in Literature, Reception |

From the Vault: Horace Odes 1.1 (translation)

I was going through some old files I’d forgotten about on some long lost server space that I’d once gotten through my parents’ internet provider and I found this translation. It dates from 12 February 2003 and I do vaguely remember doing it, intending to work my way through all of Horace and posting my translations online. It looks like I never made it past this one, but I thought it would be interesting to post.

(I used footnotes throughout but oddly did not gloss the ‘Myrtoan sea’ which lies between the Cyclades and the Peloponnesus.)

Horace, Ode 1.1

(a priamel to his benefactor)

  1. Maecenas, grown from royal roots,
  2. O, my security, my flattering badge:

  3. There are those whom collecting Olympic dust
  4. on a chariot pleases—and turnposts avoided
  5. by fiery wheels, and the celebrated palm
  6. lifted to the gods, lords of the world.

  7. This man?— if the mass of fickle Romans1
  8. strives to raise him by threefold honors;2
  9. that?— if he stores in his own granary
  10. whatever is swept up from the Lybian threshing floor.

  11. One glad to split by hoe his ancestral
  12. fields?— not on Attalic3 terms
  13. could you ever move him, that on Cyprian4 bark
  14. he might carve the Myrtoan Sea, a gutless sailor.

  15. Fearing the African wind5 wrestling with the surging sea,
  16. the merchant extols the leisure and lands
  17. of his little hamlet, but soon rebuilds his shattered
  18. rafts, unfit to endure poverty.

  19. There is he who spurns neither a cup of old Massican6 wine
  20. nor to steal away a portion from the work day,
  21. now resting his limbs beneath a green strawberry tree,
  22. now off to the gentle source of some sacred spring.

  23. The camps please many, and the sound of trumpet7
  24. mixed with cornet8, and battles, hated by mothers.

  25. The hunter lies in wait beneath frigid father sky,9
  26. unmindful of his tender bride
  27. whether a doe has appeared with her faithful fawns
  28. or a Marsian10 boar bursts his well-wound nets.

  29. Me the ivies—the prize of learned brows—
  30. unite with the gods above; me an icy grove
  31. and a fickle chorus of Nymphs with Satyrs
  32. separate from the mass, if only her flutes
  33. Euterpe11 does not withhold, nor Polyhymnia12
  34. refuse to tune her Lesbian13 lyre.

  35. But if you place me among the lyric poets,
  36. I shall strike the stars with my head uplifted.
  • 1 Quirites, poetic equivalent for citizens of Rome. (Something like ‘Columbian’ in early American writing.)
  • 2 the curule aedileship, the praetorship, and the consulship
  • 3 Attalus, proverbial symbol of great wealth
  • 4 Cyprus, famed for lumber and shipbuilding
  • 5 the stormy southwestern wind
  • 6 famous wine from Mt. Massicus in Campania
  • 7 tuba, the straight war trumpet
  • 8 lituus, the curved cavalry trumpet
  • 9 Jupiter (abl. Jove), the Roman sky god (cf. Gk. Ζεῦ Πατήρ, Skt. Dyaus Pitar)
  • 10 Central Italian
  • 11 a Muse; literally ‘delight’
  • 12 a Muse; literally ‘much sung’
  • 13 an allusion to the great Greek lyric poets from the isle of Lesbos—Sappho and Alcaeus

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