Waiting for the Barbarians (23 page)

As it turned out, these stylistic and technical innovations perfectly served a characteristic thematic preoccupation: the relationship between pleasure and pain, between how we would like to live and what life does to us. When you carefully follow the strangely winding thread of Horace’s thought from stanza to stanza, you often find yourself arriving at a destination quite different from the one the opening line might have promised. Below I have translated I.22,
Integer vitae
, “Wholesome in life,” a classic example of this characteristic Horatian sleight of hand, in which the poet’s attention wavers between high Romanness and his charming girlfriend, Lalagê:

The poem begins as if it’s going to celebrate a certain kind of Roman virtue and gravitas. (It was, indeed, often set to music and performed at funerals in Germany and Scandinavia during the nineteenth century.) And yet a shift occurs at the beginning of the third stanza, which purports to give an example of the principle, articulated in the first two, that the honest man needs no armor but his goodness. With a flourish so grand that it suggests we are not to take this business about virtue all that seriously, Horace posits himself as the exemplar of the heroism he lauds in the opening, all because (another letdown) a wolf once avoided him in a forest.

And just what (another shift) was he doing in the forest, anyway? Singing ditties about his darling if perhaps airheaded girlfriend (her Greek name, Lalagê, is derived from the verb “to chatter”). The final pair of stanzas make us realize that the poem is not, after all, about purity and innocence but rather about desire and poetry. For it is Horace’s singing and his loving that will endure, however adverse the conditions; and it occurs to you to wonder whether those conditions might not, after all, include a dour cultural emphasis on wholesomeness and purity.

The sudden swerve in Horace’s train of thought, so elegantly limned by his particular technique, can be found in a vast range of the odes on many subjects, both patently political and quietly personal. The penultimate poem of Book I, on Octavian’s triumph over Cleopatra, famously begins with a call for the celebratory drinking and foot-stomping to mark the demise of the “demented queen” (
Nunc est bibendum
, “Now let us drink”), but segues to an unsettling simile that compares the fleeing queen at Actium to a “gentle dove” pursued by a hawk—which is to say, Augustus—and then ends, somewhat disorientingly, with a moving
hommage
to the “fierce” dignity of her desire to “die more nobly,” “not to be dragged, some lowly woman, in another’s proud triumph.”

Such shifts are paralleled by another technique: sudden narrowings in focus from the general to the concrete, which can also subvert the poem’s ostensible meaning. In the Mount Soracte ode, Horace’s blithe admonishment to a young friend to enjoy love while he can takes a sudden, ferocious force from that closing evocation of the laughter of a young girl flirting in some piazza with a boy who’s just snatched a love token from her finger. That flirtation was a plausible enough prospect for Horace’s friend, but is, you realize, only a memory now for Horace himself. (And the loaded if taut manner in which
the poet describes the girl’s finger—
male pertinaci
, “badly resisting”—gives some sense of the economy of expression that further characterizes his “lapidary” diction.)

So too the Regulus ode, which so tortured Kipling’s schoolboy, and which ends with a description of the dutiful soldier going off to suffer in war—an action the poet decides, almost as an afterthought, to compare to a man going off to a weekend in the country. In the context of what has preceded it, the sudden invocation of peacetime pleasures is shattering. The progressions and shifts of the poet’s thought, as it moves through his meticulously fitted verses, is as unpredictable as the progress of any human experience, or human life, and it is this uncertainty that gives the poems, like the lives, their evanescent tone and fragile beauty.

All this is done with such great authority, and with such wit and panache—each of the first nine odes of Book I, the so-called “Parade odes,” is in a different Greek meter; it’s the poetic equivalent of the compulsories in a sporting event, designed to show you that he’s up to all the technical challenges—that it’s easy to forget that nobody had ever done it before. But it made a great posterity possible. That we find it perfectly natural that a poet’s project might be to express, in a wide variety of personas, something at once weighty and delicate in simple-looking four-line stanzas—to be formally structured but intellectually and emotionally varied, to be discursive and deeply poetic at the same time about a wide variety of subjects, many of them ostensibly everyday rather than ecstatic—is Horace’s legacy to Western poetry.

The fiercely disciplined reasonableness of Horace’s vision, his insistence on a poetic technique as rigorously thought out and meticulously achieved as the happiness the poems themselves endorse, have
long endeared him to other poets more, perhaps, than to the reading public at large. Auden had already put his finger on Horace’s appeal in his own, very Horatian ode about the modern “Horatians,” sensible but deeply feeling people who know that they

The word “polish” in the contemporary poem suggests the germ of Horace’s appeal, particularly to poets who, as J.D. McClatchy points out in the introduction to
Horace, The Odes
, his 2002 collection of verse renderings of the
Odes
by thirty-five well-known poets, have “put aside their singing robes, once they think of themselves as craftsmen rather than as bards, once they attend the world as a surgery and not a party.” It is, indeed, Horace’s supreme craftsmanship that has always made him at once “wholly untranslatable,” as Brooks Otis declared (“like making ropes out of sand,” Harold Mattingly once harrumphed in a book about Roman civilization), and irresistible to centuries of poets, particularly poets in English, from Dryden and Pope to Housman and (to cite the most recent of a spate of new translations of the
Odes
) David Ferry, whose much-praised translation appeared in 1997.

