crude and jumbled mass of atoms,
8 nothing else than a big inert load amassed together in the same place,
9 badly bonded with discordant seeds of nature. (Review this line)
10 Titan (1-the Sun) was still not around to shine its light on the world,
11 nor was Phoebe (2-the Moon) around with its crescent horns,
12 nor the earth was yet suspended in the sky
13 that surrounds it; nor had yet the long arms of
14 Amphitrite (3-the Sea) extended its embrace to all coastlines;
15 and though the earth, the sea and the air were already there,
16 the earth didn't have consistency, the sea could not be sailed,
17 the air didn't have light: nothing had its form defined,
18 the conflict was continuous because in a single body,
19 contended the heat against the cold, the humid against the dry,
20 the soft against the hard and the light against the heavy.
Notes:
(1) In Greek mythology, there was an older set of gods referred to as Titan gods. They were bigoted by Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Cronus was one of those Titan gods and he begat Zeus, Jupiter in Latin, who eventually rebelled against his father, defeated the Titans and begat the Olympian gods, Mars, Venus, Apollo, Artemis etc. In this context, therefore, it is used as a metaphor for the Sun.
(2) Phoebe, also called Selene, was a Titaness and begat Leto, the mother of Jupiter. Phoebe in Greek means "the bright one" hence its metaphor for the Moon.
(3) Amphitrite (also spelled Amphitricha) was a sea goddess, wife of Neptune the sea god and mother of Triton. Here is it used metaphorically to mean that the seas, the oceans, had not yet covered all the shorelines of the world.