by Horace
a dedicated poet.
(IV.9.25–8)
Now that Horace is more Augustus’ man and his persona is a public one, many of us will agree with Wilkinson (p. 86) that there is some ‘blunting of sensibility. The poet who had shown such fine imaginative sympathy for the captive barbarian boy and girl in the ode Icci beatis (I.29) now mentions the courage of the Rhaetians fighting in defence of their freedom merely as enhancing the prowess of the young Tiberius’:
a fine sight in martial combat
for the chaos he made in havocking
those resolved to die unconquered…
(IV. 14.17–19)
But we have not lost the Horace we knew. The seventh ode looks back to the fourth in the first book, written in similar (Archilochian) metre and on the same theme – the return of spring and the reminder in the recurring seasons that for man there is no return – and A. E. Housman was not alone in thinking this Horace’s most beautiful poem. Spring when ‘meadows no longer are frozen, nor do/the rivers roar, turgid with winter’s snow’ (IV. 12) 12 also prompts the invitation to Vergilius to
Set aside delay and thought of gain
and mindful of darkness burning mix
brief sottishness with wisdom while you many:
it is sweet to play the clown upon occasion.
And if Phyllis, invited in IV. 11 to celebrate Maecenas’ birthday in simple domestic revels, is the ‘last of my loves’ and recalls all the Greek-named girls who have gone before, the opening poem, in which the middle-aged poet calls on Venus for mercy now that desire has awakened in him ‘after so long a truce’, is one of Horace’s most poignant – not for the Ligurinus who is the cause of the awakening (the boy of the lightweight IV. 10), but for the bleak statement:
I am not as I was in the reign
of my dear Cinara…
Cinara is mentioned twice in the Epistles, each time with regret for departed youth. In Epistles 1.7.25–8
… you’ll have to restore
the strong lungs and the black hair thick on my forehead,
the charmofwords, thewell-manneredlaughter, and thesadlaments
uttered, with glass in hand, when naughty Cinara left me.
Epistles 1.14.32–5 is in the same strain:
the man who went in for fine togas and sleek hair,
who charmed, as you know, the greedy Cinara without a present,
and would drink the clear Falernian wine from midday on,
is content with a simple meal and a doze on the grass by the river.
So she was rapax – greedy for gifts, though she was willing to take Horace empty-handed; she was proterva – mischievous, naughty; she left him – and she died young. In Odes IV. 13 we are told that she had a happy successor – Lyce, now old and wrinkled in answer to Horace’s prayer:
To Cinara
the Fates allowed few years,
but Lyce shall be long
preserved, an agéd crow,
that burning young men may study
(not without much laughter)
the torch collapsed in ashes.
This is a cruel poem, but its cruelty is not the cold-blooded, gloating artifice of Epodes 8 and 12; it barely conceals the poet’s pain. Cinara’s is one name which suggests that Horace’s emotions were not limited to the close friendships he cultivated with men, and that there could be an exception to his general attitude to the young women of his poems – kindly, amused and playful, rather than seriously involved.
There is no word from Horace after this, though he lived for some five years. The Suetonian Life says only that Maecenas died in 8 B.C., asking Augustus to remember Horace ‘as you will myself’, and that shortly afterwards, on 27 November in the same year, Horace died at the age of not quite fifty-seven. He was too frail to sign a will but indicated Augustus as his heir, and was buried next to Maecenas on the Esquiline Hill.
About a hundred years later Quintilian published his Institutio Oratoria, Book X of which is his famous survey of Greek and Roman literature. What he wrote about Horace’s lyric poetry shows that the poet’s confidence in his lasting fame had not been misplaced.
Horace is almost the only one of our lyric poets who is worth reading: for sometimes he rises to great heights; he is full of grace and charm; and he shows variety in his figures of speech and an audacity in his choice of words which is very happily successful.13
Juvenal writing at much the same time confirmed that Horace also enjoyed the doubtful honour of being a school textbook:
… all those guttering lanterns – one to each pupil
so that every Virgil and Horace is grimed with lampblack
from cover to cover.14
This was the future Horace had predicted in Epistles I.20 for his little book so eager to be off into the world, and it was repeated in the schools set up by Charlemagne. Through the Middle Ages texts were copied and recopied in the Benedictine monasteries, and from the Renaissance onwards Horace was an important humanist influence on Western Europe, with his special admirers in Petrarch, Marvell, Herrick and Collins, and his philosophy of life (understandably unpopular with the Church) was perhaps best appreciated in the ‘enlightened’ eighteenth century.15 Some of his Odes have been translated more than any other classical poems; possibly the changing moods of these short lyrics have been an invitation to poets and scholars to try to capture the essence of what has a special appeal for them. One thinks at once of A. E. Housman’s translation of Odes IV.7 (Diffugere nives), the intimations of mortality which return with the spring,16 or of Milton’s ‘What slender youth bedew’d with liquid odours’ (his version of I.5, ‘Rendered almost word for word without Rhyme according to the Latin Measure, as near as the language will permit’). Translations of this particular ode were assembled by Sir Ronald Storrs and published in 1950 under the title Ad Pyrrham. They are a selection from the 45 versions which he had collected in twenty-six languages. And u to 1936 there had been over a hundred translations into English of the complete Odes.17 Among their authors there have been names justly admired for their achievement in their day: Philip Francis (1743), Christopher Smart (1756), John Conington (1863), Lord Lytton (1869), Sir Edward Marsh (1941).
