Field on Horace: Carmina 1/11

Eugene Field: Echoes from the Sabine Farm (1892)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Background: Eugene Field (1850-1895), son of Roswell Martin Field, the St Louis lawyer who took the Dred Scott case all the way to the Supreme Court, had brief brushes with the higher learning at Williams and Knox Colleges and at the University of Missouri, where he founded the student newspaper, but graduated from none of them. He honed his art of humor at various midwestern newspapers, culminating in his influential column "Sharps and Flats" in the Chicago Daily News, from 1883 until his death. His ten books, some of them written for children, began appearing in 1889. He was an avid collector of other people' books, and his last work, whose final chapter was uncompleted at his death, was Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. No trophy of the book chase was more prized, and no unaffordable volume more regretted, than some edition of his favorite poet Horace. His Chicago home was called "Sabine Farm," and there he and his younger brother (named after their father, Roswell Martin Field) took on Horace in their joint production of 1892, to which Eugene contributed translations in the style of the time, counterpointed by Roswell's looser parodies.

[The elements of these translations corresponding to the Latin oppositis and pumicibus, which in the original are separated by the verb debilitat, are shown in red for easier technical comparison].

Carmina 1/11

What end the gods may have ordained for me,
And what for thee,
03Seek not to learn, Leuconoë; we may not know.
Chaldean tables cannot bring us rest.
'T is for the best
06 To bear in patience what may come, or weal or woe.

If for more winters our poor lot is cast,
Or this the last,
09Which on the crumbling rocks has dashed Etruscan seas,
Strain clear the wine; this life is short, at best.
Take hope with zest,
12And, trusting not To-morrow, snatch To-day for ease!

In terms of feet, the Field stanza has a pattern of 7 + 6 + 7 + 6, with internal rhyme linking the 7's. It has its own grace, but the differently graceful way that Horace's sentences sometimes coincide with, but more often override, the underlying metrical rhythm is lost in the process. Field's version has a breathless quality, compared with the original, and the joyousness of "take hope with zest" intrudes a sunny note into Horace's intentionally wintry, and even threatening, landscape picture. On the plus side, the Field version has its own suppleness, it takes the Tuscan sea image in passing without getting shipwrecked on it, and within the limits of the "party" interpretation of the poem (which we believe is an error), it arrives at the end by the same route as does the original. It will seem dated to 21st century readers, but that is not the translator's fault, working as he was in the 19th century.

Both "rest" (first stanza) and "ease" (second stanza) are artifacts of Field's chosen rhyme; together, they suggest an amplitude which is not that of Horace's poem. Horace projects sense of confinement and acceptance, rather than freedom and leisure. It is such violations of sense, induced by an imposed rhyme, facile rather than faithful, that have helped to doom the rhyming translation in the ears of the poetry public.

 

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