“What! are you a little touched with the sublime lash?” someone asks in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, scenting an affair of the heart. No footnote was needed pointing the reader to sublimi flagello in Horace, Odes III.26, for these Horatian tags were part of the small coin of educated conversation. An unworthy purpose for a great poet to serve, one might think, but one that Horace would probably not have taken amiss. A double-dyed ironist, he smilingly collaborates with his own under-reading, and one can imagine him saying, If you want to respond to my verses at this level, feel free to do so. In a poem addressed to a distinguished Roman soldier, he protests his inability to strike the required heroic note:  

It falls to me to make up easygoing

Songs about such battlefields as parties,
Epic encounters between young men and

women.
Sometimes I write them because I’ve fallen

in love.
Sometimes I write them just for the fun of it.

And yet this poet who makes such modest claims for himself can on occasion come out with the highest claims. “But if you say I am truly among the poets,” he tells his great patron Maecenas in the first poem of his book, “Then my exalted head will knock against the stars,” “Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.” These four proud words herald the work that was to withstand the passage of two thousand years, as he predicted that it would:

Today I have finished a work outlasting

bronze
And the pyramids of ancient royal kings.
The North Wind raging cannot scatter it
Nor can the rain obliterate this work,
Nor can the years, nor can the ages passing.

In the main, however, Horace keeps to the middle range of experience where most of us spend our time. His great gift was to make the commonplace notable, even luminous, not to be discarded as the everyday trivia of existence. By putting a shine on our small occasions, he shows that the daily drab need not be as drab as it often is. We sit slouching at the bar staring morosely into a martini. Horace gives his drinking a touch of ceremony: “The garlanded cupbearer waiting, and garlanded I,/ Here in the shade of the arbor, drinking my wine.”

The passages I have quoted come from the translation of the four books of Odes which David Ferry has just given us (and of which, let it be noted, I am a dedicatee).[1] He has done what nobody has been able to do since the unjustly forgotten Philip Francis in the 1740s; he has found a voice, contemporary and yet Horatian, through which that poetical wonder, the Odes of Horace, can address us. No doubt complete possession is granted only to those lucky enough to be able to read them in the original. This is easily enough said, yet it is not quite true. Has anyone enough Latin to feel it as he can feel his own language? Horace’s “Linquenda tellus et domus et placens/ uxor” strikes home hard enough but still not quite as directly as Ferry’s simple English words: “Each one of us must leave the earth he loves,/ And leave his home and leave his tender wife.” Translation is always needed; witness the amount of Latin poetry that was Englished in the Latinate eighteenth century.

The alert reader of a poem called “Epigram” in Ferry’s most recent book of original verse, Dwelling Places, might have predicted that here was the Horatian poet of our day should his gift lead him to assume this role.

As with the skill of verses properly managed
the little river quietly makes its way
along the valley and through the local village
below the smiling hospitable house,
easily flowing over the shining stones,
trochee, and an anapest, pyrrhic, and also

spondee,
under the heartbeat easy governance
of long continued metrical discipline.

It is this easy governance, easy only because of long continued metrical discipline, that has allowed him to make an English-speaking poet of Roman Horace. Richard Wilbur speaks admiringly of “the way he finds what English meters will serve each poem, and weaves down through them with Horatian fluency and momentum.” Ferry never makes the mistake of trying directly to imitate classical meters; rather, as he himself puts it in the introduction, “sometimes my translation reflects the way I have heard the rhythms of the Latin.” Listen with him to the rhythm of the first line of Odes I.4:

Solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris

et Favoni.

Now the hard winter is breaking up with

the welcome coming… .

Again in the opening of IV.1 where he finds an English equivalent for the half-playful, felt jaunt of Horace’s Asclepiads:

Intermissa, Venus, diu
rursus bella moves?

Venus, it seems that now
Your wars are starting again.