W. G. Shepherd is therefore conscious that he comes at the end of a long line and takes on the responsibility of presenting Horace for our times. It may seem that his responsibility is the greater because most of his readers will be less steeped in Horace’s Latin than their predecessors, whose education was more severely classical. I see this as his advantage: they will not have been worn down, as Byron was at Harrow, by the sheer difficulty of construin the curiosa felicitas.
Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,
Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse:
Although no deeper Moralist rehearse
Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art,
Nor living Satirist the conscience pierce,
Awakening without wounding the touch’d heart,
Yet fare thee well – upon Soracte’s ridge we part.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, lxxvii
This is a sad admission from one who in maturity showed much of Horace’s sanity and urbanity and his freedom from cant and self-deception. But any honest lover of Horace will admit to having had to struggle with his Latin at some time, while others, like Byron, have never really loved his lyric poetry enough to return to it, simply because the initial effort required of them to read it in all the elaboration of an inflected language has seemed too great.
… I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as
Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon…18
A fresh translation like this one acts as a kind of liberation, a release into meeting the demands that Horace makes of us as a poet.
For the Latinist, reading without prejudice, and with Horace’s own words at the back of his mind, there are special delights and surprises: to find, for instance, the pruning metaphor retained in Odes I. 11, the rare (for Horace) usage of a string of nouns and epithets so neatly presented in the opening lines of III. 16, the delicate humour of III. 10. W. G. Shepherd’s further great advantage is that he is himself a poet, with a poet’s perception and gift of words harvested from the marvellous resources of the English language. Through his medium I think we can rediscover Horace and come nearer to understanding his complexity. For myself, I have been reading Horace for three quarters of a longish life, never exhausting what he has to offer, and shall continue to read him; and I have been given more than I dared to hope for in this new translation.
BETTY RADICE
Highgate, 1981
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts and Editions
C. E. Bennet, Horace: Odes and Epodes (Loeb text and translation), Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1924
R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace: Odes. Book I, Oxford, 1970; Book II, Oxford, 1978
T. E. Page, The Odes of Horace, London, 1883
J. C. Rolfe, Suetonius: Lives of the Poets (Loeb), Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1970
E. C. Wickham, Q. Horati Flacci Opera, revised H. W. Garrod (O.C.T.), Oxford, 1912
E. C. Wickham, The Works of Horace: Vol. I. The Odes, Carmen Saeculare and Epodes, Oxford, 1877
Gordon Williams, The Third Book of Horace’s Odes, Oxford, 1969
Books on Horace
Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace, Yale, Newhaven, 1962
C. D. N. Costa, ed., Horace, London, 1973
Eduard Fraenkel, Horace, Oxford, 1957
Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition, Oxford, 1949
Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape, London, 1957
Giuseppe Lugli, La Villa d’Orazio nella valle del Licenza, Rome, 1930
R. M. Ogilvie, Latin and Greek, London, 1964
Kenneth Quinn, Latin Explorations, London, 1963
Niall Rudd, Horace: Satires and Epistles (with Persius: Satires), Harmonds worth 1973 1979
Niall Rudd, Lines of Enquiry, Cambridge, 1976
W. Y. Sellar, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Horace and the Elegiac Poets, Oxford, 2nd edn. 1899
Ronald Storrs, Ad Pyrrham, Oxford, 1959
J. P. Sullivan, ed., Critical Essays in Roman Literature: Elegy and Lyric London 1962
David West, Reading Horace, Edinburgh, 1967
L. P. Wilkinson, Horace and his Lyric Poetry, Cambridge, 1945, 1968
Gordon Williams, Horace (New Surveys in the Classics No.6), Oxford, 1972
Gordon Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry, Oxford, 1968
A. J. Woodman and David West, Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, Cambridge, 1975
TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
An essential part of the celebrated ‘lapidary’ quality of Horace’s style in the Odes is the perfected craftsmanship with which the Latin vocabulary, grammar and syntax are fitted into complex metres adopted or adapted from Greek lyric poetry. Classical metres are of course quantitative, and as such cannot, according to my ear, be employed in English verse: long and short resolve themselves into stressed and unstressed syllables, and the resultant pattern has a narcotic or humorous effect, or else is merely chaotic.
An obvious alternative is to represent Horace’s metric by the use of regular English (i.e. stress) metres. However, if he follows this course, the translator ‘translates’, as regards metre, only the element of regularity, since stress (in the context of metre, as opposed to speech rhythm) plays no part in Classical poetics. Nor does rhyme.
