But this praise of Horace and this defense of his translators fails to justify or explain the writing of this paper. An honest confession being good for the soul, I will confess that the remarks that follow were first employed to introduce some versions of selected Odes I was once rash enough to publish. It is not a good sportsman that shuts his eyes and bangs away with both barrels at a flock of birds, and I now doubt whether I was wise in trying to bring down readers, if not with my verse-barrel, at least with my prose-barrel. Being older, I use at present only one barrel at a time and, perhaps for the same reason, I am wont to try the prose-barrel. And fortunately I can apply to the comments I intend to make on Horatian translators the quotation I used in order to mollify irate readers of my own verse renderings. It came from a once popular, now forgotten poet, the Rev. John Pomfret, and it ran as follows:—"It will be to little purpose, the Author presumes, to offer any reasons why the following POEMS appear in public; for it is ten to one whether he gives the true, and if he does, it is much greater odds whether the gentle reader is so courteous as to believe him."
So much has been written on the methods of Horace’s translators, and so much remains to be written, that it is hard to determine where to begin; but perhaps the preface of the late Professor Conington to his well-known translation of the Odes will furnish a proper point of departure. Few persons, whether translators or readers, are likely to object to Conington’s first premise that the translator ought to aim at "some kind of metrical conformity to his original." To reproduce an original Sapphic or Alcaic stanza in blank verse, or in the couplets of Pope, is at once to repel the reader who knows Horace well, and to give the reader who is unacquainted with Latin lyric poetry a totally erroneous conception of the metrical and rhythmical methods of the poet. To render a compressed Latin verse by a diffuse English one is to do injustice, as Conington observes, to the sententiousness for which Horace is justly celebrated, although the English scholar, had he written after the appearance of Mr. Gladstone’s attempt to render the Odes, might with propriety have added that the translator should not, in his avoidance of diffuseness, be seduced by the facility of the octosyllabic couplet. To translate Horace’s odes into anything but quatrains, except on occasions, is also to offend the meticulous Horatian and to mislead any reader who seeks to know the poet through an English rendering. It would seem, however, that when Professor Conington insisted that an English measure once adopted for the Alcaic must be used for every ode in which Horace employed the stanza just named, he went far toward hampering the translator, who, despite his proneness to offend, has his rights. That such uniformity ought to be aimed at, and that it will, as a rule, be aimed at, is doubtless true; but there is an element of the problem with which Conington does not seem sufficiently to have reckoned.
This is rhyme, which he assumed to be necessary to a successful rendition of an ode of Horace. A particular stanza not employing rhyme may probably be used without resulting loss in translating every ode written in a special form. Yet this may not be the case with a stanza employing rhymes, if the translator aim, as he should, at a fairly, though not an awkwardly literal rendering of the language of his original. There will necessarily be coincidences of sound in a literal prose version of a Latin stanza that will suggest a definite and advantageous arrangement of rhymes for a poetical version. To adopt a certain English stanza in which to render a certain Latin stanza wherever it occurs, is to do away with this natural advantage, which presents itself oftener than might at first be supposed.
Concrete examples will serve to make my meaning clear. The third ode of the first book, the admirable "Sic te diva potens Cypri," is written in what is called the Second Asclepiad meter; so is the delightful ninth ode of the third book, the "Donec gratus eram." We will assume that for the first of these odes the translator has chosen a quatrain with alternating rhymes (a, b, a, b). Following Professor Conington’s rule of uniformity, he must employ the same stanza for the second of the two odes, which, by the way, Conington himself did not do, for reasons which he gave at length. Now the fifth stanza of the "Donec gratus eram" runs as follows:—
"Quid si prisca redit Venus
Diductosque jugo cogit aëneo,
Si flava excutitur Chloë
Rejectaeque patet janua Lydiae?"
This may be rendered in prose:—
"What if the former Love return and join with brazen yoke the parted ones, if yellow-haired Chloë be shaken off, and the door stand open for rejected Lydia?"
If my memory does not deceive me, it was this stanza, and especially one word in its last verse, that determined the arrangement of rhymes in a version I attempted years ago, "Consule Planco." This verse seemed to run inevitably into
"And open stand for Lydia the door."
It needed but a moment to detect in the first verse of the stanza a possible rhyme-word. The syllable re of redit furnished more, not the most apt of rhymes with door, but still sufficient, as things go with amateur translators, and with a perhaps pardonable tautology I wrote