More often, though, his stanzaic forms are purely native. The quatrains that answer to Horace’s Alcaics have the proper formality of fine verse, not the traditional formality of English poetry but a new formality based on stress count, normally five to a line, rather than syllabic count.

Sometimes he writes agile tercets that link arms and glide down the page, here and there alexandrines, occasionally faux Sapphics where the last line (“watched over by you,” “hear the young maidens”) echoes or rather alludes to the final Adonic of that wonderful stanza which has held the ear of poets ever since Sappho first sounded it. The first ode of Book Three he does in Pindarics, a noble measure that has been in abeyance since Edward Lear wrote “The Dong with a Luminous Nose.”

Ferry’s governance is so fine that he has made it seem easy to translate Horace, laying him open to the danger that has often dogged his author, that of under-reading or more exactly under-hearing. The free-verse interregnum has dulled our ears, though this need not have happened had we listened more intently to the master, Pound. Good, even great, poets have written in this century, but the art of verse is now not much appreciated, even by persons known as poetry lovers. A published poet of some accomplishment printed a couplet of Pope’s in this form: “The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine;/ It feels each thread, and lives along the line.” But Pope wrote “how exquisitely fine!/ Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.” It is the choriambic movement that enacts the fineness of the touch. Perhaps a term’s attendance at Ferry’s Horatian school will teach us to listen again and to respond to poetry not merely with our minds but with our muscles.

He differs from the major verse translators of this century in that this is not Ferry’s Horace in the sense that the Propertius of “Homage” is Pound’s Propertius. There is nothing here of the radical, even arrogant, remaking that we have in Pound and less successfully in Lowell. In the main, Ferry keeps as close to the original as a verse translator can be expected to do, allowing himself the proper local liberties and omitting details of Roman usage that would not work for us now. In a poem inviting a friend just back from the wars to come and celebrate his return (II.7), Horace goes into the details. They are to cast dice to decide who is to be the pace-setter (arbiter bibendi), precious unguent is to be provided for the hair, and a slave is to weave garlands of parsley or myrtle. Parsleyed or myrtled, we might still manage to enjoy ourselves, but not with grease rubbed into our hair. Ferry lets this go and concentrates on the pleasure of the occasion where Horace’s attention goes: “I’ve got good food to eat, good wine to drink;/ Come celebrate old friendship under the laurel.”

It is his skill, a kind of wise tact, in keeping what is essential and playing down, even omitting, the contingent that has made these translations live as Horace’s poems live. Dropping the contingent is, however, easily done. Less easy to handle are those aspects of Horace that reflect the hardness of the Roman temper. It is disconcerting to find this genial poet recalling with apparent gusto the brave days of old when the sea “ran red with Punic blood.” An unwelcome suggestion of Colonel Qaddafi. Ferry--gritting his teeth?—lets Horace speak out. And there is the line that has caused such offense, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” What is to be done with this? Simply translate it: “Sweet and proper it is to die for your country.” In its Roman context this seems to me perfectly acceptable. When, however, in the fifth of the so-called Roman odes, the half-legendary warrior Regulus advises the senate to allow prisoners of war to remain in captivity and die unpitied, Ferry, finding this a bit much and assuming that it will be too much for us, introduces five words of his own to soften the harsh counsel. The prisoners should be “left—to die if they must—in the enemy camp.” Justifiable? Let the reader decide.

Somehow (a word that critics should no doubt try to avoid) Ferry has been able to bring Horace within our range while including a certain amount that is beyond our range. Although writing in today’s language, he makes us aware that these poems speak, in small and larger ways, from a day or world unlike our own. Wine is drunk there from a cup, not from a glass as we drink it. There, a poet can hope for an eternity of fame that would sound almost absurd at a time when the future of literacy, let alone high literacy, is uncertain. The Horace of Ferry’s deft extraterritorial fiction of a world—which, as in Nabokov’s Ada, runs on parallel but not identical tracks with our own—can expect his readers to be at ease with the proud, patriotic stance that would now be written off as braggadocio.

