Response
What an inspired formal choice: to render Horace’s Alcaic stanzas into English accentual-alliterative verse! The translator’s decision to employ an ancient meter that lies at the root of our poetic tradition recalls Horace’s own decision to adapt Alcaeus’s ancient form to his own time and tongue. And the meter here is, for the most part, quite well handled. There are a few spots where the syntax or the form or the sense seems faintly strained, but these are small infelicities in an otherwise charming translation.
In line 1, for example, I trip ever so slightly on the two prepositions that span the caesura; I wish we could cut one (perhaps: “How shall the poet pray || to new-enshrined Apollo?”). In the next line, I wasn’t fond of the “just,” and the value of “letting” was less immediately clear to me than a phrase such as “as he lets the wine” would have been. Also, I didn’t like encountering the word “new” again so soon; it seemed more significant in the first instance. (Quibble, quibble.)
Most of the lines seem about the right length, and there is a nice rhythmic variability to them—the translator is taking good advantage of the possibilities of the form. In a couple of half-lines, however, I simply could not, try as I might, hear only two major arses (that last word looks wrong, doesn’t it?): line 15 (“and comes back to tell the tale”) and the last line (“nor let those last years lack”). Such bumps, of course, are easily smoothed; possible solutions include: “and returns to tell of it” and “nor my last years lack.”
When I came to the “eye-pleasing plow-cattle,” I confess I wondered for a moment whether Horace’s “herds” would likely have been something else—sheep, say, or goats. But I decided to assume that “plow-cattle” was historically plausible, simply because it’s so ear-pleasing. I’m less pleased by “small” as a modifier for “olives”—it seems odd that the speaker would bother to specify the size of the olives (unless he needed another S word). Perhaps something like this: “olives and succory, || the simplest of suppers.” And I’m displeased by “level” in the antepenultimate line; not being level-headed is one thing, senile dementia is quite another, and I’m not sure the line, as it stands, adequately conveys what’s at stake here: the fear of losing one’s “mente” to old age.
Finally, there are a few instances (“Sardinia’s,” “grants,” “Calenian,” “myself,” etc.) in which the translator seems to be counting as an alliteration a consonant that does not begin an arsis. Most of these don’t trouble me, as I find the consonants in question audible enough, and as every poet has the right to decide how strictly to observe these traditions, which were not after all written in stone. But the word “disgraceful” (stressed of course on the second syllable) in the next-to-last line was an instance where I found myself wanting the consonant to coincide with the arsis, as in the word “dismal” or “dignity.”
On the whole, though, I think the fact that I was moved to fiddle and quibble so much is a sign of how engaging I felt this translation was.
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