The Satires of Horace [Paperback]

William Matthews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2002

“What is special about Matthews’ Horatian Satires is the immediacy of the idiom, the sense of discovery of the actual moment, the quickness of the turn of the line. . . . Horace’s words, in Matthews’ hands, become alive, just-written, and immortal again because they are so new.”—Stanley Plumly

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The lyric poetry of antiquity is often as important to modern poets as it is to translators and classical scholars. Mulroy is a professor of classics (Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), and Carson (classics, McGill Univ.; The Beauty of the Husband) and the late William Matthews (After All: Last Poems) are well-regarded poets. Following Pound's dictum to "make it new," Mulroy and Matthews translate Catullus and Horace into modern American idiom, striving where possible to find cultural equivalents rather than literal translations. At the same time, they try to be true to the shifting tones and rhythms of their originals. The results are fluent, giving some sense of the contemporaneousness that Catullus and Horace would have evoked in their audiences. Carson's translation follows Sappho's diction and form much more closely and includes the Greek original on the facing page. Much of what survives of Sappho are fragments, often just a stray word, phrase, or even a few letters. Like many modern poets, Carson deploys these on the blank page, letting their suggestiveness fill the gaps and create whole lyrics in the imagination of the readers. All three translators aim for a general audience, though Mulroy and Carson also include notes and introductions of value to the more scholarly reader. All three books are recommended for both public and academic libraries. T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Latin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Ausable Press (May 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931337012
• ISBN-13: 978-1931337014
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Horace well captured, February 1, 2010

By 

Andrew Charig (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Satires of Horace (Paperback)

Translating poetry is literary nightmare; it is written to be read with the scansion and tempo of the language it was written in, and no other. Latin is especially difficult, because the grammar is fundamentally different from modern European languages, and Romans wrote with rhythms (hexameters, often) which seem inherently stilted to us, and no rhyme at all. A translator feels bound to preserve the sense of his author as strictly as possible, but also to capture the feel of the work, and reproduce it in a modern language in a form that will capture, for his own audience, what it was the author sent to his. Tall order. Especially after two millennia. Pope's Iliad for instance is pathetically obscure and verbose, and completely misses Homer's pith (and vinegar). Roman poets generally wrote about public events and the people Roman's knew, so their works need lots of explanatory notes, which are distracting.

Matthews' Satires addresses these problems intelligently. He looked at previous translations and accepted some (some phrases are abstracted intact from the 1929 Fairclough). He avoided Horace's meter, which could only introduce clumsy phrasing into an English version. And by elaborating the text enough to build in explanations, he built the footnotes into it, so there are few distractions.

Purists may find perfectly good reasons to object to some passages (there are a few words in there that Horace never wrote), but he captures Horace - his humor, his fun, and his insight into the human condition - and gives it to those who can read him no other way. And that's great. Five stars.