Odes and Carmen Saeculare

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Horace, by Horace
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Title: Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace
Author: Horace
Release Date: April, 2004 [EBook #5432]
[Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 18,
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Edition: 10
Language: English
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, ODES AND
CARMEN SAECULARE OF HORACE ***
David Moynihan, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
THE ODES AND CARMEN SAECULARE OF HORACE
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE
BY JOHN
CONINGTON, M.A.
CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN
THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
THIRD EDITION.
PREFACE.
I scarcely know what excuse I can offer for making public this attempt
to "translate the untranslatable." No one can be more convinced than I
am that a really successful translator must be himself an original poet;
and where the author translated happens to be one whose special
characteristic is incommunicable grace of expression, the demand on
the translator's powers would seem to be indefinitely increased. Yet the
time appears to be gone by when men of great original gifts could find
satisfaction in reproducing the thoughts and words of others; and the
work, if done at all, must now be done by writers of inferior pretension.
Among these, however, there are still degrees; and the experience
which I have gained since I first adventured as a poetical translator has
made me doubt whether I may not be ill-advised in resuming the
experiment under any circumstances. Still, an experiment of this kind
may have an advantage of its own, even when it is unsuccessful; it may
serve as a piece of embodied criticism, showing what the experimenter
conceived to be the conditions of success, and may thus, to borrow
Horace's own metaphor of the whetstone, impart to others a quality
which it is itself without. Perhaps I may be allowed, for a few moments,
to combine precept with example, and imitate my distinguished friend
and colleague, Professor Arnold, in offering some counsels to the
future translator of Horace's Odes, referring, at the same time, by way
of illustration, to my own attempt.

The first thing at which, as it seems to me, a Horatian translator ought
to aim, is some kind of metrical conformity to his original. Without this
we are in danger of losing not only the metrical, but the general effect
of the Latin; we express ourselves in a different compass, and the
character of the expression is altered accordingly. For instance, one of
Horace's leading features is his occasional sententiousness. It is this,
perhaps more than anything else, that has made him a storehouse of
quotations. He condenses a general truth in a few words, and thus
makes his wisdom portable. "Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit;" "Nihil
est ab omni parte beatum;" "Omnes eodem cogimur,"--these and
similar expressions remain in the memory when other features of
Horace's style, equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It
is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious
brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous
to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse
measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to
mention that much will often depend on the very position of the
sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, in order to preserve these external
peculiarities, it may be necessary to recast the expression, to substitute,
in fact, one form of proverb for another; but this is far preferable to
retaining the words in a diluted form, and so losing what gives them
their character, I cannot doubt, then, that it is necessary in translating an
Ode of Horace to choose some analogous metre; as little can I doubt
that a translator of the Odes should appropriate to each Ode some
particular metre as its own. It may be true that Horace himself does not
invariably suit