In the book-lined precincts of David and Anne Ferry's antique Greek revival home, you can easily picture Ralph Waldo Emerson, standing in the foyer with hat in hand. In 1842, he paid a call on the feminist critic Margaret Fuller, who owned the house at the time. But move to the rear veranda where poet and translator David Ferry settled into a chair for an interview, and the din of passing trucks and car horns yanks you back to the present.

Ferry's own life and work lately have been like that: the raw present and the deep past. He's a plain-spoken American, who looks like a professor as played by Henry Fonda. Yet his fame has spread lately for English translations of poets dead for thousands of years. Somehow, he has found ways to make those ancient voices fresh.

Ferry, who is 81, has published five books of poems (primarily his own, with some translations) between 1960 and 1999. In 1992, he published a ''verse rendering" -- he says it's not a translation -- of the 3,000-year-old Sumerian epic ''Gilgamesh." Then he turned to the classic Roman poets Horace and Virgil, with ''The Odes of Horace" and ''The Epistles of Horace," ''The Eclogues of Virgil" and, just published, ''The Georgics of Virgil."

Horace? Virgil? What do ancient Latin poets in togas have to do with us? They're so BC.

But that question is so 21st century. As recently as 1947, General George C. Marshall said in a speech that no one could ''think with full wisdom" about contemporary times without reading Thucydides's ''History of the Peloponnesian War." Richard Thomas, a classicist at Harvard whom Ferry consulted on the ''Georgics," said: ''The reason these authors were read by everybody until the beginning of the 20th century was that they were constantly applicable. Virgil confronts the same problems we encounter: in 'the Eclogues,' love; in 'the Georgics,' the brutality of toil, problems of empire and power, and the abuse of power."

Immersing himself in Horace and Virgil, Ferry tried to interpret them in English -- not hip and contemporary, but not falsely antique, either. As it came out in the poems, strange things happened, which you can't miss when you read his versions. The old poets weirdly appear, as if they were in the room with the reader, talking about recognizable human life. They seem like real guys.

The word ''georgic" refers to the rural life, and the four Georgics -- finished in 29 BC -- celebrate the world of farming and agriculture, and the human and animal life that depends on it: peasants and sheep and horses, vineyards and honeybees. But there's more than that. They also explore the brutal uncertainty of man's place in nature, with sudden storms washing away planted seeds and fire devastating olive groves. The storms include war and rapine, which destroy humble lives as surely as bad weather. Virgil is full of pity and admiration for resilience in the face of disaster. He could be writing about Darfur.

''It's about the basic, precariously valuable, fragile work that people do," Ferry said, ''and every passage in the poem has got that power of accomplishment and sometimes defeat." Though he is a part of an intellectual elite, Virgil notices and appreciates the lives of the poor: ''It's absolutely without condescension."

A life in poetry
Born in New Jersey in 1924, Ferry saw army service in World War II, went to Amherst College, then got his PhD at Harvard. Steeped in poetry, he wrote his first book about William Wordsworth. He married Anne Ferry, herself a critic and scholar, in 1958 (they have two children), and began teaching English literature at Wellesley College in 1952, where he stayed until he retired in 1989. Now he teaches part-time at Boston University.

Some literary lights grumble darkly about the low profile of poetry in our time, but Ferry said its status is no better nor worse than it ever was. Besides, he said, ''When you're teaching, you're teaching people for whom it's alive. So it's hard for me to experience the idea that it's marginalized, because for the people I spend my life talking to, it isn't."

Ferry's most recent book of his own poems was ''Of No Country I Know," in 1999, and a new collection is in progress. With his own poems to work on, why did he tackle these ancient works?

''Passivity," he answered. ''I got assigned."

Hooked, is more like it. Harvard classicist William Moran asked Ferry to translate a few sections of ''Gilgamesh," which was carved in cuneiform on stone tablets. ''I don't know Babylonian," Ferry said, and so he used previous word-for-word translations, consulted commentaries, and made English verses in iambic pentameter. He found it a fascinating experience and went on to do the whole epic of the hero Gilgamesh, and his grief at the death of his comrade Enkidu.

After that, he was asked to do a few odes by Quintus Horatius Flaccus -- Horace -- who lived from 65 BC to 8 AD. ''I'm not a classicist," Ferry said. ''My Latin gets worked up for each poem I'm working on. I'm sort of learning it as I go." He added, ''Because I fell in love with the odes, I fell in love with Horace." From Horace he moved to Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC) -- Virgil.

The attraction for the ''Georgics" was as personal as it was academic. ''Many of my own poems in recent years have had to do with people marginalized, on the brink, near the abyss, always vulnerable," Ferry said. ''In the view of the 'Georgics,' we're always near the abyss. And so it seemed to me to be a meaningful connection between what I am doing as a poet and what I'm learning as a translator." It's not a strictly aesthetic interest -- the Ferrys help run a weekly supper for the needy at the Church of the Advent on Boston's Beacon Hill.

Not that only the down-and-out face the abyss. Ferry's poem ''That Evening at Dinner," reveals a woman friend holding out with gumption against age and illness:

We got her seated in a chair that was placed

A little too far away from the nearest table,

At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat,

Exposed, her body the object of our attention --

The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg,

The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe . . .

In his poem, ''Ellery Street," in which struggling human beings in the neighborhood and a struggling snail in his yard are part of the same world, Ferry sounds much like Virgil, who writes in ''The Georgics," ''the horse that was once / Victorious now miserably sinks / As he tries to arise, forgetting what he had been . . . "

Ferry doesn't pretend to Virgil's stature; still, that resemblance of voices isn't just an accident -- it's part of what translation is. Translation makes something new, and the maker's mark is on it. Of that new thing, Ferry says, ''It's yours. Extreme as it is to say, in a certain way your own translation completely erases the poem you are translating, and replaces it with your own."

In the age of ''The Da Vinci Code" and ''Harry Potter," it would seem unlikely that a commercial publisher like Farrar Straus & Giroux would take a chance on Horace and Virgil, even less on ''Gilgamesh." But Farrar's president and publisher, Jonathan Galassi, himself a translator of Italian poetry, has no doubts.

'' 'Gilgamesh' and 'Horace' have sold very well," he said. ''There is a hunger for access to the sources of literature, and David Ferry's translations are extremely readable and modern in tone."

As with many poets, a conversation with Ferry has long pauses as he says, ''hmm," and looks away, when asked a question. He tries to find the right words.

Asked whether he had ever felt that Virgil or Horace were near as he tried to get inside their heads and words, he answered later, by e-mail: ''Yes, there's the whole insane comedy of your voice pretending to be Horace's or Virgil's. It's like dressing up and thinking you're Napoleon. Of course, you know you're not. But even if you don't get it right, maybe you learn something of their tones of voice, their wild vocal power, and that little that you learn makes you feel like you're on a wonderful ride."