Odes

Book I

Book I 3 1 Maecenas, scion of kings, my great protector, and author of all my achievements and my fame, you know how some take pleasure at the track when the chariots churn up Olympic dust and the winner is raised up to be like a god because of his horses’ strength and his driver’s skill in just kissing the turning posts with his axles. To one the citizens give the triple palm of political honors; another, who has been shrewd and has stored up Libyan wheat achieves a momentary renown. The cautious peasant, breaking the clods in his field, never gives thought to Attalus’ vast wealth nor does he imagine sailing in Cyprian ships. The nervous merchant, worried about the tricky African winds, envies that farmer, but not his poverty, and after disaster rebuilds his shattered vessels to regain what he’s lost. Another likes his cups of Massic wine and lies on the grass for much of the day in the arbutus’ shade or near some babbling brook. Others there are who love the sound of trumpets, the danger of battle, and the risks that wives and mothers hate. Hunters 4 Book I out in the woods, under the frozen skies, never troubled by their wives’ reproaches, are eager for the hounds to sound their cries at having caught sight of a deer or a wild boar struggling in the meshes of rope nets. My predilection is learning; the scholar’s ivy raises me to the gods in their groves on high where dancing nymphs and satyrs invite me to join them, leaving the crowds behind me and below. If Euterpe lends me her flute and Polyhymnia strums on her Lesbian lyre in my behalf, and if you, my friend and patron, enter my name in the lists of lyric poets, I shall soar up to feel my head tingle, touching the stars. The Latin text of these poems is available online at the Perseus Project, as well as a word-by-word rendition into English. Such literal translations as this and the version by Niall Rudd in the Loeb Classical Library are of use, I think, to those who are reading the poems in Latin and using these Englishings as trots. To look just at the English versions is to get the sense of what Horace said but to omit entirely the poetry. A poem, after all, means in a different way than any prose version. And it is as poetry that readers should experience these elegant pieces. My intention in these notes is to make some general comment about the structure of the poems and, more particularly, to point out the changes, omissions, and sometimes additions I have made. It is my hope that this will be of some help to those readers who wish to get some understanding of the problems and solutions of translators, whose purpose must be to reinvent from the source language and, as best they can, to approximate in the target language the experience of the poem that one reading it in Latin might have. Each of us has his or her own 5 Book I “reading” of poems in our native language. There will be possible arguments, therefore, with every decision I have made. They might not be the choices that any individual reader might have preferred. But after examining the brushwork of a painting, it is necessary to step back again and look at the whole thing, in openness and simplicity. It is at that distance that one decides whether and how much to like what he sees. This ode is in Asclepiads, which is pretty much meaningless to those unfamiliar with Latin. The two things that are useful to know is that in this ode there are lines of five metrical feet; but Latin meters are quantitative, while English ones are based on stresses, so that, as a practical matter, the substitution of the stressed line is the only reasonable way to show that there is a sophisticated rhythmic pattern in Horace and invent something resembling it. This first ode is addressed to Maecenas, the poet’s patron. Those that follow are praises of Augustus (the emperor) and Virgil, the preeminent poet of the age. The tone is informal, almost familiar, as he catalogs various kinds of achievement and then, in a half-joking way, defends his chosen way of life, which makes it a...