On Translation | Gest on Horace

Margaret Ralston Gest: The Odes of Horace / With Five Prefacing Epodes (1973)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Background: Miriam Thrall's Foreword to this posthumously issued work tells us "This translation of Horace's Odes in the original meters was written by Margaret Ralston Gest during the eight years immediately preceding her death in 1965. She was an enthusiastic and meticulous scholar in a family of scholars and bibliophiles. Her interest in the classics spring from her childhood admiration of her father and ultimately led to the translation not only of Horace's Odes and fifteen of his Epodes, but of all of Catullus, Propertius, and the poetry included in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. None of this work she intended for publication, but did it for her own pleasure."

And from the essay on Horace's Meters we extract the following: "With a few exceptions the whole question of sound, in spite of its pre-eminence, has been neglected in the vast assortment of versions in English. Presumably because a first-rate translation has been stamped improcurable, the poets and readers have on the whole concluded that the meter best adapted to the English language should be chosen, rather than the one adapted to the elusive Latin of Horace's lines. In consequence, most of them have been written in iambic or, especially in the seventeenth century, trochaic or dactylic. This becomes doubly misleading when it is remembered that Horace is widely acclaimed as the greatest prosodist that the Western world has produced, with the possible exception of Sappho and Pindar - all of Horace's variety of polymetric stanzas swept away by English-speaking peoples and rarely mentioned. The present translation by Margaret Gest is important because it is the first as far as I know to use Horace's original meters throughout all of his 104 Odes."

04

08

ask not, Leuconoe
what end's waiting for thee,
through dark Babylon's charts.
should great Jupiter give
which now wearies the sea,
May thou therefore be wise:
prune back faraway plans.
So, friend, seize thou today,

- for it is wrong -
given by gods.
Better by far
winters to come
moiling on cliffs
filter the wine;
While we now speak,
putting thy trust

what is the end for me;
We shouldn't search out fate
suffer whatever is,
or should the last be this
high on the Tuscan coast.
and, as a life is short,
flown has our greedy time.
not in the morrow's morn.

To the idea of preserving in translation Horace's prosody, a prosody which, above all other features of his poetry, is the one Horace most praised himself for, no conscientious person can object. The question is whether an equivalent can be found in English, and how effective that equivalent may be as a vehicle for the thought and diction of the poem. There are a few slips of detail which detract a little from this pioneering effort. It would be prosodically unproblematic to render "we shouldn't" (line 2) correctly as "you shouldn't." Correcting "is" (line 3) to "will be" would intrude an extra syllable, but rephrasing as "to suffer what will be" would restore the count, and preserve the form. "Wine" (line 6) should be "wines," denoting a general household duty rather than a specific order, and implying a household rather than a convivial role for the lady in question. Along the same lines, "friend" (line 8), which has no counterpart in the original, is too intimate as an address to what appears to be a servant girl. There is nothing in the original to which "therefore" (line 6) corresponds. Time (line 7) is not so much "greedy" (taking away) as "grudging" (chary in doling out), again a prosodically unproblematic substitution. The difficult line 5 conveys the probably intended picture, though if the translation could have been a little longer, it would have taken some of the room in line 6 which is now padded out with "therefore."

Reading down the middle column to see if the defining central choriambs come through as self-contained phrases is an extremely severe test of a metrical version. Gest gets 50%. In the last line, Horace's "quam minimum" (admittedly tending to use up too many syllables in English) is reduced to "not," leaving the redundant if alliterative "morrow's morn" to fill up the space. All in all, though, this is a very creditable first attempt to take the high ground. One wonders if the Catullus translations were ever published.