Raffel on Horace: Carmina 1/11

Burton Raffel: The Essential Horace (1983)
An illustration for: Nine Maxims On Translation
E Bruce Brooks / University of Massachusetts / 5 Dec 2002

Translator's Statement: "These translations do not attempt to match Horace's music, or his meter, or his immensely deft manipulation of syntax. These are locked forever into the Latin that created them. The sounds of Latin are not the sounds of English; the meters of Latin (quantitative) are not the meters of English (accentual); and neither the syntax of daily Latin nor the much more complex syntax of poetic Latin is anything like the syntax of English. The linguistic realities, in short, are severely limiting. Translation thus becomes more than usually difficult. These translations make no attempt to be one-to-one equivalents. They do attempt to create English structures that to some degree do things like what Horace does in Latin"

[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

Leucon, no one's allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don't ask, don't hunt for answers
In tea leaves or in palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
04This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
08As we talk. Take the present, the future's no one's affair

This version is something of an exercise in redistribution. It often exchanges general and particular, or unpacks implications while discarding the words that are physically present. It also contemporizes and immediates.

Thus, "tea leaves or palms" (both methods being anachronistic) suggests the general category "fortune-telling," whereas the original Leoconoë was specifically consulting Babylonian horoscopes, which at this period (the year 033) had been officially banned in Rome. "Be patient" has the consecutive letters "pati" at its core, which is very neat, but "pati" in the original means "bear" rather than merely "be indulgent of." Raffel's "on these rocks" implies (as some commentators indeed claim) that the two of them are watching the storm from their window, in real time. But none of Horace's residences adjoined the Etruscan or Tyrrhenian sea on Italy's northwest coast, so the storm is best taken as an offstage decorative reference. "Cut your vines and forget about hope" expands the sense of "reseces" ("prune," implying vines), and omits the fact that in Horace's sentence it is hope and not vines which are to be pruned. And the quite precise product of the vine in "vina liques" ("strain out your wines") is blunted not into general household tasks (putting Leuconë in her place), but still further into "do what you must." It's hard for a reader to visualize what the content of this advice might be, should Leuconë actually take it.

In place of the concluding personal injunction to put as little faith as possible in days to come, we have instead the general statement "the future's no one's affair." That is not what Horace says. The future is merely unknown ground. Leuconoë should accept this, give up trying to pierce the veil, and live within the very small zone about which we can have knowledge, which turns out to be the present moment. "Take the present" falls somewhat flat as a rendering of carpe diem. All in all, with neither rhyme to constrain nor meter to impede, and thus with all the elbow room in the world at its disposal, this version does not use its freedom very well. It finds a new voice, but not one that Leuconoë would necessarily have recognized as that of her master.

The translator seems to anticipate these objections in his aggressive headnote. If so, he is correct.

 

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