Wholesome in life, of sin completely free:
that man needs no Moorish spears nor bow
nor quiver pregnant with its poisoned
arrows, Fuscus,
even if he’s about to journey through
scorching Sidra, or the inhospitable
Caucasus, or regions that the fabled Jhelum laps.
For instance: a wolf—while in the Sabine woods
I once hymned my Lalagê and wandered, beyond
my usual bounds, free of all cares, unarmed—
fled from me;
a monstrosity such as neither warlike
Apulia rears among her wide oak forests,
nor Juba’s land, the arid wet-nurse of lions, breeds.
Place me in benumbed plains where not
a single tree is refreshed by summer’s breeze,
that region of the world which mists and harsh Heaven oppress;
place me beneath the path of a too-close
sun, in a land denied to human habitation:
still I’ll love my sweetly laughing Lalagê, sweetly talking.
The poem begins as if it’s going to celebrate a certain kind of Roman virtue and gravitas. (It was, indeed, often set to music and performed at funerals in Germany and Scandinavia during the nineteenth century.) And yet a shift occurs at the beginning of the third stanza, which purports to give an example of the principle, articulated in the first two, that the honest man needs no armor but his goodness. With a flourish so grand that it suggests we are not to take this business about virtue all that seriously, Horace posits himself as the exemplar of the heroism he lauds in the opening, all because (another letdown) a wolf once avoided him in a forest.
And just what (another shift) was he doing in the forest, anyway? Singing ditties about his darling if perhaps airheaded girlfriend (her Greek name, Lalagê, is derived from the verb “to chatter”). The final pair of stanzas make us realize that the poem is not, after all, about purity and innocence but rather about desire and poetry. For it is Horace’s singing and his loving that will endure, however adverse the conditions; and it occurs to you to wonder whether those conditions might not, after all, include a dour cultural emphasis on wholesomeness and purity.
The sudden swerve in Horace’s train of thought, so elegantly limned by his particular technique, can be found in a vast range of the odes on many subjects, both patently political and quietly personal. The penultimate poem of Book I, on Octavian’s triumph over Cleopatra, famously begins with a call for the celebratory drinking and foot-stomping to mark the demise of the “demented queen” (Nunc est bibendum, “Now let us drink”), but segues to an unsettling simile that compares the fleeing queen at Actium to a “gentle dove” pursued by a hawk—which is to say, Augustus—and then ends, somewhat disorientingly, with a moving hommage to the “fierce” dignity of her desire to “die more nobly,” “not to be dragged, some lowly woman, in another’s proud triumph.”
Such shifts are paralleled by another technique: sudden narrowings in focus from the general to the concrete, which can also subvert the poem’s ostensible meaning. In the Mount Soracte ode, Horace’s blithe admonishment to a young friend to enjoy love while he can takes a sudden, ferocious force from that closing evocation of the laughter of a young girl flirting in some piazza with a boy who’s just snatched a love token from her finger. That flirtation was a plausible enough prospect for Horace’s friend, but is, you realize, only a memory now for Horace himself. (And the loaded if taut manner in which the poet describes the girl’s finger—male pertinaci, “badly resisting”—gives some sense of the economy of expression that further characterizes his “lapidary” diction.)
So too the Regulus ode, which so tortured Kipling’s schoolboy, and which ends with a description of the dutiful soldier going off to suffer in war—an action the poet decides, almost as an afterthought, to compare to a man going off to a weekend in the country. In the context of what has preceded it, the sudden invocation of peacetime pleasures is shattering. The progressions and shifts of the poet’s thought, as it moves through his meticulously fitted verses, is as unpredictable as the progress of any human experience, or human life, and it is this uncertainty that gives the poems, like the lives, their evanescent tone and fragile beauty.
