Dobson on Horace: Carmina 1/11
Austin Dobson (c1877), included in George F Whicher: Selected Poems of Horace (1947)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002
Background: Austin Dobson was the leading figure among several English poets who in early 1876 first introduced French verse forms into English poetic practice; in May 1876 he published the first original ballade written in English. The effects possible with the triolet, rondean, and villanelle were congenial to his temper, and to the taste of the time. Edmund Gosse in a July 1877 article in Cornhill Magazine ("A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse") noticed and championed this movement, and Dobson's second volume of experiments in the new medium, Proverbs in Porcelain, also appeared in that month. He was able to give to these somewhat artificial forms an appeal that was influential well into the 20th century. Among his efforts were several free but graceful versions of Horace's Carmina. George Whicher chose this one for the above anthology, along with a parallel version of the same poem by himself. Dobson's intention was to make his versions self-standing, intelligible, and attractive to Latinically unprepared English readers. All that might require explanation has been reduced to a form in which it does not require explanation.
[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
Seek not, O Maid, to know,
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Dobson here uses the villanelle form, with its two refrains which are stated separately in the first stanza, and come together in a single statement at the end of the last stanza. This conveys a sense of neatness at odds with Horace's more linear single statement, which may wind and writhe its way to its end, but does not repeat itself along the way, and does not reach that sort of prefigured closure. Dobson's ingeniously varied repetitions of ne quaesieris "seek not" wind up overmaking that one point, leaving Horace's other details outside, in the winter wind. Among those details is Horace's signature phrase "carpe diem," for which a dutiful translator will probably feel responsible. Going back to the original after reading this translation lets us appreciate, what we might not otherwise have noticed so closely: the richness of the setting with which Horace has clothed his little homily on the shortness of life, and the vivid way in which he has brought that homily to a conclusion. It is like coming home, and shutting the door, and finding things where one had left them, and all the more eloquent for being so.
Recasting a poem into an utterly different poetic procedure has its charms, but the most charming of those charms may be this: it feels so good when you stop.
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