Horace -- Translations into English; Laudatory poetry, Latin -- Translations into English
I have followed Horace's sense, not his words. I believe, with Ritter,
that the alternative is between the pipe as accompanying the vox acuta,
and the cithara or lyre as accompanying the vox gravis. Horace has
specified the vox acuta, and left the vox gravis to be inferred; I have
done just the reverse.
Me, as I lay on Vultur's steep.
In this and the two following stanzas I have paraphrased Horace, with a
view to bring out what appears to be his sense. There is, I think, a
peculiar force in the word fabulosae, standing as it does at the very
opening of the stanza, in close connection with me, and thus bearing
the weight of all the intervening words till the very end, where its
noun, palumbes, is introduced at last. Horace says in effect, "I, too,
like other poets, have a legend of my infancy." Accordingly I have
thrown the gossip of the country-side into the form of an actual
speech. Whether I am justified in heightening the marvellous by making
the stock-doves actually crown the child, instead of merely laying
branches upon him, I am not so sure; but something more seems to be
meant than the covering of leaves, which the Children in the Wood, in
our own legend, receive from the robin.
Loves the leafy growth
Of Lycia next his native wood.
Some of my predecessors seem hardly to distinguish between the Lyciae
dumeta and the natalem silvam of Delos, Apollo's attachment to both of
which warrants the two titles Delius et Patareus. I knew no better way
of marking the distinction within the compass of a line and a half than
by making Apollo exhibit a preference where Horace speaks of his
likings as co-ordinate.
Strength mix'd with mind is made more strong.
"Mixed" is not meant as a precise translation of temperatam, chastened
or restrained, though "to mix" happens to be one of the shades of
meaning of temperare.
BOOK III, ODE 5.
The fields we spoil'd with corn are green.
The later editors are right in not taking Marte nostro with coli as
well as with populata. As has been remarked to me, the pride of the
Roman is far more forcibly expressed by the complaint that the enemy
have been able to cultivate fields that Rome has ravaged than by the
statement that Roman captives have been employed to cultivate the
fields they had ravaged as invaders. The latter proposition, it is
true, includes the former; but the new matter draws off attention from
the old, and so weakens it.
Who once to faithless foes has knelt.
"Knelt" is not strictly accurate, expressing Bentley's dedidit rather
than the common, and doubtless correct, text, credidit.
And, girt by friends that mourn'd him, sped
* * *
The press of kin he push'd apart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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