August 05, 2005
Horace is Hard
In case anyone is interested, I finished my Latin textbook, Reading Latin, (yes, the review is mine) a week or so ago. Now, rather than let my newly and tenuously acquired skills rust away, I'm reading a little on my own each day. For now, I'm working on Horace and I must say, he's really difficult, far more so than the bits of Ovid and Virgil I've read so far. I'm operating under the theory that if I can read this very difficult poet, then other authors will be easy in comparison. Horace does things like put the subject four lines away from the verb. I just got used to seeing adjectives and nouns split up by only a few words, not a few stanzas. Crazy poets. Here's an example with literal and then idiomatic (not mine) translation:
namque me silva lupus in Sabina,
dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra
terminum curis vagor expeditis,
fugit inermemtruly with me woods a wolf in Sabine,
while my I was singing of Lalagen and beyond
boundary with cares I was wandering unimpeded,
fled unarmedA wolf, while roaming trouble-free
In Sabine wood, as fancy led me,
Unarm'd I sang my Lalage,
Beheld, and fled me.
Sheesh. While it's true that poetry is what's lost in translation, at least the translation between, say, French and English is easier due to their structural similarities. Latin poetry is ultimately untranslatable into English. Of course, all of this is either old news or uninteresting (or both) to you, dear Reader, but really, I'm just trying to drive you away with these sorts of posts. Now shoo!
I think you did a nice job on that stanza, especially with using the distance between the subject and verb as an effect that helps to set the scene. I hope you'll keep posting these; they're fun to read.
Drive me away with that? No way. I thought that was cool!
I wish I could claim credit for that translation, but it's not mine. I found it at the Internet Classics Archive section for Horace. The site itself was a great help, too. I would never have figured out that "Jupiter" means "sky" sometimes or that "Lalagen" is a person instead of a place.
Thanks for the link. I'm starting to feel inspired to pick my Latin textbook back up for some more self study on my long train commute.
That alone is enough to keep me posting these. While I enjoy writing these sorts of posts as they help my own understanding, they're also intended for other amateur Latinists like myself; certainly nothing I've written or am likely to write will be at all useful to advanced students, but I get the feeling that there are a good number of us out there who know just enough Latin to wish we understood the language and literature much, much better.