Odes to Longing, And to Change

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Sometimes a fine sentiment is turned by time into a mockery of itself. When the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) wrote that “it is lovely and honorable to die for the homeland,” he could hardly, even in his wildest imaginings, have foreseen that it would come to stand, centuries later, as a sarcastic epitaph for those young men whose lives were squandered in the trenches of the Great War. The English poet Wilfred Owen used the Horatian tag (“Dulce et decorum est”) as the title of one of his bitterest war poems where he denounced it as “the old Lie.” Owen knew what he was talking about; he had served in the ranks and would be killed, in 1918, at the age of 25, a mere week before the armistice.

It may be a sign of Horace’s genius that his most famous lines, even when turned on their heads, continue to resound. He was confident that his verse would survive. In a famous ode he boasted,

I’ve made a monument outlasting bronze
And taller than the pharaohs’ strongest stones.
The raging north wind and devouring rains
Can’t ruin it, nor all the countless chains
Of years, as time escapes us, flying by.
The one great part of me will never die.

The translation comes from “The Odes of Horace in Latin and English” (Carcanet, 250 pages, $17.95), translated with an introduction by Len Krisak, and with a learned and witty foreword by the classicist and author Frederic Raphael. As the quote shows, Mr. Krisak, a poet himself, has had the unfashionable audacity to translate Horace in rhyming stanzas. In the case of Horace and other classical authors, it seems doubly suspect. Latin (and Greek) poets never resorted to rhyme, depending for their effects on subtle prosody and on quantitative measures; the varying lengths of short and long vowels provided the verbal music. But the use of rhyme has its advantages. When skillfully done, rhyme obliges the translator to strive for conciseness and felicity of phrase; at its best, as here, in Mr. Krisak’s version, it can suggest the compressed elegance of the original.

Rhyming translations of Horace are as old as English poetry itself, and as venerable. To transpose his odes into trim quatrains was somehow to domesticate him, to make him fully English. For Horace had the unusual distinction of serving not only as a much-loved author, admired for the exquisite

perfection of his verse, but of standing as a model for the welllived life. Mr. Raphael notes that Horace called himself, in slyly self-deprecating mode, “a porker from the herd of Epicurus.” By this, he not only flaunted his modesty but signaled his earthiness; even his most magnificent flights are firmly grounded.

As an Epicurean, Horace was keenly aware of death. In one of his most celebrated odes, addressed to a friend with the gloomy moniker “Postumus,” he wrote:

O Postumus, my friend, think of the years,
And how, my Postumus, they slip away,
ill old age brings the furrows ploughed by tears—
And death, which piety cannot delay.

But for Horace, awareness of death acts as a spur to life. His ideal may seem quaint — to live modestly, without grandiose expectations, but to live to the full — and yet, it is an ideal with a sweet reasonableness all its own; it is an ideal within everyone’s grasp. This makes Horace sound a bit dull, and yet he was quite a party animal too:

Now is the time to drink and dance; feel free
To stamp the earth now; fancy food should be
Laid out on couches of the gods.

Mr. Krisak’s versions of the four books of Odes and the magnificent “Centennial Hymn” are easily the finest recent re-creations of Horace. They are accurate and stubbornly faithful to the original but read beautifully as English poems in their own right. Mr. Krisak is especially adept at capturing the wide tonal range of Horace’s verse, from the slyly understated to the triumphantly full-throated. This is a remarkable achievement.

Horace is, most famously, the poet laureate of the fleeting moment. He prizes those subtle, almost inconspicuous instants when change takes place, as when winter gives way to the beginning of spring. In one of his best-known maxims, he teaches us to “seize the day” (“carpe diem”), and he means it:

Harsh winter melts; the welcome spring and west winds come again
As winches drag the dry-docked hulls to sea.
The farmer spurns his fire; the cattle long to leave their pen,
While pastures thaw and green fields struggle free.

This is restrained yet full of longing; the closely observed details give it a quiet power. Perhaps only an “Epicurean porker” like Horace, his trotters planted firmly on the earth, could feel how those penned cattle yearn for the spring pastures and how even the “dry-docked hulls” ache for the brief freedom of the sea.

eormsby@nysun.com


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