Ancona on Horace: Carmina 1:11

Ronnie Ancona: Horace / Selected Odes and Satire 1.9: Teacher's Guide (1999)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Background: The translations in the Teacher's Guide (1999) are said to have been in some cases revised from those in the author's earlier monograph, Time and the Erotic in Horace's Odes (1994). That volume did not include a version of 1/11, so that this one is the ranking version. The Teacher's Guide and parallel Student Text are meant to aid in preparing for the Horace section of the Advanced Placement exam in Latin. The Preface to the Teacher's Guide thus describes the intention behind the translations:

"The translations, which were written to be literal rather than "literary," may be used by the teacher in a number of ways: for checking his or her own sense of the Latin (the beginning teacher of Horace, especially, may find this of use), for discussing with students different ways of translating (the more literal vs the less literal seen in many published translations) as well as the "untranslatability" of Horace (by showing ways in which the particular English words and constructions I have chosen are "inadequate" to the Latin). Finally, some teachers may find the translations useful to help students review their own translations."

[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

You, do not seek (it is a sacrilege to know) what end for me, what end for you the gods have given, Leoconoe, nor try Babylonian numbers. How it is better to endure whatever will be! Whether more winters, or whether Jupiter has allotted his last, which now weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea with hostile pumice-stones: be wise, strain the wine and cut back long hope because of brief time. While we are speaking, envious time will have fled: seize the day, trusting to the least extent possible in the next one.

"Sacrilege" seems strong for "nefas" ("sinful, impious"), and "hostile" seems downright overwrought for "oppositis," for rocks which, at their most military, can be seen as set against (not "with"), and are defensively resisting, the waves of the winter storm. "How it is better" is not English (try "How much better it is"), and "because of [brief time]" is already out of date; it ignores Hulton 1968, and should be rather "to the scale [of our brief span]." And "wine" should be plural, even if the plural lessens the suggestion that the poet and the lady are going to begin drinking as soon as the poem is over, and replaces that scene with downputting general advice to give up astrology and return to mundane housekeeping chores.

In another section of the Teacher's Guide, Ancona suggests that, besides a statement of Epicurean values, 1/11 contains "elements of an attempted seduction of Leuconoe." She also invites class discussion on the question "What effect is created by starting the poem with the word tu? Is this word grammatically necessary?" The answer is "No, but it may be metrically convenient." In Ancona's translation, the initial "You" has a bullying effect that is quite striking; the question is whether that effect is justified. Ancona's probable view of this poem is hinted at in her book Time and the Erotic, where she notes how, among her predecessors, "Chodorow and Benjamin showed how the attempt of the poet/lover to control the temporality of the beloved should be understood not merely in terms of desire but, more importantly, in terms of the power and domination through which a self seeks to secure its fantasy of autonomy." There is nothing in the poet's remarks to the girl in 1/11 that goes beyond recommending to her a temporal limitation which he himself, here and in other poems, philosophically accepts, and which he recommends to her also, as tending to bring them closer together. As for "seduction," if Leuconoë [sic] is other than emblematic in this poem, she is a servant, like the unnamed "boy" in the drinking scene of 1/38, and the poet can have either of them just by saying so. No slow subtle approach through wine or temporality, no "seduction," is called for.

The attempt to make of 1/11 a platform for Ancona's own brand of cultural hostility does serve to remind us, as we return to the original, how sweet the original is. For all its no-saying to the chance of a longer love.

 

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