THE ESSENTIAL ROMAN

POET DAVID FERRY'S MARVELOUS NEW TRANSLATION OF THE ODES OF HORACE

Author: By Robert Taylor

Date: SUNDAY, November 2, 1997

Page: N1

Section: Books

As Robert Frost put it, ``Poetry is `what gets lost in translation,' '' and Frost is, of course, right. A letter-perfect translation would be a rather monstrous example of reproduction, like a cloned goat. There never can exist a perfectly English Horace, bending Latin grammar and syntax to the idioms of the translator. Ferry does not seek to duplicate Sapphic and Alcaic meters; he knows that every translation is an interpretive act. His approach to Horace is not dissimilar to his previous ``Gilgamesh.'' One remains as faithful as possible to the source, yet alive to the implications of tone of voice, tempo, and context. Now and then he substitutes a deliberate anachronism for something lost in the mists of antiquity -- ``Ouija board'' is an inspired choice for ``Babylonian numbers'' -- but the poetry is preserved in English by the basic iambic foot.

James Michie, who in the early '60s made an outstanding translation of the Odes, observes that ``it is better that Horace should be `done down' into English than that he should be undone by the gradual disappearance of Latin as part of our culture.'' Gone are the days when apt Horatian quotation was part of the mental landscape of the literate. Tennyson could repeat all the Odes from memory. Not every reader, however, has relished Horace: Byron loathed him, Kipling associated him with the drudgery of the classroom (though he eventually became a passionate adherent). Among the marvels of Ferry is his far-ranging readability, and it is difficult to imagine even anti-Horatians resisting the subtlety and compression of the form.

Any translator must face paradoxical obstacles; on the one hand, the Odes are familiar, peppered like ``Hamlet'' with phrases that have passed into cliche; on the other hand, the distortions of the normal prose word order pluck the poem from the commonplace and lend it surprise. Just as the audience at ``Hamlet'' awaits ``To be or not to be'' or ``Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,'' so the reader of Horace has the solace of the predictable in enduring lines or catch phrases such as ``O fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro,'' or ``Carpe diem.'' Horace, though, brakes the superficial or hasty reader by unpredictable verbal sleight of hand requiring as much attention as the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

``The expectedness of situation to the theme frees us to focus on the particular performance of it in a given poem, and to experience that performance in relation to others,'' Ferry explains in his introduction. Thus critics will compare Gielgud's Hamlet to Olivier's or Burton's. ``One of the great pleasures of the four books of Horace's odes is to see how he will do it this time. How will Horace telling Postumus (II, 14) that death is inevitable be different from Horace telling this to Dellius (II, 3), to Leuconeoe (I, 11), to Torquatus (IV, 7), to Sestius (I, 4)? The success of each is a challenge to the others, and part of the exhilaration for the reader is that Horace -- `adroitest of artists,' as Auden called him -- meets the challenge every time. It's like watching a great diver being challenged by one perfect dive to perform yet another, of another kind and degree of difficulty, and another, and he does so.''

Then, however, the unexpected happens. The astonishing Cleopatra ode (I, 37) which opens with the cosily familiar ``nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero'' (``At last the day has come for celebration / For dancing and drinking, bringing out / The couches with their images of gods / Adorned in preparation for the feast''), shifts its celebratory mood to a denunciation of Cleopatra (``that besotted queen / With her vile gang of sick polluted creatures'') and her ambitions; shifts again to Caesar pursuing her the way a hawk pursues a dove or a hunter the hare; and ends on a ruminative note: She deserved a nobler fate. Her courage wrests admiration from Horace, and in Ferry's resonant translation, ``she scorned / In triumph to be brought in galleys unqueened / Across the seas to Rome to be a show.''

Horace is not the property of professional Latinists. In many contexts, he is the quintessential poet of Western civilization -- he will go on being quoted as long as there is poetry itself. Still, he must also retain his Latin origins. Milton realized this when he translated the famous ode to Pyrrha (I, 5) ``Rendered almost word for word without a Rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.'' The scenario of this rueful 16-line lyric concerns Horace's emotions about beautiful blonde Pyrrha, with whom he was once in love. She is charming but dangerous, a femme fatale; her new boyfriend is gently satirized, and Pyrrha is compared to the fickle weather on the ocean. Milton's ``What slender youth, bedewed with liquid odours / Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave / Pyrrha? for whom bind'st thou / In wreaths thy golden hair / Plain in thy neatness?'' becomes in Ferry ``What perfumed debonair youth is it, among / The blossoming roses, urging himself upon you / In the summer grotto? For whom have you arranged / Your shining hair so elegantly and simply?'' Milton's version is literal, Ferry's is not, but both succeed because of their luminous evocation of a poet who remains essentially Roman in his universality.