Alexander on Horace: Carmina 1/11

Sidney Alexander: The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace (1999)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Translator's Statement: "All those metric-charts which have tormented generations of students all over European Latinate civilization - the Alcaic Strophe, the First Asclepiadean, the Iambic Trimeter and the Second Archilochian, the Trochaic Strophe and the Second Sapphic - all illustrated with the symbols for long and short syllables (which anyone with an ear discovers soon enough have no relationship whatever to the actual living heartbeats of the poem) - all of this I have dispensed with and instead listened to Horace's pulsations; and having ascertained the rhythmic pattern, I have sought not to reproduce (which is impossible in the crossover of languages) but to recreate an English equivalent which should be true to the genius of our language and yet be related (as least as blood-cousins are related) to the Latin original."

[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

Ask not, O Leuconoë - to know is forbidden - what end
the gods have allotted either to me or to you.
Nor consult the Babylonian tables. How much better
04To patiently endure whatever comes
Whether Jupiter grants us more winters, or whether this one,
now crashing Tyrrhenean waves against the rocks,
shall be the last. Be wise. Water your wine.
08Life is so brief: cut short far-reaching hopes.
Even as we speak, envious Time is fleeing.
Seize the day: entrusting as little as possible to tomorrow.

This might be called an aggressively nonmetrical approach. The translator not only denies that quantitative meter has an equivalent in English, he denies that quantitative meter is relevant to the original in the first place. There is thus - there could have been - no attempt to keep the original meter. The original eight lines are here expanded to ten lines of varying syllabic length. Within the ten, new ideas (marked by a period after the preceding idea) more often coincide with line beginnings than is true of the original, giving a less fluid general impression. The sense of the poem, however, is consecutively rendered.

There is one obtrusive error of understanding. Liques "clarify; strain [as liquids; note that the legal term non liquet means "unclear; not proven"]" is here rendered as "water" ("mix with water, dilute"), and the plural vina "wines" is here rendered "wine." The result is a more general maxim, perhaps meant to be taken as "dilute your hopes of the future." This is thematically consistent as far as it goes. But the original refers to a mere household chore, and advises Leuconoë to tend to her work, and not worry about such arcane matters as the future (for which Alexander's "entrust to" is less accurate than Anonymous's "trust to"). This reminds us that Leuconoë is not a wife, as modern readers may prefer to imagine, but a servant. The poem might be sweeter the other way, but it would not be Horace's poem.

 

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