There is a great deal of Horace in this book, a modern Horace as the Horace of Philip Francis’s translation was an eighteenth-century Horace. What we do not find here is “the merely witty, urbane, reasonable fellow who sometimes emerges in English,” as Rosanna Warren put it in a fine article in The Threepenny Review (Summer 1997). And yet Horace is witty; he is urbane. Consider only the first line of the poem (III.26) that begins “Vixi puellis nuper idoneus,” “Until lately I lived on easy terms with girls.” How to translate that, Horace blandly turning the tables on those who would mock the complacency of this middle-aged corpulent amorist? Neither Ferry nor anyone else to my knowledge has captured it. Horace is also, to the distress of romantic spirits, reasonable. When do we find this poet’s eye rolling in a fine frenzy?

Hence it is that, like no other poet of comparable stature, he has so often been given less than his due. Pound, comparing him with Catullus, wrote foolishly that “Horace has but the clubman’s poise.” Oh dear, clubbable Horace. No less foolishly, Matthew Arnold complained that he “wants seriousness. [He] warms himself before the transient fire of human animation and human pleasure while he can, and is only serious when he reflects that the fire must soon go out.” Arnold then quotes two lines from the great poem beginning “Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis” (of which we are fortunate to have the version by Housman, as perfect as any translation can hope to be) and issues his verdict: “For nature there is renovation, but for man there is none—it is exquisite, but it is not interpretative and fortifying.” We may disagree and claim for Horace precisely the virtue that Arnold denies him: he is eminently fortifying, nowhere more so than in his poems about death.

The poets of this century have not served us well here, and Empson in his poem “Ignorance of Death” speaks representatively when he confesses that he feels “very blank upon this topic” and thinks that “though important, and proper for anyone to bring up,/ It is one that most people should be prepared to be blank upon.” It is true that Philip Larkin is hardly blank on this topic, but whatever may be said about the near panic which takes hold of him at the thought of death, it is certainly not fortifying. The poems for friends dying of AIDS in Thom Gunn’s latest book, The Man with Night Sweats, strike a note of lean, controlled outrage against this dreadful visitant into late twentieth-century life, but this death is still seen as an exception. We will all die, but we will not all die of AIDS. In Horace, there is no panic, no outrage, but rather a calm acceptance of what must be. After the pleasures and sorrows of life comes eternal exile, the day when our number is up and we are assigned our place in the ferryman’s boat that takes us to the world of the dead: “et nos in aeternum/ exsilium impositura cumbae.”

Eternal exile? Horace challenges us here. Christian readers will presumably say that the great pagan poet was simply wrong. Other readers he catches between wind and water, for they, although lacking any determinate belief in survival, may be reluctant to confront so bleak a sentence (and, thus, in this country speak of someone who has died as having passed away). Ferry delicately takes care of their dilemma, or so it seems to me; this may well not be his intention. Committed to preserving the sense of what Horace says, he is nonetheless addressing late twentieth-century readers who like their final prospects to be blurred, and for them he substitutes for Horace’s “eternal exile” an undefined region from which we do not return. We take our place “In that dark boat, that bears us all away/ From here to where no one comes back from ever.” This is grave and perhaps as much as we can take, but it lacks the flat finality of the Latin. Horace speaks out, facing what he takes to be the facts head on, and by so doing he steadies us. Not fortifying indeed! What can Uncle Matthew have been thinking of?

David Ferry’s achievement has been handsomely seconded by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. At a time when books of verse slip modestly before the public, slim little fellows not presuming to compete with the important works of the day—the latest gossip from or about the White House and so forth—The Odes of Horace is in every sense a big book, measuring nine inches by six, an imposing presence on the shelf and in our hands. The translations have room to breathe on their spacious pages, and admirably!—on the facing pages stands the eternal Latin:

exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non aquilo

impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
ANNORUM SERIES ET FUGA TEMPORUM.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 344 pages, $35. Go back to the text.

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