Horace

Just to be clear, I give Horace all the stars in the internet. I give David Ferry two of them.

Horace's poems are masterpieces of concision, obliquity, delay, and obfuscation. David Ferry's version of Horace is, well, prolix, acute, direct, and transparent. In his introduction he more or less says that his unit of translation is the poem as a whole, which is a perfectly defenseable position. Literal translations are terrible, translations of poems should really themselves be poems. The show more problem here is that Ferry and I disagree so strongly on what a poem should actually be. His ideal seems to be something that is very slightly metrical, but mostly conversational in tone.

I read his translations of Virgil's Eclogues many years ago and liked it okay, and I suspect his style is much better suited to long poems of that kind: what matters in them is what is being said as much as how it is written. But for Horace's odes, what is being said is almost entirely banal, and it is being said in an extraordinary, beautiful, fascinating way. Ferry loses all of that.

Is there a good, modernist translation of Horace out there, akin to Fagles' Oresteia? I hope to read one before I die. show less

With Horace, I’ve found yet another reason to learn Latin. There’s always a loss when you read a text in translation. Simply consider that ugly anglicisation Horace. As if Horatius isn’t a perfectly decent Roman name.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus had studied in Athens at the Academy founded by Plato where he also learned to appreciate the Greek lyrical poetry (Pindar, Sappho, Alcaeus) that later strongly inspired his own writings. Although he fought as a military tribune on the losing side show more at Philippi, he later supported Augustus, at least in writing. His Carmen Saeculare (also included in this book) was commissioned by Augustus in 17 BCE.
Horace later self-deprecatingly downplayed his role in the war – likely a wise thing to do all things considered. But it is under any circumstance as a great poet that he was celebrated, both in his own time and ever since. - I started reading this book containing his Odes last summer, and for some reason I left it hibernating all through the winter. It just might be that it should be read in the summer:

"The garlanded cupbearer waiting, and garlanded I,
Here in the shade of the arbour, drinking my wine." (i.38)

Personally I am inclined to forgo the garland, but life on Horace's Sabine farm is otherwise much to my liking – as is his praise of the simple living and the simple pleasures. But he is painfully aware of the ways things are changing:

"It won’t be long before the little farms
Will be crowded out of being by the great
Estates of these latter days with their enormous
Fish ponds bigger than Lake Lucrinus is.
(...)
It wasn’t like this at all in Cato’s time
Or Romulus's time. Our fathers' ways
Were not these ways. Nobody minded then

That this holding was nothing more than a little farm.
They thought more then about the common good."
... (ii.15)

He can also be, and indeed he often is, more humorous - here with a morbid twist in an ode dedicated to a tree on his estate:

...
"That man probably strangled his own father;
His hearth is probably stained with the blood of a houseguest
He murdered at midnight; he’s probably an expert at poison
Or any other crime you choose to name --

That man who planted you you wretched rotten
Falling tree come down on your master’s head."
... (ii.13)

His sense of humor is often present in the odes to faithless lovers or the banter between lovers - or in the praise of wine. But he always returns to the joys of simple rural life. It was Horace’s patron Maecenas who gave him the villa outside Rome - and the first three books of Odes were dedicated to him, and so is the particular ode this quote is taken from:

...
"The more the money grows the more the greed
Grows too; also the anxiety of greed.

Maecenas, glory of simple knighthood, this
Is the reason I myself was always afraid

Of too much ambition and of rising too high.
The more a man can do without, the more

The gods will do for him. So, empty-handed,
Deserting the camp of the rich, I seek the camp

Of those who ask for little, and thus I am
A more impressive master of all the wealth

I happily have contempt for than if I
Were that poor thing belittled by his riches,

Hiding away in his storehouse everything garnered
From the rich Apulian fields his peasants till.

The splendid lord of the riches of Africa
Mistakenly thinks he's better off than I,

With my little farm whose crops I'm certain of,
And my quiet little stream of pure brook water."
... (iii.16)

There is a subtlety in Horace that I find really intriguing, and I liked Ferry’s translations a lot - the only exceptions were when he used some very obvious anachronisms, but they were so few and far between that it really didn’t matter all that much. I haven’t read any other translations, but as can also be judged from the above quotes, this translation is quite an accomplishment. It is also great to have the Latin version on on the facing page – and it makes it all the more striking how much more wordy the English language is in comparison to the simple, concise and elegant Latin. show less

Passei a tarde estudando essa Arte Poética do Horácio porque um livro desses a gente não lê, estuda. Explico. A tradução e as notas do sempre magnânimo Guilherme Gontijo Flores é sempre um passo à frente na chamada leitura apenas por prazer. O tradutor é tão amplamente qualificado que até suas notas de rodapé nos auxiliam de maneira a melhor sorver o texto poético e, não só, ampliam o nosso conhecimento da interpretação, das referências, do aspecto formal, tanto que me show more parece pouco elogiar apenas como uma grande edição essa da Autêntica. Até faz me lamentar ter sofrido tanto nas aulas de latim da minha graduação na UEL. show less

I found this book on the floor of a young relative's car. Serendipitously, 'A New Ganymede' in David Malouf's Typewriter Music is a version of ode 3:20, and the way Professor Williams presented 3:20 here was reader-friendly, so I decided to read the unfortunately pedagogical-looking book from cover to cover. Initially, the pleasures of reading it were mostly in the same category as the joys of really hard cryptic crosswords, but as my Latin began to revive I found myself engaging, enjoying show more the light the poems cast on my experience of the world. (Easy, for example, to see George W Bush and the new imperium as grotesque parody of Caesar Augustus and his imperium.) It strikes me that even though it does mean something to call Latin a dead language, it's not dead the way a tree or a bandicoot is dead: it's still full of life in these poems. A language isn't really dead until no one's left alive who can speak it or read it. Soon after I wrote that last sentence I read the 30th and last ode in the book, and found my thoughts echoed there:

Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei
vitabit Libitinam.

In English:

Not all of me will die and a large part of me
will avoid the goddess of funerals.

He was right. Horace is dead and so is everyone who mourned his loss, but we can still engage with his language, the traces left by his mind spark living minds down fresh paths. show less