The Works, and: The Odes of Horace in Latin and English (review)

Dryden's idea of a translation has been broadened recently. We now admit not only a 'modern dress' version of an old original (where swords become revolvers and the Argiletum becomes Paternoster Row – Dryden was thinking of long-dead classical authors being translated), but a whole spectrum of increasingly far-fetched and re-personalized versions of their original that might be said to culminate in Ulysses, asa work vaguely dependent on the Odyssey. Ezra Pound is sometimes credited with having opened up this new territory, but this is to forget the Smith brothers' Horace in London, and poems like Kit Smart's 'The Pretty Chambermaid' (which he called an 'imitation' – Dryden's term still being used in the old sense – of Horace Odes II.4) and Pope's Sober Advice from Horace, to the Young Gentlemen about Town, an imitation of SermonesI.2.

All the same, perhaps Pound, by changing the notions of fidelity and impersonality in transmission, may have handed out the poetic licences for the poems 'after X' – the 'versions', the Lowellian 'imitations' which have become a new genre for our times. The gist of this new freedom was implied by Lowell himself in a letter to Pound (9 March 1958): 'I've done a metrical but unrhymed translation of Rimbaud's "Rages de Caesar," and am embarrassed to see how good it is without my adding much of anything, even with my subtracting the original's formal sound effects.' It is fair to say that any living poet about to be translated into another language would want the job to be done by a 'good translator' in the old sense, who might be characterized as like an obedient sightseer on a tour, who looks patiently (and closely) at what he's toldto look at, and who doesn't keep asking questions and peeping at distractions that are not on the itinerary. Meanwhile, the new genre flourishes. It is as if the poems of dead foreigners, provided they are out of copyright, are fair game as rough drafts for one's own poems.

Maureen Almond's The Workscontains fifty-three poems, seventeen of them 'after' Horace's Epodes and five of them 'after' living poets; and the rest are not translations but as it were poems in their own right. Both the original poems and the transposed poems by others are set in Middlesburgh and environs, and all relate to the local life of (one assumes) Maureen Almond's younger days. What she is using is sometimes the barest hints of the framework of the credited original: in 'Trafalgar Street Men (after Horace, Epode II, Beatus ille)', for instance, she touches base at the beginning –

It's a lucky man who can follow his dad into the works

– and again in the middle where 'your problem love life' is mentioned, to be immediately followed as in Horace by the delightfully hard-working wife and the children; and of course in the final four lines, where, as in her model, the more or less happy life described is suddenly held at arm's length. Horace writes it off in his last four lines by revealing that the speaker is a moneylender who, instead of going in for the rural life he praises, continues to be a usurer; Almond (who like Horace has the speech in quotation marks) turns it into a different form of irony. Her speaker is an industrial landlord speaking to his tenants, 'trying always to be one of them', who after outlining their way of life, instead of copying them, puts up the rent. Evidently she is using the ancient framework as a form or mould for a poem of her own.

Epode III is used in a similar way: Horace's poem blames Maecenas for serving him very garlicky food and ends up...