Volume 51, Number 8 · May 13, 2004
The Strange Music of Horace
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Horace, the Odes: New Translations by Contemporary Poets
edited by J.D. McClatchy
Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $24.95
Daylight was fading on June 3, 17 BC, when there suddenly ascended into the soft air above the Palatine Hill in Rome the pure and reedy sound of fifty-four young voices, belonging to adolescent girls and boys, singing a most unusual hymn. Anyone in the audience that evening who knew his Greek literature—and we may suppose that many did—would have recognized the syncopated, slightly nervous meter of the song being sung as the one invented and made famous six centuries earlier by the Lesbian poet Sappho, who used it to convey some of her most famous lyrics of erotic yearning. ('That man seems to me to be like a god/who, sitting just across from you,/when you've spoken sweetly/ hears you.')
Review, 5497 words
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