On Translation | Brooks on Horace

E Bruce Brooks: unpublished notes (c1999)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Amidst all this criticism, it's only fair to try one's own hand. Indeed, with all these possibilities, it's impossible not to try. Here then is an attempt (so to speak) to combine the prosodic ideals of Gest with the practical prose fluidity of Passage, plus a few more small points of possible virtue from here and there, and from Horace.

04

08

you should not be asking -
what term the Gods have set,
computations attempt.
if there be more winters,
which on eroded rocks
by Tuscan seas. Be wise,
cut back all longer hopes.
is flying. Take today;

it's wrong to know -
Leuconoë,
But, far better,
or if this one
now wearies out
strain out your wines,
For as we speak,
put little trust

either for me or thee,
nor Babylonian
accept whatever comes:
Jupiter makes our last,
the waves hurled upon them
and to our brief compass
grudging Time already
in any tomorrows.

Faithful intentions may often find the same path through the same difficulties, and in the realm of translation, this will sometimes mean that faithful translations (unlike "creative" ones) tend to converge. The present writer discovers, in the course of gathering the other examples of this poem, that some of the phrases above, set down in all ignorance sometime around 1999, had been anticipated by Margaret Gest and others, trying in earlier decades to find the easiest match in English for the supple yet densely weighted locutions of Horace. Despite that good example, there are certainly shortcomings in the present version. Among the ones registering on the checklist applied elsewhere: "we're not to know" (line 1) would be more accurately "it would be wrong to know" (the metrically suitable "'twere wrong to know" seemed no longer dictionally viable); "comes" (line 2) abandons the original erit, and "little" (line 8) does not exhaust quam minimum ("as little as possible"). The Gest check, reading down the middle column to see if phrases correspond, does not come out too bad, 7 for 8.

In Latin, as in Japanese, the original sequence of words and phrases may sometimes have to be inverted to yield comparably natural results in English. How far to go in this direction is a matter of tact. In general, this version seeks to keep something of the jaggedness and distension of Horace's word placement in Latin, without snapping the thread of reader recognition. A little cragginess helps the poem not to slip away before its eight allotted lines have fairly run their brief course.

It is hoped that the sweetness in the original, which has attracted many readers, comes through in this version, but also that it comes through as confined to the affectionately concerned Leuconoë, leaving intact the poet's rebuke of her, his insistent constriction of both their horizons, his Epicurean Dauism that limits but does not liberate, to stand as his own more austere feeling about the two of them.