The way to enjoy Horace is to read him and not about him, and the way to read him is in Latin. These translations, published by and for the friends of the two translators, at first consideration, then, avail little, for except for one ode quoted in full in this preface (with a half dozen or so translations of it) the Latin is not given. Happily, however, in this case, it may be taken for granted that for the public for whom this small work is designed, it will be no great hardship to lay hand on a Latin version of the poems.

For most of us, it is extremely difficult to read Horace, straight and cold, in Latin. When occasionally we try, most of us reproach ourselves for our unskill and blame the teachers of our childhood and youth with whom in earlier years we struggled wretchedly through the beginnings of Latin grammar, through Fabulae Faciles, Caesar, Cicero, and perhaps, if we persisted far enough, Vergil and some of Horace.

If we had been born a generation or two earlier, it would not have been “the few who persisted” who would have had some Horace. For every educated man of what we may loosely call Western Christendom read some Horace, from the time of the Renaissance when we first started the wholesale production of educated men. In England, and in this country up to the end of the nineteenth century, it was drummed and hammered into every schoolboy. Kipling in his autobiography refers to “King,” of much beloved memory to readers of Stalky & Co., as having “taught me to loathe Horace for 2 years, to forget him for 20, and then to love him for the rest of my days, and through many sleepless nights.”

But Horace was never easy to read, I think probably not even to his contemporaries. He says himself that trying to be concise, he is obscure.¹

The earliest extant commentary, that of Porphyrius in the third century, while aimed somewhat at helping one understand Horace, is really aimed at helping one read him.

Horace is not hard to understand, once one can read what he is saying, find the subject or predicate of the verb, put together the two halves of an ablative absolute, distinguish some gerunds and gerundives, or join the proper adjective in one line to its noun that may appear in the middle of the third line away. There is no great trouble after this.

There began to be editions of Horace almost as soon as there was printing. There were over thirty before 1500, and more than 200 in the next century. Up to now there have been some 4,000. The great majority of these have notes or comments. Some have as much comment as text; and a few, when the fashion for such things was at its height in the sixteenth century, have considerably more. There is a Venice edition of 1559 which, in addition to the early commentaries of Porphyrius and of Acronis, had those of Parrhasius, Mancinelli and Ascensius, who had already been popular for a generation; with their scholia, scholiisque, the title page reads, Angeli Politiani, M. Antonii Sabellici, Ludovici Coelii Rodigini, Baptistae Pii, Petri Criniti, Aldi Manutii, Matthaei Bonfinis & Jacobi Bononiensis nuper adjunctis. Nor is this all. His nos praeterea annotationes … Antonii Thylesii Consentini, Francisci Robertelli Utinensis, atque Henrici Glareani … addidimus. After all this come the notes on the metre by Nicolas Perotus.

If the man of the Renaissance took his Horace with this much learned assistance, we need not perhaps feel too badly when, confronted by a beautiful quarto page of the Baskerville edition, unblemished by note, comment, or explanation, we read our author with a little difficulty.

The chief trouble in reading Horace is in the order of the words, and most of the early commentators gave an ordo for the complicated passages. The ordo of two different editions is not necessarily the same; the ordo in a French edition will usually differ from that in an English one.² But in some of the harder passages of Horace almost any ordo or order other than his may help the reader. However, the rearrangement of the words in Latin is not necessary, and for the reader of Horace whose Latin is a little less than adequate, any version in his mother tongue, prose or verse, paraphrase, imitation, or burlesque will suffice, and many are a joy!

Occasionally, as we believe is the case with the present translations, where learning has been lightened and brightened with sympathy and wit, the translations can stand alone; but even with these, we cannot but urge the reader to reach to his shelves and read them with the original.

For as we said, the way to enjoy Horace is to read him in Latin, which generally speaking we cannot do today, and probably no one ever could do easily. Another way is to read him with a literal translation beside us, and for this something like the eighteenth-century editions by David Watson with notes and ordo serve well: easier to find and about as useful, even though it lacks the ordo and notes, is the contemporary Loeb Library edition. Better still, one step better, is to read a poetic translation published with the Latin on one page and English on the opposite, of which there are a good number. That by Bulwer Lytton is a fair example, but the trouble in this case is that we are separated from Lord Lytton by about a century, and though we are hardly aware of it, our own English usage has changed a little since then, and things that were subtle to his readers are often obscure to us. He, moreover, like many, set out to translate the odes and epodes, and he did translate the odes and epodes. Some of his results are inspired, but in some we feel that a particular ode may have been done only because the preceding and following ones had been done, and therefore this one had to be.

Best of all, so far as it goes, for the reader who can put his hand on some or any edition of Horace (and this, after all, is any reader), is what is here presented, a translation in verse, a double translation in a number of instances, of some of the odes and epodes, not all, but only those their fancy chose, by two wise and witty gentlemen. Either could doubtless have translated all of them in verse. Neither did, and nothing in the two collections is forced or strained. It is an unfeeling reader who will not know, as he reads, that these translations were made not for duty but delight.

Horace, of course, is untranslatable. This is one of the commonest remarks about Horace, and even though it seems a little foolish to put it in a preface to some new translations, there is a compulsion to say it again. One of the present translators has said it himself, and yet happily it did not deter him; and the uncounted others who have made an effort to put Horace, sound and shape as well as sense, into another language, whether they called their versions translations, paraphrases, burlesques, or imitations (there was an ecphrasis from Venice in 1546), must all have known this, and many of them said it.

