Horace

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good translation of "The Odes and Epodes." Thanks.

Hmmmmm, I guess not.

Honestly I'm not familiar enough with Horace to recommend a good translation the way that I can with Herodotus, Homer, Virgil, etc. I've read snippets here and there, but nothing substantial.

Thanks Feicht. I'll probably just snag the Loeb, you can't go wrong with them.

Yeah, the translations can be a bit... "archaic".... sometimes, but at least you have the original language, so maybe just grab a dictionary too ;-D

There are so many, you can really just go by the translation style you find most accessible. There's the Penguin Horace in English that features all the major and a lot of minor translators. Then you could go from there. Horace's Odes and Epodes are like all lyric poetry, somewhat resistant to translation, so everyone has their own ideas. I tend to like the seventeenth and eighteenth century translators, such as Dryden and Philip Francis, which puts me in a minority. Many translators do not do the whole collection, just some of their favorites, and including especially the Ars Poetica which is not really lyric.

Pushkin translated Ode III.30 into Russian, with some adaptation for a northern readership. The fact that Pushkin's version has five stanzas instead of Horace's original four hints at a certain amount of embroidery. Vladimir Nabokov translated the translation into English. My favorite stanza:

"Throughout great Rus' my echoes will extend,
and all will name me, all tongues in her use:
the Slavs' proud heir, the Finn, the Kalmuk, friend
of steppes, the yet untamed Tanguz."

Ezra Pound's more literal version of the same lines of Horace:

"I shall be spoken where the wild flood Aufidus
Lashes, and Daunus ruled the parched farmland."

The current Loeb by Niall Rudd is a prose translation, helpful if you are battling your way through the Latin, but otherwise sort of a false impression. Of the standard contemporary versions, I prefer the Oxford World Classics by David West, which is pretty good, and not the Penguin by W. G. Sheperd which is prosy, viscous, and monotonous. I like the old Penguin Odes by James Michie but some don't.

Thanks so much, Anthony. That is a lot of helpful information. Are the Dryden and Francis translations difficult to find? I suppose I'll check B&N and/or Amazon to see.

Dryden didn't translate all the Odes, and I think his translations are usually found in collected editions of his poetry. The Francis translation was complete, and I think there were several editions of it, but it was a long time ago. You generally see his versions now in anthologies. I don't know if there are any reprint editions at a reasonable price. But look on the booksellers, including Abe or Alibris. A lot of good translators have translated Horace, but very few have translated him complete. Francis was the standard for the eighteenth century, Conington for the nineteenth.

I have two bilingual verse translations that are each interesting in their own way. One is The Odes of Horace translated by David Ferry. The other is Horace: The Odes edited by McClatchy, which is a collection of translations of individual verses by contemporary poets.

I don't read Latin, so I can't speak to how faithful they are to the original, but both are a pleasure to read in themselves.

(edited the typo on David Ferry's name)

The McClatchy anthology is new to me. I just checked it out on Amazon, it looks really attractive. So I put it on my wishlist. The translators seem to be a who's who of American poets from the boomer generation. A lot of people like David Ferry's version. It doesn't grab me but it is accurate and straightforward. If you're looking for a facing-page version with a fairly literal but poetic translation, it's a better bet than Loeb IMO. But I like Ferry's version of Gilgamesh.

BTW Ferry's wife, the late Anne Ferry, was a fine writer on her own account, and a first-rate teacher. She published a number of works of literary history and criticism, such as Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies, on the effect of anthologization on poems and vice versa. She approached literature with a lot of common sense, something that was not to be taken for granted in late twentieth-century criticism.

Also BTW, investigation reveals that there are a number of reasonably priced editions of the Francis translations of Horace, some used, others Print on Demand. Abe Books has quite a few available, I didn't check anywhere else. I do like the ones I have read, but many people today do not feel comfortable with rhyme and meter and Augustan diction.

I think you all have given me a good enough reason to justify getting all of these translations!

Forge ahead!