Customer Reviews

The Satires of Horace

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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.