Epistles of Horace (Bilingual Edition)

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." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, 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.

Brief description: Horace (65 BCE-8 BCE) was a Roman lyric poet during the reign of Augustus whose major themes included politics, love, philosophy, social role, and poetry. He wrote Satires, Odes, and Epistles as well as Carmen Saeculare and Ars Poetica. Much more is known about Horace than other ancient poets because he included many autobiographical details in his writing. Horace's Epistles later influenced the style of Ovid and Propertius.

Review Quotes:

"Reading these versions we feel as if the streets that Horace walked have opened onto our own." --Peter Campion, Raritan

"Masterful . . . Writing of such authority is not translation in the conventional sense, but a reawakening of an ancient voice in the voice of a poet who is sitting, as it were, on the other side of the room. Ferry takes his bearings from the great blank verse poets of the last two hundred years, especially Frost, and while he manages to be faithful to the meaning, substance and shades, of the Latin original, Ferry achieves through his historical, cultural, and linguistic cross-pollination something more important and lasting than mere translation: he brings to life new as well as old possibilities for poetry in America now. The all-but-amazing fact is that this is now the third time that Ferry has performed this feat, his Gilgamesh (1992) and Horace's Odes (1997) being the other and even more remarkable instances." --Harry Thomas, Harvard Review