the Greater Nomadic Council

Horace, Odes, 1.5

Given the favorable responses to my recent posts on Latin poetry, I thought I'd discuss one of Horace's odes that I recently read. 1.5 appears to be a particularly popular ode from the amount of commentary I was able to find online and from some implied remarks in those commentaries. Of course, Horace's odes in general are highly treasured works. Nietzsche eloquently makes the point I fumbled in an earlier post:

To this day I have got from no poet the same artistic delight as from the very first a Horatian ode gave me. In certain languages what is here achieved is not even to be thought of. This mosaic of words, in which every word by sound, by position, and by meaning, spreads it influence to right and left and over the whole; the minimum in compass and number of symbols, the maximum achieved in the effectiveness of these symbols, all that is Roman, and believe me, of excellence unsurpassed.

1.5 is a particularly enjoyable ode because it combines many of these subtle word-order effects with the enduring theme of foolish, youthful love; Horace's vantage point is one of detached wisdom:

quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
    grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
      cui flavam religas comam,

simplex munditiis? heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
    nigris aequora ventis
      emirabitur insolens,

qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
    sperat, nescius aurae
      fallacis! miseri, quibus

intemptata nites. me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
    suspendisse potenti
      vestimenta maris deo.

Milton's translation, a heroic, though inevitably doomed, attempt to recreate the poem's effects runs:

What slender youth bedew'd with liquid odours
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
   Pyrrha, for whom bind'st thou
   in wreaths thy golden hair,

Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
On faith and changed Gods complain: and seas
   Rough with black winds and storms
   unwonted shall admire:

Who now enjoys thee, credulous, all-gold,
Who alwayes vacant, alwayes amiable
   Hopes thee; of flattering gales
   unmindfull. Hapless they

To whom thou untry'd seem'st fair. Me in my vow'd
Picture the sacred wall declares t'have hung
   My dank and dripping weeds
   To the stern God of Sea.

As David West writes, "This is as close a translation could come without becoming a crib, and the price is high." As any decent commentary on this poem notes (commentaries on Horace are necessary if you want to study these on your own), the poem's first line recreates through word order the lover's embrace of Pyrrha: "quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa" is literally "who [in] many slender you boy in roses". The next line echoes this effect by placing the verb "urget" in the middle of "liquidis odoribus," a common technique known as hyperbaton. The verb, however, demands comment. It means "to press, press hard on, press onward, push on"; it can also mean "to press close, crowd". "Urget" is quite a bit more salacious than the "court" that Milton uses. While it certainly has that sense (as in "to urge" or "press a case") the context—a bed of roses, a heady perfume, a cave (which needs little symbolic interpretation)—lends the word a far greater physical import than Milton's translation allows. While Horace is not leering, the innuendo is clear. The first question's syntax also mimics the luxuriousness of the setting; the second, far shorter and more straight-forward question pleasingly contrasts this with a glimpse of Pyrrha's preparations. "For whom do you tie your flaxen hair, simple in elegance?" West points out that "simplex munditiis" is "untranslatable" and "not so demure and Puritan as 'plain in thy neatness.'" The sense here is, instead, of deceptive, studied simplicity that results from the highest art. Munditia has several connotations: "cleanness, cleanliness; neatness, elegance, spruceness." Likewise, "simplex" means not just "simple," but "uncompounded, unmixed; plain, ordinary, natural, without elaboration; artless, ingenuous." Without the possibility of translating "munditia" as "elegance," the phrase might be far easier to translate, but that connotation throws what would otherwise be a fairly straight-forward construction into doubt. Translation also misses the word-play of the third stanza between "aurea" [golden] and "aurae" [breezes/winds]. Not only does "aurea" recall Pyrrha's "flavam coman" [yellow/golden hair] and not only does it transmute her physical characteristics into a mistaken moral judgment by her naive lover, but it further replicates the inevitable, heart-wrenching knowledge the "puer" will discover once he becomes one of the "miseri" who have known and lost Pyrrha's affections. The final sentence of the poem is the most tortured, what one commentator calls "the despair of students reading the text with dictionary in hand." I know it took me at least half an hour to figure out those last four lines. Part of that was lack of context; often, upon retiring, Greeks would dedicate their tools to the appropriate deity or hang a votive plaque on the walls of the temple. But even knowing this, we don't know what the sacred walls indicate with the poet's votive tablet until we reach the last line. The water imagery that has been present from the very beginning—the boy drenched in odors, the "aspera aequora" [rough seas]—now implicates the poet himself. Pyrrha is the "niger ventus" [dark wind; in the poem "nigris ventis"] that dangerously rouses young men's passions. Although we don't think Horace himeself once loved Pyrrha, he may have loved her type, but has since reached dry land. West states, "Saved from shipwreck, they [Greeks or Italians] might offer up the clothes they had been washed ashore in." The difficult word-order could suggest a certain reticence on Horace's part to admit this; it could also represent the turmoil he once experienced but has since put by. The "tabula votiva" [votive tablet] further suggests the act of writing itself. Horace has put aside naive, youthful love for the sacred work of poetry.