The Epistles of Horace
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
My aim is to take familiar things and make
Poetry of them, and do it in such a way
That it looks as if it was as easy as could be
For anybody to do it . . . the power of making
A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much.
--from "The Art of Poetry"
When David Ferry's translation of The Odes of Horace appeared in 1997, Bernard Knox, writing in The New York Review of Books, called it "a Horace for our times." In The Epistles of Horace, Ferry has translated the work in which Horace perfected the conversational verse medium that gives his voice such dazzling immediacy, speaking in these letters with such directness, wit, and urgency to young writers, to friends, to his patron Maecenas, to Emperor Augustus himself. It is the voice of a free man, talking about how to get along in a Roman world full of temptations, opportunities, and contingencies, and how to do so with one's integrity intact. Horace's world, so unlike our own and yet so like it, comes to life in these poems. And there are also the poems--the famous "Art of Poetry" and others--about the tasks and responsibilities of the writer: truth to the demands of one's medium, fearless clear-sighted self-knowledge, and unillusioned, uncynical realism, joyfully recognizing the world for what it is.
Available in ebook for the first time, this English-only edition of The Epistles of Horace includes Ferry's translation along with his introduction, notes, and glossary. "Reading these versions we feel as if the streets that Horace walked have opened onto our own" (Peter Campion, Raritan).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known to English readers as the author of the imposing Odes, Horace began and ended his career with the more personal and metrically less complex Satires and Epistles(the famous "Ars Poetica" among them). Having tackled the Odes (as well as Virgil's Eclogues), Ferry here uses a base of iambic pentameter as an equivalent to Horace's hexameter, and the freeness of the translation gives free reign to Horace's elegance and aphoristic wisdom. While the volume offers the Latin text on the facing page, those with a more scholarly bent are apt to be somewhat disappointed: no line correspondence or facilitating line numbers, and only a minimal glossary and notes are provided. And the translation may be a little too free. A passage truncated by Ferry as: "It's that I follow whatever is bad for me/ And shun the things that might be good for me," is given in full by Jacob Fuchs (Horace's Satires and Epistles) as: "I seek what injures me, flee what I think may help./ The wind blows me: in Rome I love Tibur, in Tibur Rome." Ferry's language is certainly smoother, but some readers may not know what they're missing. Still, most will find that Ferry's casually metrical renderings get the spirit and formal feeling right.
