ON TRANSLATING THE ODES OF HORACE

W. P. TRENT

In a letter written on August 21, 1703, to Robert Harley, afterward Earl of Oxford and Prime Minister, by Dr. George Hickes, the famous scholar and non-juror, there is a reference to "old Dr. Biram Eaton who has read Horace over, as they tell me, many hundred times, oftener, I fear, than he has read the Gospels." Dr. Biram Eaton has escaped an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, and, so far as I know, he has never been reckoned by Horatians among their patron saints. In view of the slur cast upon him by Dr. Hickes I should like to propose his canonization, but I should much prefer to lay a wager that he found time between his readings to try to turn some of the odes of his favorite writer into English verses, probably into couplets resembling those of Dryden. And I should. also be willing to wager that before and after making each of his versions, he gave expression, in some form or other, to the proverbial statement that to attempt to translate Horace is to attempt the impossible.

Perhaps we owe to this proverbial impossibility the fact that the translator of Horace is always with us. A living antinomy, he writes a modest preface; then exclaiming in the words of his master, "Nil mortalibus ardui est," he tries to scale very heaven in his folly, to rush blindly per vetitum nefas. But because he has loved much, therefore is much forgiven him. To love Horace and not attempt to translate him would be to flout that principle of altruism in which

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some modern thinkers have discovered, more poetically perhaps than philosophically, the motive force of civilization. We love Horace, and hence we must try to set him forth in a way to make others love him," is what all translators, it would seem, say to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, when they decide to publish their respective renditions. And who shall blame them? Where is the critic competent to judge their work, who has not himself listened to the Siren's song, if but for a moment in his youth, who has not a version of some ode of Horace hid away among his papers, the memory of which will doubtless forever prevent him from flinging a stone at any fellow-offender?

It is not only impossible to translate Horace adequately, but it is impossible to explain satisfactorily the causes of his unbounded popularity-a popularity illustrated by the fact that when that well-known group of American booklovers, the Bibliophile Society, were seeking to determine what great man of letters they would first honor by issuing one or more of his works in sumptuous form, they chosenot an author of their own day or nation or language-but a writer dead nearly two thousand years, of alien race and tongue, spokesman of a civilization remote and strange, the Horace of the immortal Odes. Yet admirers of Lucretius and of Catullus tell us very plainly and insistently that this Horace of the Odes is not a great poet. We listen respectfully to the charge and somehow we do not seem greatly to resent it; we merely read the Odes, if possible, more diligently and affectionately-not, it is true, in the splendid Bibliophile volumes, but in some well-worn pocket edition that has accompanied us on our journeys, or, like one I own, has helped us to while away the hours on a deer stand, through which the deer, as shy as the fawn with which the poet compared Chloë, simply would not run. If we own such a pocket volume, we leave our critical faculties in

abeyance when Dante, in the Inferno, introduces Horace to us along with Homer and Ovid and Lucan; for do not our hearts tell us that in the truest sense of the phrase, he is worthy to walk with the greatest of this mediævally assorted company? We feel sure that Virgil must have loved him as a man; we have proof that Milton admired him as a poet. We deny to him "the grand manner," but we attribute to him every charm. When we seek to analyze this charm, we are left with the suspicion that, after we have pointed out many of its elements, such as humor, vivacity, kindliness, sententiousness, and the like, there are as many others, equally potent but more subtle, that escape us altogether. So we turn the hackneyed saying into “the charm is the man," and contentedly exchange analysis for enjoyment. And yet we are persuaded that no author is more worthy of the painstaking, detailed study characteristic of modern scholarship than is this same Epicurean poet, who so utterly defies analysis and would be the first, were he not but "dust and a shade," to smile at our ponderous erudition. We feel that the scholar who shall devote the best years of his life to studying the influence of Horace upon subsequent writers in the chief literatures and to collecting the tributes that have been paid to his genius by the great and worthy of all lands and ages, will deserve sincere benedictions. We conclude, in short, that that exquisite epithet, the well-beloved," so inappropriately bestowed upon the worthless and flippant French King, belongs to Horace, and to Horace alone, jure divino.

But this praise of Horace and this defense of his translators fails to justify or explain the writing of this paper. An honest confession being good for the soul, I will confess that the remarks that follow were first employed to introduce some versions of selected Odes I was once rash enough to publish. It is not a good sportsman that shuts his eyes

and bangs away with both barrels at a flock of birds, and I now doubt whether I was wise in trying to bring down readers, if not with my verse-barrel, at least with my prosebarrel. Being older, I use at present only one barrel at a time and, perhaps for the same reason, I am wont to try the prose-barrel. And fortunately I can apply to the comments I intend to make on Horatian translators the quotation I used in order to mollify irate readers of my own verse renderings. It came from a once popular, now forgotten poet, the Rev. John Pomfret, and it ran as follows:-" It will be to little purpose, the Author presumes, to offer any reasons why the following POEMS appear in public; for it is ten to one whether he gives the true, and if he does, it is much greater odds whether the gentle reader is so courteous as to believe him."

So much has been written on the methods of Horace's translators, and so much remains to be written, that it is hard to determine where to begin; but perhaps the preface of the late Professor Conington to his well-known translation of the Odes will furnish a proper point of departure. Few persons, whether translators or readers, are likely to object to Conington's first premise that the translator ought to aim at "some kind of metrical conformity to his original." To reproduce an original Sapphic or Alcaic stanza in blank verse, or in the couplets of Pope, is at once to repel the reader who knows Horace well, and to give the reader who is unacquainted with Latin lyric poetry a totally erroneous conception of the metrical and rhythmical methods of the poet. To render a compressed Latin verse by a diffuse English one is to do injustice, as Conington observes, to the sententiousness for which Horace is justly celebrated, although the English scholar, had he written after the appearance of Mr. Gladstone's attempt to render the Odes, might with propriety have added that the translator should not,

in his avoidance of diffuseness, be seduced by the facility of the octosyllabic couplet. To translate Horace's odes into anything but quatrains, except on occasions, is also to offend the meticulous Horatian and to mislead any reader who seeks to know the poet through an English rendering. It would seem, however, that when Professor Conington insisted that an English measure once adopted for the Alcaic must be used for every ode in which Horace employed the stanza just named, he went far toward hampering the translator, who, despite his proneness to offend, has his rights. That such uniformity ought to be aimed at, and that it will, as a rule, be aimed at, is doubtless true; but there is an element of the problem with which Conington does not seem sufficiently to have reckoned.

This is rhyme, which he assumed to be necessary to a successful rendition of an ode of Horace. A particular stanza not employing rhyme may probably be used without resulting loss in translating every ode written in a special form. Yet this may not be the case with a stanza employing rhymes, if the translator aim, as he should, at a fairly, though not an awkwardly literal rendering of the language of his original. There will necessarily be coincidences of sound in a literal prose version of a Latin stanza that will suggest a definite and advantageous arrangement of rhymes for a poetical version. To adopt a certain English stanza in which to render a certain Latin stanza wherever it occurs, is to do away with this natural advantage, which presents itself oftener than might at first be supposed.

Concrete examples will serve to make my meaning clear. The third ode of the first book, the admirable "Sic te diva potens Cypri," is written in what is called the Second Asclepiad meter; so is the delightful ninth ode of the third book, the "Donec gratus eram." We will assume that for the first of these odes the translator has chosen a