My own method has been to sacrifice the residual common denominator of regularity in order to write the sort of verse I am best at. I will not describe this as ‘free’, since the term implies freedom from formal discipline, and I have done what I can to achieve rhythmic cogency, which involves careful control of the number and placing of stressed and unstressed syllables – indeed, some lines derive their motor impulse from approximation to iambic and/or anapaestic and/or dactylic stress-metres.
The metres of the Epodes are in the main straightforward iambics: accordingly, the rhythms of my translations tend to be cruder than for the Odes.
Since my aim has been to make each English poem live now, why the archaisms – the occasional Shakespearean or Miltonic echo, the touches of ‘Augustan’ diction, etc.? These features ‘felt right’ throughout the period when I was making these translations (1975 – 81), and I still approve them. Why? I cannot say for sure, but I can provide a rationale after the event, which I find plausible – which accords, that is, with my conscious attitudes to the translation of Horace.
I feel at once both very close to and very distant from Horace. The closeness is experienced in terms of the patent aesthetic excellence of his work, and the abundant humanity of the personae he assumes (or aspects of himself he reveals) therein. The feeling of distance is maintained by Horace’s continual reminders that his world was (human nature excepted) so profoundly different from ours: he lived – this is the essential point – so very long ago. Naïve perception of time merges into an awed awareness of duration; of the perdurable vitality and sophistication of Horace’s art; of the fact that as a translator of this poet I have across the centuries so many, and in many cases such illustrious, predecessors. Perhaps the archaisms in these versions register, and seek to remind the reader of, that long perspective.
The poems that follow are translations from the Oxford Classical Texts edition, except that I have preferred the following variant readings. EPODES: 2.25 ripis for rivis; 5.3 et for aut, 87 maga non for magnum; 9.17 hoc for hunc; 16.15 quod for quid 17.81 exitum for exitus. ODES: I.7.17 perpetuos for perpetuo; I.8.2 oro for vere; I.12.41 intonsis for incomptis; I.15.20 crines for cultus; I.25.2 ictibus for iactibus, 20 Euro for Hebro; 1.27.19 laboras in for laborabas; 1.31.9 Calena for Calenam, 10 ut for et, 18 et for at; I.32.15 medicumque for mihi cumque; I.38.6 cura for curo; II.13.38 laborum for laborem; III.3.12 bibet for bibit, 54 tangat for tanget; III.4.9 avio for Apulo, 38 addidit for abdidit; III.14.11 non for iam; III.24.4 publicum for Apulicum; III.26.7 securesque for et arcus; IV.2.49 tuque for terque; IV.4.17 Raetis for Raeti; IV.9.31 silebo for sileri; IV.10.5 Ligurine for Ligurinum.
Working on this project has been an engrossing and profoundly satisfying task: it has also involved me in some of the hardest work I have ever undertaken, so the interest shown by friends and correspondents has helped me greatly. I thank the following people, who have given encouragement and/or criticism and/or have accepted poems for publication or broadcasting: my wife Margaret, Michael Benson, Professor C. O. Brink, William Cookson, Dick Davis, Elsie Durrans, Tony Greaves, Peter Jay, Tom Lowenstein, Donald McFarlan, J. H. Prynne, Michael Schmidt, C. H. Sisson, Fraser Steel, Alison Wade, John Welch and Peter Whigham.
Natural justice requires that I make separate mention of Betty Radice. She provided me with comments covering draft versions of all the poems in this book: in many cases her scholarship and acute feeling for language proved extremely helpful. Also, I am most grateful for her assistance with the notes and glossary.
W. G. SHEPHERD
Southgate, 1981
EPODES
1
Ibis Liburnis
You advance our light Liburnian galleys
‘gainst towering bulwarks, friend Maecenas,
prepared yourself to undergo
all Caesar’s perils. But what of us
whose life, if you survive,
is joy; if not, a burden?
Shall we pursue a docile ease
not sweet with you away,
or endure your rigours with the hearts
&
nbsp; 10
of not unmanly men? We shall
endure, and over the Alpine peaks
or uninhabitable Caucasus
or far as the farthest bays of the West
shall follow with fortitude. I am not
warlike and I lack resolve, so how,
you ask, can my endeavours aid yours?
Your comrades know the less,
as those away the greater, fear –
the broody bird dreads gliding serpents
20
most for the featherless chicks
she has left, though her presence
could bring them no help. This and every
war should be willingly fought
in hope of your approbation –
not that more bullocks may strain
forward yoked to my ploughs;
nor that before the parching
Dog-Days come my herds may change
Calabrian for Lucanian grazing;
30
nor in hope of a spick and span villa
abutting on lofty Tusculum’s Circean walls.
Your favour has enriched me enough
and more: I will not lay up wealth
to bury in the earth like miserly Chremes
or squander like some feckless heir.
2