It is true, in a way, or partly so, and partly, in a way, it is not true.

It is no very difficult matter to put any particular verse of Horace into English, or for that matter French, or Dutch, or German, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian. It has been done many times in most of these languages. He has also been translated into Russian, Polish, Rumanian, Arabic, and Chinese, and at least once into Greek. This latter is hardly remarkable, for Horace, as he says himself, “first taught Graecian measures how to run in Latin song,”

Princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
Deduxisse modos …

Bk. III:30

or as Philip Francis translated it in the middle eighteenth century,

Who first attempted to inspire
With Graecian sounds the Roman lyre.

However, putting the words of a poem into another language, say French, or English, does not necessarily (actually almost never) result in a French or English poem.

But it is also possible to translate faithfully an ode of Horace into poetry in another language. Even more is possible: it can be translated into poetry of close to the same form. Particularly is this true in English. Milton did this with Quis multa gracilis with more or less success (each will have his own opinion about the extent of the success), and so have other poets with other odes; Bulwer Lytton, for example, to a good degree, or so it seems to me, with O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique (Bk. I:30). Someone has called this “dancing in chains,” yet these and others have done it nicely, even though they do not often achieve anything to equal the line of Cowley that so pleased John Drinkwater:³

And trusts the faithless April of thy May.

or Dryden's

Half unwilling willing kiss.

The results in these cases are good, but they are not precisely Horace.

There are a great number of translations of single poems that are precious to readers of English poetry, by Congreve, Otway, Prior, Ben Jonson, Samuel Johnson, and nearer the present day, by Conington, De Vere, Gladstone, Robert Louis Stevenson, Austin Dobson, Lord Dunsany, to name only a few.

Only the verse translations can be read with any satisfaction. A literal translation is only a literal translation, and while the meaning is there, everything is lost of the author's admitted chief joy, that of arranging words together.

As a result, amateur translators, by whom I mean those who have laboured for love, have not been willing to spend their time making prose translations, but have tried in their various ways not only to give the meaning, but to give some of the metric, rhythmic, musical sound and form of the original. This is what seems impossible. However skillfully done, the result does not have the quality of the original; associations of words in one language will not carry through to another, puns, onomatopoeia, alliteration, will vanish. If these aspects are worked into the translation, then the literal sense almost inevitably suffers.

Yet many of the translators, greatly inspired, have produced the happiest results. Few of us can ever read the Pyrrha ode and not think of Milton's translation, or the Torquatus (the first printed Horace) and not think of Dr. Johnson's

The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again.

or the Intermissa, Venus, diu, without our memories of the Horace being interwoven with those of Ben Jonson and Ernest Dowson.

Many of the English versions are dear to our memory, but they are not exactly Horace. In a way they are more than Horace, they are Horace plus Milton, or Horace plus Prior, or Dobson, or De Vere, down to our present translators.

Perhaps the best evidence that there is justification for now putting forth these new versions of some of Horace will appear if we follow any particular ode through a few of its changes in other than the words of its author.

Persicos odi serves us best. Most of us will remember some of the eight Latin lines of this many-times-translated darling. Horace wrote:

Carminum Liber I
XXXVIII
Persicos odi, puer, apparatus,
displicent nexae philyra coronae;
mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum sera moretur.
Simplici myrto nihil allabores
sedulus, cura: neque te ministrum
dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem.

In the translations which follow there seems to me to be a gratifying variety. There is not much to choose between the two prose versions, the first of the eighteenth and the second of the twentieth century; and it is hard to believe that the Francis translation which follows them appeared at the same time as Watson's. That by Archdeacon Wrangham is pleasing, as, indeed, are all of the hundred and two that he made; and we have always felt kindly toward him for his modest prefatory explanation that his version was not undertaken “in any regular succession, but promiscuously, as memory, during my solitary walks or rides suggested the originals.” We include Hartley Coleridge's version because of the curious fact that it is the reason why the fine translations of the odes of the First Book by Patrick Branwell Brontë are incomplete, lacking this one ode. On 27 June 1840 he wrote, at the end of his manuscript, “This ode I have no heart to attempt after having heard Mr. H. Coleridge's translation on May-day at Ambleside.”

Bulwer Lytton in this, as in many of his translations, follows the form of the original, and, it seems, with no sacrifice of sense. But he fails to capture the sprightliness that one sees in the Archdeacon's version. As the translations come nearer to the present day, through those of De Vere, and of Eugene and Roswell Field, the touch seems to get lighter; translation tends to become paraphrase, paraphrase as in Franklin P. Adams' version, and some of those of our present translators, comes close to burlesque. Who cares? They are a joy to read, and we always have the original.

Notes

1. … brevis esse laboro, Obscurus fio … Ars Poetica 25.

2. One may compare, for example, Persicos odi, Bk. I;38, in any one of the editions which have the notes of Porphyrius, Acronis, and Ascensius, say that published in Paris in 1519, with the same ode in the edition by David Watson, London 1743, and with the Paris edition of 1894 with arguments and notes “par une société de Professeurs et de latinistes.”

3. The Odes of … Horace … translated by Patrick Branwell Brontë with an introduction by John Drinkwater, London, privately printed 1923.