All this is done with such great authority, and with such wit and panache—each of the first nine odes of Book I, the so-called “Parade odes,” is in a different Greek meter; it’s the poetic equivalent of the compulsories in a sporting event, designed to show you that he’s up to all the technical challenges—that it’s easy to forget that nobody had ever done it before. But it made a great posterity possible. That we find it perfectly natural that a poet’s project might be to express, in a wide variety of personas, something at once weighty and delicate in simple-looking four-line stanzas—to be formally structured but intellectually and emotionally varied, to be discursive and deeply poetic at the same time about a wide variety of subjects, many of them ostensibly everyday rather than ecstatic—is Horace’s legacy to Western poetry.
The fiercely disciplined reasonableness of Horace’s vision, his insistence on a poetic technique as rigorously thought out and meticulously achieved as the happiness the poems themselves endorse, have long endeared him to other poets more, perhaps, than to the reading public at large. Auden had already put his finger on Horace’s appeal in his own, very Horatian ode about the modern “Horatians,” sensible but deeply feeling people who know that they
… are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs
like Regulus, of no account. We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective.
The word “polish” in the contemporary poem suggests the germ of Horace’s appeal, particularly to poets who, as J.D. McClatchy points out in the introduction to Horace, The Odes, his 2002 collection of verse renderings of the Odes by thirty-five well-known poets, have “put aside their singing robes, once they think of themselves as craftsmen rather than as bards, once they attend the world as a surgery and not a party.” It is, indeed, Horace’s supreme craftsmanship that has always made him at once “wholly untranslatable,” as Brooks Otis declared (“like making ropes out of sand,” Harold Mattingly once harrumphed in a book about Roman civilization), and irresistible to centuries of poets, particularly poets in English, from Dryden and Pope to Housman and (to cite the most recent of a spate of new translations of the Odes) David Ferry, whose much-praised translation appeared in 1997.
It is perhaps inevitable that every new translation of a great classic, like every new production of a canonical opera, needs some kind of self-justificatory new “take” on the work: in Sidney Alexander’s meticulous 1999 translation of the Odes, for instance, it was that he was giving us Horace as “the quintessential Italian.” In the introduction to his volume, McClatchy announces the distinguishing feature of the collection: “Never before,” he writes, “have the leading poets of the day assembled specifically to translate all the odes.” He goes on to declare that
the variety of tone to be heard in these translations matches the mercurial shifts in mood and response the Latin poems themselves exhibit. The pairings of poem and translator were deliberate, and made in the hope of creating interesting juxtapositions. To have an American poet laureate write about political patronage, to have a woman poet write about seduction, an old poet write about the vagaries of age, a Southern poet about the blandishments of the countryside, a gay poet about the strategies of “degeneracy”… these are part of the editorial plot for this new book.
These Odes thus stand alongside recent collections of translations of a given classic, parts of which are distributed among different contemporary poets: for instance, Daniel Halpern’s Dante’s Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets or Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun’s A
fter Ovid: New Metamorphoses.
And yet while you admire McClatchy’s impulse to create interesting textures between poet and translator, some of that “editorial plot” sounds a little gimmicky to me. Surely it’s enough to want to see how a group of excellent contemporary poets handle Horace, without having to suggest, inter alia, that southerners know more about countrysides than (say) midwesterners or New Englanders do, that women know more about seduction than men, or that gay men are more intimate with “degeneracy” (scare quotes or no) than are others. For my part, I’d be happy with a gay translator who knew Latin as well as he presumably knew degeneracy: Mark Doty, a poet I much admire, seems to think that Horace was (as he says in III.14) a young man during the consulship of someone called “Planco,” probably because the words consule Planco appear in Horace’s text; but that’s just because Planco is the ablative form of Plancus, the consul’s actual name. Such glitches would have been easy enough to correct, had the editorial focus been on Romans rather than Americans.
