Smart on Horace: Carmina 1/11
Christopher Smart (1767)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002
Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was educated at Cambridge, but flourished best as a poet under other influences; his most esteemed work (the 1763 Song to David) was written while he was confined to a mental asylum. His complete translations of Horace's Carmina were published four years later. In a note to our poem, he says "In order to imitate the metre of the original, the longest measure in the English tongue (much in use amongst our old poets) is here introduced, but, for convenience of printing, one line is severed into two." This longest measure is the heptameter line, with its 4 + 3 foot count. We here indent the latter part, but capitalize and number the result as one line, following Smart's intention.
Translator's Headnote: "He advises Leuconoe to indulge in pleasures, regardless of all care for the morrow, by deducing his arguments from the brefity and fleetness of life."
[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, what we're forbid to know,
04
08
12
A somewhat zany version. Like many translations, it follows the original meekly enough at the beginning, but develops originality crotchets toward the end. We take it as obvious that Smart's rhymes tend to break up the more continuous flow of Horace's original, and we note in local extenuation that the alternate-rhyme scheme (xAxA) at least does not require us to acknowledge that Smart is mispronouncing "Leuconoë."
Smart's version does not scant Horace's basic advice to Leuconoë, but it does suffer at several points from the religious optimism of the translator. Horace's Epicureanism is pessimistic. The gods, if they exist, take no part in the affairs of men, fortune is capricious rather than earned, and there is no kindly Providence ordering things (however inscrutably, in the short term) for the best. Smart (one cannot say Horace) advises the lady in the poem to "cheerfully submit" to the gods' will, and be confident of life's "compendious" benefits. The Epicurean rather hunkers down, reducing desire to a biscuit, and bolting the biscuit lest arbitrary time snatch even that away. The cheerful acceptance of the Smartian rests on a different, and more confident, world view. As for the mysterious "pranks" of the last line, they are perhaps more likely to be those of London than of Rome.
On the opposite side of the ledger, one possibly interesting touch in this version is the recognition that "more winters" means not merely "a longer life" but more specifically "more exposure to storm and cloud." The commentators say of "winters" that poets used winter or summer indifferently to symbolize "years." There may be more to it than that. The close parallel to the deep winter of Carmina 1/9 (the "Soracte" poem), with its similar cadence in the pleasures of the moment, should not be overlooked by the careful reader. We may also note that Smart's philosophical confidence, noted above, is exactly what Leuconoe is told to abjure in the last line of the original, and, in justice to Smart be it said, also in the last line of his version. For Horaces's immortal crystallization of that philosohy into a soundbite, "carpe diem," Smart can do no better than "be greedy of to-day." Presumably this means not inviting the neighbors in to share the biscuit. An anonmyous reader of the local university library copy of Arthur Sherbo's edition of Smart's Horace has penciled in, at this point, "seize the day." It is certainly a step in the right direction. If Smart at this point had thought to outSmart Horace, his audience across the centuries has here disillusioned him.
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