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2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice This groundbreaking new translation of Horace's most widely read collection of poetry is rendered in modern, metrical English verse rather than the more common free verse found in many other translations. Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz adapts the Roman poet's rich and metrically varied poetry to English formal verse, reproducing the works in a way that maintains fidelity to the tone, timbre, and style of the originals while conforming to the rules of English prosody. Each poem is true to the sense and aesthetic pleasure of the Latin and carries with it the dignity, concision, and movement characteristic of Horace's writing. Kaimowitz presents each translation with annotations, providing the context necessary for understanding and enjoying Horace's work. He also comments on textual instability and explains how he constructed his verse renditions to mirror Horatian Latin. Horace and The Odes are introduced in lively fashion by noted classicist Ronnie Ancona.… (more)
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Horace's poems are masterpieces of concision, obliquity, delay, and obfuscation. David Ferry's version of Horace is, well, prolix, acute, direct, and transparent. In his introduction he more or less says
I read his translations of Virgil's Eclogues many years ago and liked it okay, and I suspect his style is much better suited to long poems of that kind: what matters in them is what is being said as much as how it is written. But for Horace's odes, what is being said is almost entirely banal, and it is being said in an extraordinary, beautiful, fascinating way. Ferry loses all of that.
Is there a good, modernist translation of Horace out there, akin to Fagles' Oresteia? I hope to read one before I die.