There are, to be sure, many deep pleasures to be had from individual translations you find here. Not least is that of an older poet, who has given to the incomparable Ligurinus ode, which begins with a weary rejection of love but ends in an image of heartbreaking erotic turmoil, just the right shift from bantering faux-Sappho (“So it’s war again, Venus, / after all this time?”) to the plaintive and poignant yearning of the poem’s ending. In these last lines, the translator nicely replicates, with the long and short i’s, and with the m’s of his “Then why, Ligurinus, why / do my eyes sometimes fill, even spill over?,” both the assonant repetitions and yearning alliterative m’s and n’s of the Latin sed cur heu, Ligurine, cur / manat rare meas lacrima per genas? I doubt that such felicities are due simply to the fact that Richard Howard, the translator of this “old age” poem, was born in 1929.
Similarly effective is the contribution of John Hollander, who in all of his translations, including an excellent rendering of the Soracte ode, displays a fine sensitivity in matters of enjambment, both between lines and between stanzas—always of vital importance in this poet, in whom sequences of thought are everything. Dick Davis’s Carmen saeculare, which I quoted at the beginning of this essay, is appropriately dignified and yet manages, by means of rhymes on alternate lines, to sound like a song, which is precisely what it is. And I liked the elegant way in which Rosanna Warren handles the unenviable assignment of IV.7, Diffugere nives, “The snows are fled away,” the poem that A.E. Housman famously considered to be the most beautiful in ancient literature and which he himself memorably translated in a way that managed to sound both like Horace and like himself (“The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws / And grasses in the mead renew their birth …”). Warren has managed to find new growth herself in these lines, unpacking the Latin to create fresh but not strained effects in English that make the poem sound, indeed, like poetry: “All gone, the snow: grass throngs back to the fields, / the trees grow out new hair …”
So McClatchy’s Horace has grown out some lovely new hair in which we can all luxuriate. Yet as a representation of the Odes as a whole (which, with its facing Latin pages, it is impossible not to take it as, whatever the editor’s demurs), the new collection has deep problems, for precisely the reasons the editor proffers in order to authorize the new effort: that Horace’s “mercurial shifts in mood and response” justify the wildly different tones and degrees of formality, from free verse to rhymed couplets, on offer here.
It seems to me that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Horace’s work. Horace’s poetic identity lies precisely in the meticulous and masterly way he uses form, form above all, to solve both stylistic and intellectual problems: if he writes a poem in a stanzaic meter, it’s because he wants you to feel the delicate rhythm of pausing and moving, pausing and moving, en route to the heart-stopping climax; if he casts it as a series of dense lines (as he does in the envoi to the first three books, III.30, Exegi monumentum, “I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze”), it’s because he wants you to feel the weight, the monumentality. Whatever his mercurial mood shifts, his absolute control and forceful personality give the poems a profound and unmistakable unity.
Indeed, each ode within the larger groupings (the individual books, and all the books taken together) is arranged with as much “mosaic” precision as are individual words within individual odes. To cite just one example: odes II.2–11 are arranged in pairs of poems treating (roughly) the same subject, one poem in skipping Sapphics, the other in more weighty Alcaics. Part of the pleasure this sequence affords is the undulating shifts in tonality and rhythm between, first, the poems within each pair, and then among the pairs themselves.
Of this Horace, McClatchy’s collection can give you no impression whatever. The multiple-translator approach works better for epic, whose narrative momentum helps to thread discrete cantos or books, themselves often fairly weighty and substantial, together; the continuities among lyric poems, carefully organized by their creator into a collection, are more fragile. (A device that better suits both the original work and its contemporary admirers is the one employed in R. Storrs’s 1959 Oxford University Press collection of 144 translations of a single ode, I.5: Ad Pyrrham: A Polyglot Collection of Translations of Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha, a work that actually illuminates the ancient original while showing the variety of choices available to translators.)
