Translator’s Note

Horace is one of the great lyric poets and a personal favorite. His attention to the shape of his poems, his practice of restraint and irony (including at his own expense), and his sense of his achievement all appeal to me, and I hope to convey them in these two translations.

In translating Horace, perhaps my primary concern is the shape of his poems—their appearance on the page as well as their rhythmic form. Those who have studied Latin verse will be familiar with his reputation for metrical variety (numerosus Horatius, said Ovid,“metrical Horace”), while readers of English will know collections whose formal variety traces ultimately to Horace, such as Herbert’s Temple and the Sidney Psalter. The question of how to translate Horace’s forms into English verse has always been around, and I demonstrate here two of the main strategies that have been taken.

In Wandering Horace (Odes 1.34), I take the less common strategy, namely, to attempt to reproduce, more or less directly, the Latin form in English. Horace wrote the poem in the elaborate Greek form known as the Alcaic stanza: two lines of eleven syllables, one of nine, and one of ten, each with their own unvarying pattern of long and short syllables. But English verse doesn’t deal in longs and shorts, and its patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables must either vary or else be very dull. Faced with this problem, most sensible English poets have made recourse to using a native English verse form rather than a native Latin verse form (a strategy to which I turn in my second translation). Others, most notably W. H. Auden and Donald Hall, give up on the rhythm of the Alcaic but maintain its syllable count and thereby its shape on the page.

Horace’s Alcaic stanza has been stuck in my ear for some time now, so I knew I wanted to maintain its movement in my translation, if possible. Something about the intricacy and power of its rhythm reminded me of the motorcycle engines my father used to work on in our garage: those double and triple longs like punching pistons, the repetitions and variations revolving on themselves, the contraction of the third line and the rolling expansion of the fourth like the constant cycling between intake of air and gas and puffing out of exhaust. Perhaps I’m being fanciful, but I feel there is an engine-like vigor here, especially worth preserving in this translation of a poem about celestial combustion. I found my model for getting the rhythm into English in Mary Sidney’s Alcaic paraphrase of Psalm 120, which approximates Horace’s rhythm by using stressed syllables in a pattern roughly equivalent to the long syllables of the Latin. Here I scan the first stanza of both Horace’s poem and my translation, marking long (–) and short (u) in the Latin, and primary stress (/), secondary stress (\) and unstressed (u) in the English:

–   –    u –  –  |  –   u  u  –    u   –

Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens,

–  –  u –  – |  –    u  u – u –

insanientis dum sapientiae

  –   –   u   –  –    –     u   –    –

consultus erro, nunc retrorsum

  – u   u  –    u u – u   –   –

vela dar-atq-iterare cursus

/    \   u  /   \  |    /    u  u    /        u    /

Hardly religious, barely a prayer to god

  \      /    u     /        \     |   /    u          u  /  u   /

I’ve said or read while maddened philosophy’s

  \    /   u    \   /    u    u   /    \

My errant inquiry, digression—

  /    u      u    /          u    u   /      u  /     \

All but compelled now to take a tack and

In lines one and two of the stanza, I am careful to always have a primary stress in either the first or second syllable, and in the fourth, sixth, ninth, and eleventh. The other syllables can be stressed or unstressed, though they tend toward the latter. Horace’s third line is the most difficult to reproduce in English because of its higher concentration of long syllables, but I have again attempted to maintain the rhythmical pattern. As Tennyson recognized, ending the line with two stresses or with a feminine ending (stressed-unstressed) helps at least to differentiate the rhythm from that of the first two lines, with their masculine endings. The fourth line transfers most easily to English verse, which more easily accommodates runs of unstressed syllables than runs of stresses (for an excellent account of these matters, see John Talbot, The Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination, Bloomsbury: 2022).

None of these are strict rules I set for myself before translating, to be carried out in every instance with machine-like consistency. It is a strength of English prosody that it would not admit of such a process. Variant readings of stress and emphasis are possible and welcome. All I can say is I had Horace’s rhythm in my ear as I wrote my translation, trying to keep that rhythm in the background of the English, like music from a farther room. If that music can bring pleasure without being fully noticed, all the better.

My second translation, Monumental Horace (Odes 3.30), is quite different. Here is the more common strategy, of using a native English verse form as a rough equivalent to that of the Latin. Horace’s poem consists of sixteen, twelve-syllable lines, all of them identical in their pattern of long and short syllables. In translating, it gradually struck me how close to a sonnet this arrangement was, especially since the Latin happens to have several end-line rhymes (not normally discussed as a feature of ancient verse, but there they are). Further, the sonnet form’s tight construction made it seem a fitting vehicle for this poem about building monuments, and its association with poetic immortality in Petrarch, Shakespeare, and others also fit Horace’s audacious claims to greatness in the poem.