David Moynihan, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
I scarcely know what excuse I can offer for making public this attemptto "translate the untranslatable." No one can be more convinced than Iam that a really successful translator must be himself an originalpoet; and where the author translated happens to be one whose specialcharacteristic is incommunicable grace of expression, the demand on thetranslator's powers would seem to be indefinitely increased. Yet thetime appears to be gone by when men of great original gifts could findsatisfaction in reproducing the thoughts and words of others; and thework, if done at all, must now be done by writers of inferiorpretension. Among these, however, there are still degrees; and theexperience which I have gained since I first adventured as a poeticaltranslator has made me doubt whether I may not be ill-advised inresuming the experiment under any circumstances. Still, an experimentof this kind may have an advantage of its own, even when it isunsuccessful; it may serve as a piece of embodied criticism, showingwhat the experimenter conceived to be the conditions of success, andmay thus, to borrow Horace's own metaphor of the whetstone, impart toothers a quality which it is itself without. Perhaps I may be allowed,for a few moments, to combine precept with example, and imitate mydistinguished friend and colleague, Professor Arnold, in offering somecounsels to the future translator of Horace's Odes, referring, at thesame time, by way of illustration, to my own attempt.
The first thing at which, as it seems to me, a Horatian translatorought to aim, is some kind of metrical conformity to his original.Without this we are in danger of losing not only the metrical, but thegeneral effect of the Latin; we express ourselves in a differentcompass, and the character of the expression is altered accordingly.For instance, one of Horace's leading features is his occasionalsententiousness. It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that hasmade him a storehouse of quotations. He condenses a general truth in afew words, and thus makes his wisdom portable. "Non, si male nunc, etolim sic erit;" "Nihil est ab omni parte beatum;" "Omnes eodemcogimur,"—these and similar expressions remain in the memory whenother features of Horace's style, equally characteristic, but lessobvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to dojustice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which hewrites is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he choosesa longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverbby expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the veryposition of the sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, in order to preservethese external peculiarities, it may be necessary to recast theexpression, to substitute, in fact, one form of proverb for another;but this is far preferable to retaining the words in a diluted form,and so losing what gives them their character, I cannot doubt, then,that it is necessary in translating an Ode of Horace to choose someanalogous metre; as little can I doubt that a translator of the Odesshould appropriate to each Ode some particular metre as its own. It maybe true that Horace himself does not invariably suit his metre to hissubject; the solemn Alcaic is used for a poem in dispraise of seriousthought and praise of wine; the Asclepiad stanza in which Quintilius islamented is employed to describe the loves