Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Satires, Epistles, and Art of
Poetry by Horace
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Title: The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry
Author: Horace
a.k.a. Quintus Horatius Flaccus
Translated by John Conington, M. A.
Release Date: April, 2004 [EBook #5419]
[Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 14,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SATIRES OF
HORACE ***
Produced by David Moynihan, Charles Franks
and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
THE SATIRES, EPISTLES, AND ART OF POETRY OF
HORACE
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE
BY JOHN
CONINGTON, M.A.
CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN
THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
TO
THE REV. W. H. THOMPSON, D.D.
MASTER OF TRINITY
COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
ETC. ETC. ETC.
IN
GRATITUDE FOR MANY KINDNESSES
RECEIVED FROM
HIM AND OTHER CAMBRIDGE FRIENDS,
AND IN
ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE COMPLIMENT
PAID BY
CAMBRIDGE TO OXFORD
IN THE APPOINTMENT OF
THE OXFORD LATIN PROFESSOR
AS ONE OF THE
ELECTORS TO HER LATIN CHAIR.
PREFACE.
In venturing to follow up my translation of the Odes of Horace by a
version of the Satires and Epistles, I feel that I am in no way entitled to
refer to the former as a justification of my boldness in undertaking the
latter. Both classes of works are doubtless explicable as products of the
same original genius: but they differ so widely in many of their
characteristics, that success in rendering the one, though greater than
any which I can hope to have attained, would afford no presumption
that the translator would be found to have the least aptitude for the
other. As a matter of fact, while the Odes still continue to invite

translation after
translation, the Satires and Epistles, popular as they
were among translators and imitators a hundred years ago, have
scarcely been attempted at all since that great revolution in literary taste
which was effected during the last ten years of the last century and the
first ten years of the present. Byron's Hints from Horace, Mr. Howes'
forgotten but highly meritorious version of the Satires and Epistles, to
which I hope to return before long, and a few
experiments by Mr.
Theodore Martin, published in the notes to his translation of the Odes
and elsewhere, constitute perhaps the whole recent stock of which a
new translator may be expected to take account. In one sense this is
encouraging: in another dispiriting. The field is not pre-occupied: but
the reason is, that general opinion has pronounced its cultivation
unprofitable and hopeless.
No doubt, apart from fluctuations in the taste of the reading public,
there are special reasons why a version of this portion of Horace's
works should be a difficult, perhaps an impracticable undertaking. It
would not be easy to maintain that a Roman satirist was incapable of
adequate representation in English in the face of such an instance to the
contrary as Gifford's Juvenal, probably, take it all in all, the very best
version of a classic in the language. But though Juvenal has many
passages which sufficiently remind us of Horace, some of them light
and playful, others level and almost flat, these do not form the staple of
his Satires: there are passages of dignified declamation and passionate
invective which suffer less in translation, and which may be so
rendered as to leave a lasting impression of pleasure upon the mind of
the reader. Like Horace, he has an abundance of local and temporary
allusions, in dealing with which the most successful translator is the
one who fails least: unlike Horace, when he quits the local and the
temporary, he generally quits also the language of persiflage, and
abandons himself unrestrainedly to feeling. Persiflage, I suppose, even
in ordinary life, is much less easy to practise with perfect success than a
graver and less artificial mode of speaking, though, perhaps for that
very reason, it is apt to be more sought after: the persiflage of a writer
of another nation and of a past age is