Gladstone on Horace: Carmina 1/11
William Ewart Gladstone: The Odes of Horace (1894)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002
Gladstone (1809-1898) was famous for his oratorical skill; he was the dominant personality in the [British] Liberal Party from 1868-1894. He held the Prime Ministership four times (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, and 1892-94). He retired in 1894 following the 1893 defeat of his Irish Home Rule bill, the issue which wrecked his ministry. His Horace translations are from the end of this last active period, their preface being dated to 10 September 1894.
Translator's Statement: "There is, in my view, one special necessity of translation from Horace: that is to say, the necessity of compression. So far as I am aware, Milton in earlier days and Conington in our own, are almost the only exceptions to this observation. And without compression, in my opinion, a translation from Horace, whatever its other merits may be, ceases to be Horatian: ceases, that is, to represent the original. Accepting thankfully the great lesson and example of Mr Conington, I find other points of importance, where I am compelled to dissent from the rules he has laid down. One of these rules is that all Odes, which Horace has written in one and the same metre, are to be rendered in one and the same metre by his translators. I think there are at least two fundamental objections to this rule. The first is that the quantity of matter, which the poet has given in the same forms of stanza, is by no means uniform; and, if uniformity is to govern the translation, the space available for conveying what has to be conveyed will be sometimes too great, and sometimes too small. There is another objection, which lies yet nearer the root of the matter. Horace has in numerous cases employed the same metre for Odes the most widely divergent in subject and character. Horace knew the capacities of his respective metres, and how far he could make each of them elastic for particular varieties of use. But it does not follow that any one English metre, which the translator may have chosen for some one Horatian Ode, will be equally supple, and equally effective, for conveying the spirit and effect of every other Ode which Horace may have found it practicable to construct under the same metrical conditions. Every one of the Odes, as a rule, has a spirit, genius, and movement of its own; and I hold that the translator from Horace should both claim and exercise the largest possible freedom in varying his metres, so as to adapt them in each case to the original with which he has to deal. . . He should largely abridge the syllabic length of his Latin text: should carry compression to the farthest practicable point: should severely limit his use of licentious and imperfect rhymes: should avoid those irregularities in the Use of the English genitive, which are so fatal to euphony. He should endeavour, with whatever changes of mere form, to preserve in all cases the sense and point of his author, and should sparingly allow the perilous but seductive doctrine of free translation."
[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
Oh ask thou not, 't is sin to know,
04
08
The translator's preface is worth studying as an example of skillful political discourse, focusing on one thing while quietly assuming another. Thus, Gladstone disavows "licentious and imperfect" rhymes, a platform to which no decent citizen could object, but never defends the use of rhyme in the first place. He points out that Horace does not always use the same meter for the same mood, but ignores the many cases were Horace does use the same meter for the same mood, such as in this poem and in Carmina 4/10 (also eight lines, and also in the 5th Asclepiadean meter, and also on the subject of the passage of time and pleasure). Gladstone puts 4/10 into a quite different metrical shape. So much for "mere form."
Within the confines of its new shape (iambic heptameter, rhyming in couplets), the thought of this poem runs rather smoothly, and "fronting" admirably captures something of the difficultly visualizable "oppositis," without taking a lot of prosodic time to do so, and the sense of debilitat "wearing out," missed or substituted by many translators, is scrupulously rendered. Those interested in "compression" will be glad to know that the Latin text of 128 syllables is represented by an English text of 104 syllables; no licentious indulgence there. In the plan of the poem as a whole, the thematic phrase "carpe diem" is expanded to occupy the last half-line, so that much depends on that half-line. If anyone but a Prime Minister had guided the pen, one might suggest that "harvest" evokes a country panorama, with reapers busy in every golden field, and the nation's future assured; whereas the original sense "pluck down" points more sharply to one bough, one fruit, one hand, and the personal present moment.
But as it is (how many translators date their prefaces from Hawarden Castle?), criticism must be mute. Except of course that of Lord Dunsany, who can take Hawarden Castle and raise it one. We will get to Lord Dunsany as our next example, by clicking on the arrow below.
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