BMCRn't you glad you're not Stuart?

My all-time favorite BMCR contributor, Steven J. Willett, has a new review of Stuart Lyons's Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi.

He touches on some of my favorite topics:

1) The fallacy of biographical reading.

The Roman Odes have long been a quarry from which critics try to extract hard traces of sincerity or insincerity, as if these were binary opposites, but the job of a court-poet is to reflect court agendas and not his own private opinions. ... Sincerity is a poetic illusion created by the poet's verbal and structural dexterity. We have no instrument to probe behind the illusion to mental states, even in the case of modern poets where we possess letters and contemporary documents.

2) The performance of Latin verse.

Whatever Horace's own theatrical performance might have involved, there is nothing to suggest his contemporary readers sang such complex, intricate, allusive, ambiguous and rhetorically informed odes. The only way to comprehend their riches is by reading. Lyons shows himself far too confident in drawing "inescapable" conclusions from literary conventions that lack the slightest external corroboration.

3) Versification.

[Lyons's] decision to use traditional English versification has dressed Horace in such traditional garb that he vanishes into the mob of pallid imitations that stretch back to the sixteenth century. No matter how hard Lyons tries to make the odes sing, they sound like Thomas Gray on a bad day when he had nothing better to do than write his "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat."

Ouch.

Literature in translation?

I have long wanted a reader in classical literature in translation to build into the early years of my Latin language courses, but have come up empty. Several years ago in the course that put me on the path toward classics (a brilliant course called simply 'Humanities'), one of the two instructors lamented that there wasn't a better or more affordable set of anthologies than the little paperback Penguins by Michael Grant. If memory serves they were boring and scatter-shot to my young college brain, and even if they were not now out of print, I could not see purchasing them for high school students.

Surely I am not alone in wanting something like this to help contextualize the study of Latin, and to help communicate things like values that do not translate from the pages of introductory textbooks.

Has anyone a suggestion?

Translation: theory and practice

Maximus Planudes, the great Byzantine scholar of the Palaeologan renaissance, composed a Greek translation of the Distichs of Cato (Catonis Disticha), a collection of moral advice in Latin, of late date and popular for centuries. The portion that caught my eye was the prologue to book two:

Εἰ μὲν γηπονίας ἐθέλεις μαθέειν πολυκάρπους,
Ἡσίοδον μέτιθι κλυτόν. εἰ δ’ αὖ εἰδέναι αἱρῇ
τὰς βοτανῶν δυνάμεις, Νίκανδρος τάς σε διδάξει.
εἰ δὲ Φρυγῶν ποθέεις Δαναῶν τε δαῆναι ἀγῶνας,
δίζεο θεῖον Ὅμηρον, ὃς Ἄρεος ἔργ’ ἀγορεύει.
εἰ δέ γ’ ἐρᾶν βούλει τοῦ ἐρᾶν τε τέχνην ἐπιγνῶναι,
στεῖχε Θεόκριτον ἀμφὶ γυναιμανῆ. εἰ δὲ μέλει σοι
σὺν σοφίῃ ζώειν, κλύε μοι κείνων ἃ μαθεῖν χρή,
ὧν διὰ πᾶς βότον παθέων δίχα πάντα διοικεῖ·
δεῦρ’ ἴθι γοῦν καὶ τίπτε πέλει σοφίη σύ γε μυοῦ.

I'll give a quick and dirty translation (no time to look things up):

If you want to learn about fruitful tillage, follow famed Hesiod.
And if you'd rather know the powers of plants, Nicander will teach you these.
And if you long to learn about the contests of the Phrygians and the Danaans, seek out divine Homer, who tells the works of Ares.
And if you prefer loving and learning the art of love, follow Theocritus on madness for women.

The oddest bit here is probably the reference to Theocritus as a writer of love poetry on women.

Here's the Latin original:

Telluris si forte velis cognoscere cultus,
Virgilium legito; quod si mage nosse laboras
Herbarum vires, Macer tibi carmina dicit.
Si romana cupis et punica noscere bella,
Lucanum quaeras, qui Martis proelia dixit.
Si quid amare libet, vel discere amare legendo,
Nasonem petito;

So on agriculture Vergil was preceded by Hesiod. Despite this common connection, Hesiod was less a model for Vergil than was Nicander, author of the lost Georgica (only fragments, preserved by Athenaeus, survive). Planudes must have known this, but knew just as well that the Georgica could not be consulted, which would render his translation inept in a sense. Advice only matters when it can be followed, even if it is just a literary exercise.

Aemilius Macer will tell you the powers of plants, and he too followed Nicander, this time inspired by the Alexipharmaca, one of Nicander's two extant works (one of our principal manuscripts of the Theriaca and the Alexipharmaca is written in Planudes' own hand). The poem concerned both poisons and antidotes. Lucan, rather than Vergil, is the poet of epic, and he of course followed Homer. Finally Ovid's love poetry was preceded by the amatory idylls of Theocritus. If they did not predominate among his idylls, then at least Ovid had a prodigious output not limited to love poems.

What makes this translation most interesting to me are two things: (1) that Planudes substituted Greek authors who wrote on their various themes before the Romans, and were often their models, and (2) that Planudes only used extant works that his own audience actually could read. This is translation of a sort we rarely see, making the material as relevant and accessible to the audience as if it were not a foreign work at all while still maintaining its antiquarian nature.