Horace Is The Greatest--Game Over
 

Horace is the greatest lyric poet of all time, and anyone who disagrees with me is a. . .a, well, a flibbertigibbet!

I mean,
ausa et iacentem visere regiam
vultu sereno, fortis et asperas
tractare serpentes, ut atrum
corpore combiberet venenum

Come on! Cleopatra is "brave enough even to handle wild asps so that she might drink the black venom into her body"!

Come on!

OK, I give. But should that be venenum?

Cheers,
John

Venenum indeed, atrum venenum a serpentibus!

Eheu!

Cheers,
John

Hmn, this thread has not been nearly as incendiary as I had hoped.

Perhaps that should be modified, Aaron, with "as far as we can tell". We only have fragments of Sappho's lyrical poetry, and perhaps there are others whose work we've never seen.

Duncan

Now we're getting somewhere! I will fetch my popcorn.

John

Holidays, I bet. I've been thinking on it, but too sick personally to respond as I'd like.

I've been reading Horace's Odes, in the Shepherd and Michie translations side by side.

Shepherd is vastly better, in most cases.

I have the McClatchy Horace, which I enjoyed.

Cheers,
John

Also:
A Greek-English lexicon wrote Liddell and Scott.
Some parts were clever, and some parts were not.
There's more, but I'll stop there.

Aaron N, you should just learn Latin and read the original. It’s worth it.

There had been some poems in Sapphic stanzas on the Met-Board, and a number of issues arose. Aaron, Horace does on occasion use a monosyllable as the last word in a line (as you do) but always for effect. Here the two terminal “et”s (and’s) serve to convey the vastness of the trip:

Septimi, Gadis aditure mecum et
Cantabrum indoctum iuga ferre nostra et
barbaras Syrtes, ubi Maura semper
aestuat unda,

(Crib)
Septimius, you who are about to travel with me to Gades and
to the Cantabrian untutored as of yet in bearing our yoke and
to the wild Syrtes, where always the Moorish
surf is boiling,

Yup.

Though Pooch's Latin facility far exceeds my own, I can muddle my way through Horace (a stab at 1.38 of mine is I still think on the board).

Given your deep love of the Aeneid, it would certainly be worth your time.

It's a life goal. It's not currently feasible, given my time constraints. So Horace in English it is.

Yeah. Understandable. Time is always the problem when it comes to everything. How I wish I could just earn an income in writing and audit classes in languages.

The nice thing about the McClatchy Odes is that the Latin is on the facing page. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Cheers,
John

John, I enjoyed the McClatchy edition primarily as a survey of contemporary poetry (in its time). For those who don't know the book, McClatchy had a variety of contemporary poets translate one ode each.

Yes, I was using the English as a pleasant crib for the Latin (a thing I need these days), but I don't remember any of the versions being terrible. :-)

Cheers,
John

I'm refreshing my Latin in anticipation of taking the MTEL in Latin, and re-reading translations of Ovid, Horace, Catullus, and Vergil in English (and working through some in Latin in anticipation).

Forget "of all time," are we sure Ovid isn't the best Latin lyric poet?

Also, I have not loved the Ferry Horace.

Nah, compression, range, versatility, subtlety--Horace wins. Anyway, Ovid is an epic and elegaic poet. Don't be a flibbertigibbet.

At the risk of seeming a curmudgeon and perhaps a dilettante, Horace's music is also repeatedly quite lovely:

nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes, geluque flumina constiterint acuto.

Cheers,
John

I mean, he used elegiac couplets, but I don't think the "lyric/elegiac" distinction holds much water nowadays.

Ovid is better at one literary form (elegiac couplet) than perhaps any other person has ever been at any other form (sans Shakespeare in blank verse drama and sonnets). And the bulk of his non-epic work fits well within the range of what we would classify, broadly, as lyric poetry today.

Dante at terza rima.

John

Yeah. Don't know how I missed that obvious one.

I think Vergil is better at Latin hexameters and Propertius is better at Elegaic couplets. Love, love Ovid--but his poetry is like a comic book to me.

Vergil's Latin hexameters >>>> everyone's Latin hexameters
Ovid's elegiac couplets >>> Propertius's

Comic book is a genuinely funny way of putting it. His persona really does feel, sometimes, postmodern, and not always in a good way. But Horace goes the opposite way, too often. A little too comfortable in his certainties.

Oh, this is going to turn ugly. How much Propertius have you read? The Monobiblos is the best.

Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis,
contactum nullis ante cupidinibus.
tum mihi constantis deiecit lumina fastus
et caput impositis pressit Amor pedibus,
donec me docuit castas odisse puellas
improbus, et nullo vivere consilio.


". . . Love, dogged god, taught me to hate chaste girls and live without counsel."

Yeah!

Ha. One need not denigrate one to elevate the other. I like Propertius just fine, though I will admit I've but dabbled in the Latin of Propertius and dove more liberally into to Ovid, but that's because (given what I've read), I've liked Ovid better. From what I have read, I like Ovid better. because I find him cleverer, and possessing a finer ear to turns of phrases.

I would say de gustibus non est disputandum, but I don't believe that for a second. What is there to do but disagree about tastes?

In a quick reading of your excerpt, the original poem I have not read, I have to say I enjoy the distance "improbus" has from "Amor," and the clever way it stands next to--and consonates with--"puellas." Artfully done.

Passion, man! Passion! Propertius has got balls of fire! Ovid is, in contrast, very clever.

Meh. Performative passion at best, as all love poetry is at its core. Real passion cannot be contained in words, let along elegiac couplets. Ovid knew this. He recognized the poems to Cynthia--and Lesbia and Delia and Marathus and the others who we have lost--for what they were: sham attempts to capture true passion. So he played along, perhaps a little too slyly, but also winking at the audience. Give me that man as a poet.

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Socrate nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto?

You see how [Mount] Socrates stands out white
with deep snow, and the struggling trees can
no longer sustain the burden, and the rivers
are frozen with sharp ice?

For whom else than we on this thread would Horace have overlooked that tremendous Latin typo on Monte Soratte -- and who else but Horace could have, would have gotten away with it?
Straight-on downright upstanding atomistic letter-swapping swivel-eyed Epicurean magic!

I'm a big fan of Horace. I've just finished reading a translation of his Satires, and they've been very inspiring in offering a different mode and tone of poetry for me; I'm working through the Odes in English and Latin, as well.

But in reading Horace, all I can think about is the cultivated leisure he produces in his Odes. They are lovely constructions, but ones that really can only appeal to a certain type of reader. Given that, this article cracked me up. I got all the answers right myself, but they were tougher than I thought, and I might have gotten one or more wrong were I not in the middle of reading Horace now.

Who Said it: Horace or Millennial Rustic Twee?