The Satires of Horace. Horace

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      In the twentieth century, translation of the Satires became the province of academics who largely drained the text of its vigor, wit, and conversational tone. The 1926 Fairclough version (Harvard University Press) is reasonably accurate but prose. The 1959 Bovie version (University of Chicago Press) is a “sixties” precursor loaded with trendy extratextual references ranging from Paradise Lost to existentialism. The 1973 Rudd version (Penguin) claims to be written in hexameter, but it is in fact a prose translation that tangles sense and syntax by forcing Horace's many long sentences into an order dictated by line-by-line translation rather than fluidity.

      The 1993 “literal” translations of Brown and Muecke (Aris & Phillips) are extremely well done and their notes were invaluable to me. Their work, however, has the weakness of all such translations—it is tough reading because it is meant for scholars parsing the Latin and not for general readers who can't access the Latin.

      The most recent literary translation, the 1996 Alexander version (Princeton University Press), rests on a seriously mistaken premise. Alexander declares about the Satires that “Though written in hexameters they are prose through and through” (emphasis added). He compounds this error by adding that with regard to meter “all of this I have dispensed with and listened instead to Horace's pulsations; and having ascertained the rhythmic pattern, I have not sought to reproduce (which is impossible in the crossover of languages) but to recreate an English equivalent which should be true to the genius of our language and yet be related (at least as blood cousins are related) to the Latin original.”

      Despite the grandiosity of Alexander's description of his own work, it is impossible to discern any rhythmic patterns in his translation; the truth is that it is generic contemporary free verse that lacks any connection to form, much less to Horatian meters and rhythms. His version is also frequently off-key, primarily due to his misconception of Horace as “the quintessential Italian” rather than the quintessential Roman.

      I confess fondness for William Matthews's unfinished 2002 version (Ausable Press). It captures much of the fluidity and concision of the Satires, although these virtues frequently come at the price of eliminating content essential to understanding the subtlety of the text. If Matthews had lived long enough to complete and revise this work, it might well have become the standard.

      So, how should the Satires be translated? Except perhaps for Billy Collins and a few others, wit is rare in today's free verse, and nobody has written an acclaimed long humorous poem in free verse. Whether it is fashionable in the academy or not, the ghosts of Swift and Pope still haunt our expectations of satire and humor. The trick is not how to run from that legacy, but how to respect it with fresh language that does not savage the original poem.

      My first rule for this translation was to preserve as many meanings and images from the original text as possible. My second rule was to inject nothing into the translation that isn't arguably in the original. When jokes just didn't translate well, I bent these rules a little and confessed the liberty in the notes.

      A corollary of my first rule was to use names of people and places without dumbing them down, a surprisingly common practice. Rudd, for instance, calls Porcius “Hogg,” Novius “Newman,” and, most annoyingly, Horace “Floppy” when Horace refers to himself as “Flaccus.” I considered my corollary sufficiently important that I necessarily deviated slightly from my strict meter and rhyme so I could include names that flavor the poetry and that might stimulate readers to learn more about the context of the Satires.

      I wrote this translation not just in meter, but in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, otherwise known as “heroic couplets.” I am well aware that this choice will be controversial among classicists. Rudd, for instance, has asserted that “the obvious fact remains that rhyming couplets would not do for a modern translation. They do not allow the thought to flow on in a conversational style, and they demand conventional licenses of diction and word-order which are not granted today.”

      Rudd's argument is, of course, impossible to defend. Horace himself argued in metrical verse for the importance of meter, and there is nothing about formal poetry that requires mangling diction and word order. I challenge anyone to scour the couplets in Richard Wilbur's Molière translations for “conventional licenses of diction and word order which are not granted today,” then to contrast the clarity and beauty of Wilbur's lines with Rudd's rendering of lines 36–40 of Book I, Satire 2:

      It is worth your while to give ear, ye who wish ill success to adulterous men, how on all sides they are beset by troubles, how their pleasure is spoiled by many a pain, is won but rarely, and then, as it often chances, amidst atrocious perils.

      Enough said on that point.

      Roman meters relied on syllable length rather than stress, so Horace's dactylic hexameter doesn't feel much like English dactylic hexameter. Indeed, today's formal poets rarely use dactylic hexameter because the line length and rhythms tend to sound alien to our ear. It was, however, the workhorse meter of Horace's age, and thus is arguably closest in spirit to our iambic pentameter.

      I have chosen to use rhyme, even though the Romans did not, because it is so embedded in our expectations of humorous poetry. The combination of rhyme and meter creates rhythms that lead to the expectation of a punch line, and the anticipation of the punch line is a key element of humor. Most of my rhymes are exact if one relies on my idiosyncratic American pronunciation (apologies to my British friends for “filleted”). I bent a bit to preserve a few names, and I used identical rhyme, otherwise known as “rime riche,” on the two occasions where Horace repeated a closing word or phrase from the previous line.

      I have used fewer metrical substitutions than Horace did, but I have used some. I have made frequent use of the convention of starting a line with a trochee rather than an iamb, and I have also used trochees to start sentences later in a line. As is common practice, I have also occasionally used substituted trochees to signal a shift to a darker mood.

      I have generally avoided anapestic substitutions except to preserve a name, and have used elision only when it is standard in everyday speech. I have also tried to track everyday pronunciation in my scansion, thus I counted “fire” as a two-syllable word that rhymes with “higher,” even though most formal poets of today still follow older conventions with regard to many words of this type.

      I hear more spondees (a foot of two syllables of approximately equal stress) than most formalists, and I have made many of what I consider to be spondaic substitutions. I also adamantly reject the notion that all stressed syllables must be hard stresses, and encourage those interested in prosody to embrace Timothy Steele's analysis of “relative stress” in his all the fun's in how you say a thing (Ohio University Press, 1999).

      When I ended a line with a feminine ending (an extra unstressed syllable at the end of the line), I gave myself the option of making the next line either a “headless” (first unstressed syllable dropped) or a standard iambic pentameter line. Practice varies, and I usually used the headless lines to make enjambed lines flow without a break in the rhythm. I have also avoided capitalizing the first word in each line because I thought to do so would distract the reader in the enjambed lines that attempt to mimic Horace's enjambment.

      I tried to replicate puns when I could, and used wordplay in the vicinity of puns when I could not pun more precisely. I also tried to avoid words and tropes with too much of a modern connotation (I reluctantly gave up on “waffling” at one point for this reason), but occasionally allowed myself some liberties.

      For all the years of frustration, this project gave me great joy. I hope it gives you great joy as well.

      Introduction

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