Horace

I mean, the line from Horace that we already discussed, it's about this aspiration towards high culture and towards the range of different cultural representations that the Romans could gain and reinvent by borrowing so many different literary genres from the Greeks.

Yeah.

So the Romans borrowed not only genres and stories from the Greeks, but also poetic forms.

And one of the things I think that sets you apart as a translator is your rigorous attention to form, especially to keeping a regular meter even while using accessible language.

So can you talk a little about how you think formal features like meter and rhythm affect the way that an audience connects to a work?

Yeah, great question.

I mean, that's, again, one of the big themes of the book, but it's also one of my big stump things as a translator is that I very much wanted to try to provide 21st century readers of Homer and tragedy with translations that use traditional meter because the regular musicality and rhythmicality of the originals seem to me so much part of the experience that they're designed not just for performance out loud, they need to be speakable in some way or other, but speakable not in a casual, I'm just chatting to you kind of way, but in a way where even if you're not thinking about meter on some subliminal level, you're going to hear the difference between something read out loud that has a beat versus something that doesn't.

And again, I very much admire plenty of existing translations that don't use meter, but I also felt there were lots of those out there already, and there's something that I can add to what's available to a... to an English reader who may not have access to the original by thinking about how mito isn't just about, in a way, an embodied experience of these musical qualities of language, but it's also about the semantics of poetic form, that if you use a traditional form, you cue the reader or listener into, this sounds rhythmically, metrically like the rhythms of poetry from 100 or 200 years ago.

It offers a poet's perspective on what poetry is and how it should be written and what it might do for the reader.

The term Ars Poetica comes from a poem written by Horace, an ancient Roman poet, in 19 BC.

Horace's poem is 476 lines long, written in the form of a letter.

In this poem, Horace advises young poets on the art of writing poetry.

His writing advice includes maxims on word choice, tone, meter, and characterization in dramatic poems.

He also advises poets to show restraint and to avoid over-writing.

And like Horace's Ars Poetica, much of the advice I've gotten has come to me in the form of letters.

In one letter, the late poet Stanley Plumly wrote, "You seem to be suffering from second book-itis.

The action is first in the world of the gods, then in that of the heroes, and lastly in that of men.

It is the time-honored division of Pindarzode and Horace's.

tina theon tine heroa tina dandra chela desomen but these divisions shade into one another and each contains matter that belongs elsewhere pyrrhus and thisbe is a love story of the hellenistic age but it is told by the daughters of minnius in the mythical days of pentheus of thebes still it might have been familiar before the flood who cares it does not disturb the reader's sense of the descending sweep of time the moment he may feel that he is floating about in a timeless realm of myth the poet with a magic touch attaches the myth to history as when apollo flying away after his victory over pan sees laomedon far beneath him building the walls of troy we know where we are and what is coming the trojan war is not far away when it comes ovid takes care not to enter the lists against either homer or virgil he tells what metamorphoses he can at the beginning and narrates the death of achilles at the end the intervening stretch of time must be wiped out with an amusing sort of illusion he manages to slide o'er full nine years and leave the growth untried of that wide gap he assembles the heroes at a feast the after-dinner talk is restricted to deeds of war for of what else could great achilles tell or others tell with great achilles there Nestor finally has the floor, and while Nestor talks, centuries can slip by.

When he has finished, the war is done.

The next episode marks the appearance of Greece as Rome unites with her own religion, the worship of Asclepius.

The previous stories symbolize remote antiquity.

This one brings us to the third century, the time in Horace's profound epigram when captive Greece took its rude victor captive.

This is a turning point in the history of Rome.

Ego nec studium sine divite vina Nec rude quid prosit video ingenium Alterius sic altera poesit Opem res et conjuret amice.

Horace, De Arte Poetica.

Thus made English: Concerning poets there has been contest Whether they're made by art or nature best But if I may presume in this affair Among the rest my judgment to declare No art without a genius will avail And parts without the help of art will fail But both ingredients jointly must unite Or verse will never shine with a transcendent light.

Oldham.

Nec semper feriet quodcunque minabitur arcus.

Verum ubi plura nitent in caminae, non ego possis offendor maculis quas aut incuria fudit aut humana parco cavit natura.

Horace, The Art Poet.

Thus Englished: Be not too rigidly censorious.

But the five-act structure is, in fact, a rather arbitrary pronouncement.

It comes to us from a single Roman poet writing a letter to a friend about how to write good poetry.

That poet was Horace.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, his full Latin name, lived from 65 to 8 BCE.

He was a poet, a satirist, and the son of a freedman, a man who had been enslaved but was granted his freedom.

He fought on the losing side at the Battle of Philippi, which could have ended his life and certainly ended any political ambitions he had.

Instead, he became one of the most influential literary critics in history.

Their structures are very different and they were codified to an extent, but the number five doesn't really figure.

Satire always claimed to be of Roman birth.

Certainly in the hands of Horace it became an instrument of urbane and ironical castigation, and in the hands of Juvenal a weapon of invective which the genius of the Roman state might seem to have shaped for itself, and which every modern polity, as it reached the civic maturity and the urban corruption of Rome, has sought to wield.

But even its derivative poetical forms acquired in the Roman world a metropolitan flavor.

The blithe, open-air pastoral of Theocritus, full of the blazed perfume of the Sicilian noontide, became the Virgilian eclogue, with its literary shepherds and its uncertain scenery, touched with the sentiment of a poet inured, like Theocritus, to court and city, but far more inwardly mastered by their spell.

She has for him a history, and the joy and pathos of history, and he forgets that she is a mechanical term.

To say that he puts the nevermore of romantic sentimentality in the place of the dispassionate give-and-take of mechanics would do wrong to the immense virility which animates every line of this athlete among poets.

Of the cheap melancholy of discontent he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complacency, or of that literary melancholy where the sigh of Horace or Ronsard or Herrick over the passing of roses and all other beautiful things covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be gathered while still there is time.

No, the melancholy of Lucretius is like that of Durer's Melencolia, the sadness of strong intellect and far-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time and the ebbing of the tides of mortality; or like Wordsworth's mournful music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated from vulgar joys and fears; or like the melancholy of Keats, the veiled goddess who hath her shrine in the very temple of delight, the amare aliquid, in Lucretius' own yet more pregnant words, which lurks in the very sweetness of the flower.