Dunsany on Horace: Carmina 1/11

Lord Dunsany: The Odes of Horace (1947)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Translator's Statement: "Getting on for a hundred years ago Mr Gladstone, when putting the Odes into English verse, felt a justification was needed for yet another translation, and gave as his justification that other translators had wandered far from Horace. But such translations as I have seen, into English verse, including Mr Gladstone's, seemed frequently to wander from the original, and this may often be necessary; but I have approached this job with a sense of the impiety of adding anything to what Horace has said, and a strong reluctance to leave anything out. On the other hand, the quite incompatible rule must be accepted that, if keeping faithfully to the original should make the lines cramped and dull, nobody in the world will read them. These are the Scylla and Charybdis of 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

Seek not, Leuconoë, wrong it is to know,
What day the gods shall send for you or me
To be our last: let Babylonians show
04No calculations, but what is to be

Make you the best of. Maybe many winters
Jupiter gives you, or this one the last,
Which even now against the worn rocks splinters
08The waves of the Tyrrhenian on them cast.

Be wise, strain out the wine, and keep your hope
To a small space; for, even while we rhyme,
The grudging hour flies on. With each day cope
12And trust but little to the coming time.

Lord Dunsany, chronicler of Elfland, was the apostle of the unseen in English literature, and we may suspect that Horace's belittling of Babylonian spells and computations may have irked him as too confining. Dunsany does see that the confinement of hope "to a small space" is essential to the poem, and he does that sentiment justice in his version. But "shall send for" (line 2) implies a future determination of the lengths of their lives, whereas the point for Horace is that these points have already been set; it is merely impermissible to try to find out what they irrevocably are. Horace wants today to be picked down like a ripe fruit, not "coped with," as though it were some chore to be gotten out of the way while waiting for the future. There is no future. There is whatever time the poet and his lady may have, and that time, the present moment, is already fleeing into the past.

Dunsany does get distance between the rocks as eroded by previous seas ("the worn rocks," line 7 of the translation) and their being set against the new waves of the present storm ("on them cast," line 8). The task of widening the screen at this point may have been, for this translator, a congenial challenge.

But as for his suggestion (line 10) that Horace and Leuconoë are speaking "rhyme" to each other, it is not to be forgiven. Nor is the same legitimizing claim when it recurs ("I have seen Bacchus as he taught his rhymes") at the beginning of Dunsany's version of Carmina 2/19. Horace does not rhyme. These moments overreach by retrojecting a device of the translator, not implicitly but openly, into the poem. Had Horace and his lady found themselves suddenly rhyming, they would doubtless have stared at each other with no less astonishment than overtook the peasants of the Parliament of Erl, when they saw that magic had engulfed them from Elfland, and that the fields outside their windows "were no longer the fields we know."

 

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