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Horace's timeless songs of wisdom and death Reviewed by Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, December 29, 2002
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Horace: The Odes New Translations by Contemporary Poets Edited by J.D. McClatchy PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; 312 PAGES; $24.95By the time of Horace's death in 8 B.C., his "Odes" had met the very fate he had ridiculed: They had become a school text. To the uninitiated, translating Horace still sounds like a sterile task, a punishing occupation left over from the Edwardian boys' school. Yet it is a labor that has engaged poets as diverse as John Milton, William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, A.E. Housman, Robert Lowell and even such amateurs as John Quincy Adams and William Gladstone. Now we can add to the list 35 of the most prominent contemporary poets, including nine Pulitzer Prize winners and four former U.S. poet laureates. J.D. McClatchy's "Horace: The Odes," is the book most likely to be overlooked this season -- unprepossessing Horace is unlikely to be on list of must-read books for this year. Not surprising, from one point of view -- the Romans didn't like the odes that much either. But more discriminating readers, Emperor Caesar Augustus and Horace's wealthy patron Gaius Maecenas among them, have always taken note, for Horace has always been the latest word in the avant-garde. Even two millennia later, in these war-hungry times, what could be more timely than Horace? What field is not enriched by our Roman blood with tombs that testify to unholy war?(translated by Daryl Hine) -- and what did we shrink from? as hardened as we are, is there an evil untouched by us?"(translated by John Hollander) In an era of avarice and showy consumption, who makes the call to moderation better than Horace? Our folly scales the sky; Our naughtiness will not allow Jove to lay his thunderbolts by.(Hine) Or this warning, to an eager palace builder: And yet the really up-to-date space every wealthy lord is destined to occupy belongs to ravenous Death. Why work so hard for yours? (David Wagoner) Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a.k.a. Horace, was born on Dec. 8, 65 B.C., as the son of a freed slave who worked a meager farm. Horace fought on the losing side at Philippi in 42 B.C., with Julius Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius. ("I escaped unharmed in the rout at Philippi,/ Escaped that cursed falling tree/ And the shipwreck of Sicily," he recalls in McClatchy's own superb translation, among the best in a dynamite volume.) His father's estate at Venusia was confiscated, and Horace began climbing the slow ladder to imperial favor, beginning as a clerk of the treasury. The young poet Virgil befriended him and introduced him to Maecenas, who was to become a lifelong savior. Maecenas' gift of a farm in the Sabine hills was to provide Horace with a writer's solitude. There, Horace abandoned his scathing hexameter satires and turned to writing his odes, or carminae, "songs," he called them. He finished the third book at age 42, with a fourth book published at the emperor's request a decade later, in 13 B.C. A comment on his poetic shift occurs in the odes: Heat tempted Me in my sweet early days, and sent Me deeply mad to one-sided poems. Now I want to replace those sour lines with Sweet lines (Robert Bly) McClatchy calls the odes the most important and influential book of lyric poems ever published: "a whole world elegantly suspended in poems that brim with a wisdom alternately sly and sad." And indeed the collection is a world in itself, an encyclopedia of emotions and styles and poetic forms. Horace is technically a scrupulous virtuoso, performing in a smorgasbord of meters, offering newly minted Latin in the old Greek forms to his long-dead masters, Sappho and Alcaeus, Asclepiades, even Homer, as he reminds us of the impossibility of love, the necessity of moderation and, always, the inevitability of death: Remember death's dark burning, and while there's still time, Mix up your wise ways with a bit of folly; A little foolishness is sometimes sweet. (Charles Wright) Yet I believe a single night awaits us, one and all, and death is known by all and one but once (Alice Fulton) Life's too short for all but the simplest dreams; soon you'll be lodged in one of Pluto's black airless rooms (James Lasdun) The difficulty is capturing the sinuousness of his line, the unexpectedness and emotional immediacy of his conclusions. Horace doesn't assert as much as he seduces the reader into his poems. Wordiness is an ever-present problem. Maintaining Horace's verbal economy as well as elegance is almost impossible in English. McClatchy clearly has a firm hand on the helm; his matchless introduction shows overview and focus at once. His contributors apparently share his vision and his seriousness; many of these translations are likely to become touchstones. Certainly, Horace is an astringent digestive to cleanse the palate from the kitsch of the Christmas season. In this annual season of surfeit, it's downright therapeutic to read Horace, once again, "bumping the stars with my exalted head." (Robert Pinsky) Bay Area writer Cynthia Haven has written most recently for the Times Literary Supplement of London and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. |
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