Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
Horacescope
By D.S. Carne-Ross
The Complete Works of Horace
translated by Charles E. Passage
Frederick Ungar, 402 pp., $28.50
The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles
translated by Burton Raffel, foreword and afterword by W.R. Johnson
North Point Press, 274 pp., $13.50 (paper)
Two more vessels land up on the Sirens' coast, strewn with the wreckage of their countless predecessors. What is it that drives people to translate Horace, the most translated and least translatable of poets? Versions exist in their thousands, the successes can be fitted into a few pages. Surely, though, there must be some way of bringing this treasure across. Perhaps if one keeps very close to the sense and form, even reproducing the meters syllable by syllable? Or go about it the other way and write as Horace would have written were he alive today?
Review, 2892 words
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