I see my reputation is at stake; My fame is shrewdly gored.
—Troilus and Cressida , 111.2.227-8

Horace’s four books of odes have faced the test of time more successfully than any body of poems in western literature. Here, translated by “the leading poets of the day” (I quote from the editor’s description of this anthology), he faces in the most literal sense a stiffer test, since his Latin originals stand to the left of the English versions. A dubious practice, suggesting that he licenses what is happening to his right.

Fifteen of the editor’s thirty-five poets have won prizes for their work. This is reassuring news, yet poets are not always at their best with the difficult art of verse translation. Trying to be what academics call faithful, they may on occasion be as crudely literal as Robert Creeley is in his version of a love poem (Odes 1.19) where a girl is noted for her grata protervitas—she is provocative in an attractive way. “Her amorous forwardness,” Creeley translates. The Latin has not quite been felt into verse, one might say.

Elsewhere we find the poet, released from the tether of the literal, giving us his version of a poem (3.26) about an amorist who looks back on his career with urbane self-complacency. Horace begins:  

Vixi puellis nuper idoneus
et militavi non sine gloria

(Till lately I have lived on easy terms with girls, and fought [in love’s battles] not without renown.) Creeley writes:

No problems with life,
at least from those I’ve loved, who testify
I’ve done all right

till now.

“Where is this in the Latin?” the classicist asks angrily, unaware that Creeley is now employing the mode of translation known as creative. Walter de la Mare neatly describes the liberties this mode permits: “Whatever Miss T eats turns into Miss T.” Exactly. Horace has been turned into Creeley.

Brief though it is, the poem has room for a surprise ending, for it turns out that the man is only pretending to give up his love life since Chloe says no. So he asks Venus to punish her:

Please flick just once
with your imperious whip
young Chloë’s disdaining bum.

With this, Creeley puts the finishing touch to his wreckage of an adroit and pleasing composition.

Finding today’s speech for Horace drives some translators to unnecessarily desperate measures. In Donec gratus eram tibi (3.9—When I was dear to you), a light-hearted dialogue between two lovers who have separated and want to come together again, the man looks back to the time when he could embrace his girl. Straight-forward enough, yet C. K. Williams, rising to what he takes to be the occasion (Horace is after all a classic), writes: “When I was wound round luminous/ you …” Wound round—like a python? Come now. Horace can be droll, but he is never ridiculous.

Some of these translators sound like Housman’s Shropshire Lad, “a stranger and afraid/ In a world I never made.” In Odes 3.6, a girl who has lost her morals and looks forward to wanton love affairs is said to be “overcome by profligate desire.” The translator is not some Victorian curate gingerly facing the licentious ancients, but Richard Howard, an urbane fellow who does not write like this when he is working with French texts nearer our own time.

To put the point another way, some translators behave like people ill at ease at a party to which they have not been invited. In a poem (2.8) about a young woman called Barina whose deplorable conduct has not made her look less attractive, Heather McHugh, probably wishing that she had stayed at home, begins like this:

Were even a single penalty incurred, Barina, for the sum
of all your violate vows, or were you one tooth uglier,
one nail more broken, for the now-enormous volume
of your broken word,

I might be able to believe you.

Perhaps it is unfair to turn to Sir Charles Sedley in the eighteenth century, a period when the art of verse composition had reached a high level, and watch him making his way through the Latin with practiced social ease:

Did any Punishment attend

Thy former Perjuries,
I should believe a second time

Thy charming Flatteries;
Did but one wrinkle mar this Face,
Or hadst thou lost one single Grace …

Rather free, and no wrinkle in the Latin, granted, but Sir Charles has given us a poem for a poem. So too in our own day did James Michie in his complete translation of the Odes (Penguin Classics, 1967):

Barinë, if for perjured truth
Some punishment had ever hurt you—
One blemished nail or blackened tooth—
I might believe this show of virtue.

The translator’s lot is a hard one, for Michie’s accomplished performance has been scandalously little recognized. Write well, and you will probably be ignored; badly, and you risk being praised by people (Milton puts it very well) “Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise.”

If Horace’s social or convivial poems raise problems of tone and diction, one would expect that the proud Roman note of the big public poems would be even harder to catch in our humbler day—witness almighty America’s anxiety about going it alone. Yet the editor, J. D. McClatchy, strikes it well in Descende caelo (3.4) without going beyond the bounds of today’s speech:

Descend from heaven, divine Calliope,
And play upon your flute a long slow song

Or, accompanied by Apollo’s lyre,

Sing in your own clear voice.