It is perhaps inevitable that every new translation of a great classic, like every new production of a canonical opera, needs some kind of self-justificatory new “take” on the work: in Sidney Alexander’s
meticulous 1999 translation of the
Odes
, for instance, it was that he was giving us Horace as “the quintessential Italian.” In the introduction to his volume, McClatchy announces the distinguishing feature of the collection: “Never before,” he writes, “have the leading poets of the day assembled specifically to translate all the odes.” He goes on to declare that

These
Odes
thus stand alongside recent collections of translations of a given classic, parts of which are distributed among different contemporary poets: for instance, Daniel Halpern’s
Dante’s Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets
or Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun’s
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
.

And yet while you admire McClatchy’s impulse to create interesting textures between poet and translator, some of that “editorial plot” sounds a little gimmicky to me. Surely it’s enough to want to see how a group of excellent contemporary poets handle Horace, without having to suggest, inter alia, that southerners know more about countrysides than (say) midwesterners or New Englanders do, that women know more about seduction than men, or that gay men are more intimate with “degeneracy” (scare quotes or no) than are
others. For my part, I’d be happy with a gay translator who knew Latin as well as he presumably knew degeneracy: Mark Doty, a poet I much admire, seems to think that Horace was (as he says in III.14) a young man during the consulship of someone called “Planco,” probably because the words
consule Planco
appear in Horace’s text; but that’s just because
Planco
is the ablative form of
Plancus
, the consul’s actual name. Such glitches would have been easy enough to correct, had the editorial focus been on Romans rather than Americans.

There are, to be sure, many deep pleasures to be had from individual translations you find here. Not least is that of an older poet, who has given to the incomparable Ligurinus ode, which begins with a weary rejection of love but ends in an image of heartbreaking erotic turmoil, just the right shift from bantering faux-Sappho (“So it’s war again, Venus, / after all this time?”) to the plaintive and poignant yearning of the poem’s ending. In these last lines, the translator nicely replicates, with the long and short
i
’s, and with the
m
’s of his “Then why, Ligurinus, why / do my eyes sometimes fill, even spill over?,” both the assonant repetitions and yearning alliterative
m
’s and
n
’s of the Latin
sed cur heu, Ligurine, cur
/
manat rare meas lacrima per genas?
I doubt that such felicities are due simply to the fact that Richard Howard, the translator of this “old age” poem, was born in 1929.

Similarly effective is the contribution of John Hollander, who in all of his translations, including an excellent rendering of the Soracte ode, displays a fine sensitivity in matters of enjambment, both between lines and between stanzas—always of vital importance in this poet, in whom sequences of thought are everything. Dick Davis’s
Carmen saeculare
, which I quoted at the beginning of this essay, is appropriately dignified and yet manages, by means of rhymes on alternate lines, to sound like a song, which is precisely what it is. And I liked the elegant way in which Rosanna Warren handles the unenviable assignment of IV.7,
Diffugere nives
, “The snows are fled away,”
the poem that A.E. Housman famously considered to be the most beautiful in ancient literature and which he himself memorably translated in a way that managed to sound both like Horace and like himself (“The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws / And grasses in the mead renew their birth …”). Warren has managed to find new growth herself in these lines, unpacking the Latin to create fresh but not strained effects in English that make the poem sound, indeed, like poetry: “All gone, the snow: grass throngs back to the fields, / the trees grow out new hair …”

So McClatchy’s Horace has grown out some lovely new hair in which we can all luxuriate. Yet as a representation of the
Odes
as a whole (which, with its facing Latin pages, it is impossible not to take it as, whatever the editor’s demurs), the new collection has deep problems, for precisely the reasons the editor proffers in order to authorize the new effort: that Horace’s “mercurial shifts in mood and response” justify the wildly different tones and degrees of formality, from free verse to rhymed couplets, on offer here.

It seems to me that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Horace’s work. Horace’s poetic identity lies precisely in the meticulous and masterly way he uses form, form above all, to solve both stylistic and intellectual problems: if he writes a poem in a stanzaic meter, it’s because he wants you to feel the delicate rhythm of pausing and moving, pausing and moving, en route to the heart-stopping climax; if he casts it as a series of dense lines (as he does in the envoi to the first three books, III.30,
Exegi monumentum
, “I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze”), it’s because he wants you to feel the weight, the monumentality. Whatever his mercurial mood shifts, his absolute control and forceful personality give the poems a profound and unmistakable unity.