And of course some of the approaches on display here work less well than others. Rachel Hadas’s use of singsong rhyming couplets in the Regulus ode give it a fatally Gunga Dinish ring; Carl Phillips’s decision to cast I.32, a crucial poem that quite self-consciously concerns Horace’s formal achievement (“give me a Roman song, / my lyre, though Greek yourself”) in loose-limbed free verse that trickles down the page makes it, in a way, far too easy—it deprives you of an essential component of the experience of reading Horatian verse, that of an aesthetic and emotional effect achieved by means of a serious intellectual effort. Horace is hard in Latin, and he should be hard in English. Without the formal rigor, the odes are reduced to little more than their apparent content, which is of course much less than what they’re really “about.”
So the individual talents of translators are on show here at the expense of Horace himself. You wonder, indeed, just who it is this collection is meant to serve. Certainly it will be of little use to those interested in ancient, as opposed to modern, poets: a major and distressing omission is the utter lack of notes of any kind. As nice as it is to think that the average intelligent reader will be able to make sense of (I have opened the collection to a random page) references to Gyges, Peleus, Magnessian Hippolyte, Oricum, and Chloë, you suspect this is a touch optimistic. The importance of the poems’ specific references isn’t, as the current collection might suggest (one translation leaves out the proper names altogether, substituting blanks), pedantic: when Horace chides Venus for starting up old battles again in the Ligurinus poem, for instance, it’s useful to know that Augustus claimed descent from that untrustworthy deity, and hence that the poem thus slyly questions both the erotic and political compulsions responsible for its own creation. To miss such nuances, easy enough to explain in a sentence or two, is to miss much of Horace’s wit, and a lot of his seriousness, too.
The startling failure to offer even simple clarifications that would enhance ordinary readers’ appreciation of Horace’s deeply constructed meanings suggests again that the real focus here is on the translators; there is, indeed, a whiff of clubbiness about the present collection. (I kept wondering why none of the so-called New Formalists—Timothy Steele, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Dana Gioia—appears in these pages: their emphasis on formal rigor, and particularly Steele’s temperament, with its wry celebrations of emotional restraint, would make them ideal candidates for translating Horace.) That hermetic quality will surely have the unfortunate effect of making Horace more rather than less forbidding to the poetry-reading public. Whatever the pleasures it affords, Horace, Th
e Odes isn’t, finally, Horace’s Odes. For the present saeculum, at least, their strange music—exotic and plainspoken, Greek and Roman, fluid and lapidary, yearning and complacent, earthy and effete—continues to hover in the air, just out of reach.
—The New York Review of Books, May 13, 2004
OSCAR WILDE, CLASSICS SCHOLAR
WHEN ASKED WHAT he intended to do after finishing at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde—who was already well known not only for his outré persona (“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” etc.) but for his brilliant achievements as a classics scholar—made it clear in which direction his ambitions lay. “God knows,” the twenty-three-year-old told his great friend David Hunter Blair, who had asked Wilde about his postgraduate plans, and who later fondly recalled the conversation in his 1939 memoir, In Victorian Days. “I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”
As we know, his prediction would be spectacularly fulfilled. Like a character in one of the Greek tragedies he was able to translate so fluently as a student, his short life followed a spectacular trajectory from fame to infamy, from the heady triumphs of his post-Oxford days, when he was already famous enough to be lampooned by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, to the dreadful peripeteia of the trials and imprisonment. But to some of those who knew him at the time, Wilde’s emphatic rejection of the scholarly life must have come as something of a surprise.
He had, after all, shown a remarkable flair for the classics from the start. At the Portora Royal School, where he’d been sent in the autumn of 1864, just before his tenth birthday, he won the classical medal examination with his extempore translations from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (the tragedy he loved above all others) and the Carpenter Prize for his superior performance on the examination on the Greek New Testament. Later, at Trinity College, Dublin, he took a first in his freshman classical exams and went on to win the Berkeley Gold Medal for his paper on a subject that was, perhaps, not without augury: the Fragmenta comicorum graecorum, “Fragments of the Greek Comics,” the great scholarly edition by the early-nineteenth-century German philologue Augustus Meineke. According to his friend Robert Sherard, he occasionally pawned the medal when he needed money, but managed always to redeem it, keeping it until the end of his life.
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