Customer Reviews

The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition

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David Ferry's translation is simply undeservedly popular and is absolutely NOT the best Horace in English currently in print!

I defy anyone to find Ferry's Horace superior to the wonderfully readable translation done recently by Sidney Alexander and published in Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Richard Howard, translator extraordinaire himself, has written a short Preface for the volume, in which he compares a passage from Alexander's work to other versions of the same passage done by Pound, Michie, and Burton Raffel, and Howard justly judges that Alexander's is the "far superior text."

Ferry's language is too often simply muddled, the syntax unclear. Do yourself a great favor, buy the Sidney Alexander translation, and you'll be rewarded with a vastly more enjoyable reading experience!

I wanted to like this translation after all the nice things that D.S. Carne-Ross said about it in the useful and enjoyable "Horace in English." But this is a translation that is made more for image-by-image accuracy than for the ear. Often you read Ferry describing the right word rather than saying it. (Phrases like "too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune" read like a dictionary entries.) In the difficult-to-render i.5 he ends up phrasing things like Yoda - "Hapless are they enamored of that beauty." Too academic are they who write as this one.

These new translations of the Odes capture the freshness and ingenuity of the originals. For readers of Latin, they offer a companionable appreciation that recreates the thrill of direct encounter with the originals. For any reader, the translations convey the excitement of penetrating the puzzles of the Latin to discover the edginess of Rome's predominant lyric innovator.

Horace invented the short meditative form that dominates twenty-first century poetry. He was also one of the first important figures in the Western literary tradition to speak as a whole person and not merely as a representative of his social group or as a disembodied conduit of human feeling. Kaimowitz's versions fully convey the specificity of Horace's human voice, getting over into English the surprising twists of his thought, and the strength of his view of life.

The translations manage to do this by following the inner course of each poem on several levels. No English counterpart can faithfully recreate the sentence structure of the originals. The highly inflected nature of the Latin language renders the position of a word in a sentence unnecessary in determining its grammatical role. Horace uses the consequent flexibility of his language to multiply the nuances of a sentence, for example, by allowing an adjective to precede by several lines the noun it modifies, or again by withholding the verb of a sentence for a long delayed appearance, leaving the much earlier encountered subject and object of the sentence in suspense.

Kaimowitz takes aim at the resulting subtlety and relentlessly follows Horace's underlying message, by imitating the order in which elements of his thought are displayed in the original, and by devising equivalents that stretch the grammatical and structural possibilities of English but nevertheless achieve a rare grace of their own.

The inward sense of the originals is also partly conveyed by the fidelity of these translations to the metrical shape of the Latin poems. Horace was himself borrowing meters from the already centuries-old Greek lyric tradition. It is fitting that these translations strive to accomplish a metrical revival like Horace's own. In the process, they take on a compact, burnished look like that of the poems they stand for.

I bought this at the same time as Michie's translation and prefer the latter. Ferry does a decent job of capturing the simplest level of the poems readably and easily, but the subtlety and deeper levels of the originals seem to be missing.

For someone wanting the Latin texts, however, this book might be a good buy, since the poems are attractively presented, each starting on a fresh page, in a pleasant typeface.

No doubt that a command of Greek and Roman mythology adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of Horace's Odes but in many cases the context explains the reference. Horace's commonplace themes are deeply imbedded in our culture and he illuminates them with uncommon insight and poetry: love is cruel, seize the day, greed wants more, death equalizes, happy the one who wants nothing, don't be beguiled by past success, luck changes, accept your place, beauty fades, death comes, money can't buy peace, a friend is our other half. I love Horace the man, the Odes and the Ferry translation which brings a contemporary idiom to the poems without seeming contrived.

Horace's odes are particularly difficult to translate because the poet modulates his tone, the emotional registers of his voice, and the speed of his verse suddenly and dramatically. Ferry's translations above all capture these swift changes in Horace's voice, providing the English versions that best reproduce the remarkable range of Horace's style.

This is one of the worst translations of any book in any language I've ever come across. You'll never understand the harmony, grace, and beauty of Horace from Ferry's translation. He often just makes up entire phrases and throws in unnecessary filler, or he'll eliminate poetically necessary words and phrases that might help you understand Horace's artistic intent. Even worse, his English is awkward, wordy, unmusical, or just plain meaningless.

For example, let's take the first stanza of Ode 1.38 "To his Slave."

Here's the Latin:
Persicos odi, puer, apparatus,
displicent nexae philyra coronae
mitte sectari rosa quo locorum
sera moretur.

Here's Ferry's horrible and wildly inaccurate translation:
I dislike elaborate show, as, for example,
"Persian" garlands too intricately woven,
So don't go looking everywhere for somewhere
Where the last-blooming rose anywhere might be.

Here's good crib from Michael Gilleland that I found on his excellent "Odes of Horace" website. This translation actually captures what Horace is saying:
Boy, I dislike Persian finery;
garlands sewn with bast displease me;
don't try to find out in what spot the
late-blooming rose lingers.

Notice the difference? Horace doesn't say, "I dislike elaborate show, as, for example, Persian garlands. . .". He says, "Boy, I dislike Persian finery." Horace doesn't say, "garlands too intricately woven," he says, "garlands sewn with bast." (The word "philyra" actually means the inner bark of the Linden tree.)

And I think anyone with an ear for English poetry would recoil in horror from Ferry's last two lines. "So don't go looking everywhere for somewhere where the last-blooming rose anywhere might be." This is one of the most ungainly and graceless English sentences I've ever encountered, and it's not even within a stone's throw of the Latin. The Latin "sera" mean "late," not "last," and nowhere in the Latin will you find "everywhere, anywhere, somewhere," all of which are ugly, superfluous, and jarring. Ferry takes a perfectly simple and lovely Latin phrase of seven words and turns it into a complicated, inharmonious paragraph of 15 words that makes you recoil in pain.

The last half of this poem is even more poorly written and inaccurate, as are the rest of his translations. If you love Horace or are trying to learn Latin, do not buy this book. If you have it, throw it away. Buy the Loeb Horace--it is infintely better. Better yet, buy "Horace Fully Parsed, Word by Word." This is the best book around to really help you understand Horace's intricate beauty and poetic magic. It's on Amazon. Too bad Ferry (whoever he is), didn't use it. He obviously can't read Latin, and he can barely write in English.

This is another unreadable (and incomprehensible) translation of Horace. Get the David West translation in the World Classics edition. At least, you will be able to understand the poems in that version.