More difficult is the line from the sixth ode of the same book where Horace reminds Rome of the cost of neglecting the religious observances that made it great: “dis te minorem quod geris, imperas.” (It is because you hold yourself subject to the gods that you rule.) Apparently puzzled by this, Richard Howard writes: “Once you ruled by religion; honor your gods.” Ruling by religion makes Horace sound like an Iranian mullah. The line was dear to Kipling, one of our great Horatian poets (he could write Horatian odes himself), who rightly saw it as an expression of the piety that should temper the pride of imperial power. The weighty, pregnant Latin is hard to capture today. The best translation was made in the eighteenth century by William Oldisworth: “You reign by bowing to the Gods Commands.” Note the word order, with “reign” coming before “bowing.” There is pride as well as piety here. Time has turned the imperial city into a tourist trap, and a whole dimension of the Odes is now almost beyond our reach.

I have not been able to find much to praise in this anthology, but some successes there are. The translator who sounds most like Horace is Carl Phillips, possibly because he knows Horace’s language, having taught high school Latin for eight years. Wasting no words, he provides a tightly written version of Odes 1.32, and unlike some of his colleagues does not feel the need to give Horace a helping hand by adding decorative jerks of his own invention.

He begins: “This I pray.” Unhappily, the facing Latin provided by the editor gives poscimur, the passive voice (I am asked or called on), a variant reading inferior in sense to the text that Phillips is obviously translating which gives poscimus, the active voice. This must be what Horace wrote, for the poem is a prayer to the lyre:

This I pray:

if ever in shadowed
ease I made of song

something lasting for
this year, and more—

Richard Wilbur, an experienced translator, turns in a responsible version of the ode on the golden mean (2.10), not perhaps a great favorite today, but part of the oeuvre that should not be neglected. John Hollander builds a sturdy stanza for the popular Soracte ode (1.9) and for others in the same metre, resembling the stanza that Tennyson invented, “representing in some measure the grandest of metres, the Horatian alcaic,” and used in “The Daisy” and “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice.” Rosanna Warren takes a seldom translated ode, the second of the first book, about the time when the Tiber burst its banks and flooded the city: “We saw the mustard Tiber, his waves flung back/ passionately from the Tuscan shore” (vidimus flavum Tiberim, retortis/ litore Etrusco violenter undis). Boldly she tackles the great poem in the fourth book, Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis, which Housman’s superb rendering has almost put out of bounds to translators. She does not rival the master, yet one may prefer “we’re nothing but dust and shade” to Housman’s “We are dust and dreams,” too bland perhaps for the slow thunder of pulvis et umbra sumus.

Horace, the Horace-in-translation of the Odes, has become the Vivaldi of classical verse. We seem determined in these late lean days to keep him with us as a vital poetic presence and friend. Since our Latin is shaky or nonexistent, he must be translated. This anthology shows how he fares when he is handed over to contemporary poets who, probably having no Latin, must do what they can to dredge up from the Loeb prose the elements of a poem. The editor, who has to pilot Horace through the quicksands of modern verse, is or should be at hand to tell them how far the poem they have extracted by this means does bear any resemblance to a Horatian ode. McClatchy, however, does not appear to know Latin, since he tells us that “the word Horace himself used to describe these poems was carminae or ‘songs.’” (Since when was carmen a first declension noun?) Lacking a first-hand familiarity with Horace’s poetry, he has allowed too many ungainly travesties to pass muster.

Since our poets can do little to keep Horace alive, we should perhaps call on our technology to come to the rescue and provide us with a Horatian cassette: a generous selection from the Odes read by someone who can make classical Latin sound like a living language. Anyone who had once heard the first line of the ode to Pyrrha (1.5), and felt how seemly and companionable it is—“Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa”—would surely have striven to come up with something better than the line which here introduces it: “What slip of a boy, all slick with what perfumes.”

The reader deserves to be told that the back cover of this book carries a handsome endorsement from Harold Bloom: “J. D. McClatchy’s extraordinary collection gives us the richest version of Horace’s odes ever made available in English.” I hate to add anything to Professor Bloom’s reading-list, but should he have time to consult the recent anthology Horace in English (Penguin Classics, 1996), he would find that the odes have been translated by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sidney, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Crashaw, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Hopkins, Housman, Kipling (whose “Translation of ode 5.3” makes English observe the contour of Horatian Latin), Pound, Bunting, and David Ferry. Are we to believe that all these poets have been outdone by the leading poets of McClatchy’s day?

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