The Odes of Horace: Bilingual Edition [Paperback]

David Ferry (Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 1998

The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages.

Now David Ferry, the acclaimed poet and translator of Gilgamesh, has made an inspired new translation of the complete Odes of Horace, one that conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

David Ferry's The Odes of Horace represents the first truly distinguished translation of the complete odes into the American idiom. The translator has managed to retain the poet's moral tone while purging any taint of sententiousness. How? By recasting the structure of "Carpe Diem," for example, he gives this familiar poem a power one would have not thought possible. Ferry even manages a Latin-English rhyme at the end, by shifting the position of the addressee's name: "Leuconoe-- / Hold on to the day."

Ferry's Horace is always a specific personality, with his own identity, background, and attitude. Yet he is also a conduit of history. Turning to "Delicta maiorum immeritus lues..." (which Ferry straightforwardly calls "To the Romans"), we are plunged into a devastating meditation on the imperium. At this point, of course, it's commonplace to point out similarities between the American empire and that of ancient Rome. But this translation gives us a feeling for just how contemporary Horace really is. The best example would probably be "To Dellius":

Dellius, don't be
Too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune.
You are going to die.

It doesn't matter at all whether you spend
Your days and nights in sorrow,
Or, on the other hand, in holiday pleasure.
Drinking Falernian wine

Of an excellent vintage year, on the river bank.

It helps to know that the historical Dellius was exiled in Egypt at the time, making those Italian vintages strictly off-limits to him. What's more, he was a double or perhaps triple agent, which gives him an additional Cold War coloration. In any case, the allusiveness of the odes--and the taut, bone-dry English of Ferry's translation--should gain Horace a legion or so of new readers. --Mark Rudman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is a delightful translation of the Odes by poet, scholar, and translator Ferry, who with apparent effortlessness manages to render Horace's Latin poems into fine, unsmeared American idiom. Horace, along with his friend Virgil, is the most celebrated and influential poet of Augustus's reign and is renowned for his ability to make the ordinary (the commonplace events and situations of life) extraordinary. There are few surprises or dramatic aberrations in Horace's odes, but the absence of unusual subject matter only serves to draw attention to the simple beauty of its rendering. This will be a superb addition to any library's collection.?Thomas F. Merrill, formerly with Univ. of Delaware
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (October 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525722
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525729
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars There IS a better translation of Horace out there. . . May 17, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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!

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to like this but . . . January 13, 2002

By M. Lane

Format:Paperback

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid new translation of Horace November 27, 2009

By Palinurus

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Middle of the road translation September 13, 2004

By Kuru

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Please note that the poorly rated reviews are NOT for this book. November 24, 2008

By Constant Reader

Format:Paperback

Amazon has clearly mixed up the reviews for two different translations of Horace! I have read the Kaimowitz translation and have heard a reading of the tranlation; it is lovely. The author attempts to make the English translation have the same feeling and tone as the original Latin and succeeds admirably, according to my friends who know the poems in the original Latin. What I admire is the intimacy between the reader and Horace that the author has managed to create. I feel as if the span of centuries has been bridged and I have entered Horace's world, evesdropping on his conversation. Amazon does an injustice to this edition by muddling the ratings and reviews with a less-liked translation by another author.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Uncommon Poems of the Commonplace June 11, 2000

By Donald Vish

Format:Paperback

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ferry's translation captures the tone of Horace's Odes July 17, 1998

By Outis Nihil

Format:Hardcover

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.