200 English translations of Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (Odes 3.9):

Isaac Waisberg, 2022, Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (PDF Book)

More Collections of Translations.

From Winston Churchill’s My Early Years.

When the last sound of my mother’s departing wheels had died away, the Headmaster invited me to hand over any money I had in my possession. I produced my three half-crowns which were duly entered in a book, and I was told that from time to time there would be a ‘shop’ at the school with all sorts of things which one would like to have, and that I could choose what I liked up to the limit of the seven and sixpence. Then we quitted the Headmaster’s parlour and the comfortable private side of the house, and entered the more bleak apartments reserved for the instruction and accommodation of the pupils. I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown-covered book filled with words in different types of print.

“You have never done any Latin before, have you?” he said.

“No, sir.”

“This is a Latin grammar.” He opened it at a well-thumbed page. “You must learn this,” he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. “I will come back in half an hour and see what you know.”

Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.

Mensa
Mensa
Mensam
Mensae
Mensae
Mensa

a table
O table
a table
of a table
to or for a table
by, with or from a table

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I there upon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.

In due course the Master returned.

“Have you learnt it?” he asked.

“I think I can say it, sir,” I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

“What does it mean, sir?”

“It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.”

“But,” I repeated, “what does it mean?”

“Mensa means a table,” he answered.

“Then why does mensa also mean O table,” I enquired, “and what does O table mean?”

“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” he replied.

“But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity.

“O table, you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.” And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, “You would use it in speaking to a table.”

“But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement.

“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,” was his conclusive rejoinder.

Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.

“I am happy too that the subject of my lecture should be Walter Bagehot, who has been my revered and, indeed, I feel, intimate companion for over a quarter of a century. The gift he has bestowed on me is what he himself called ‘immortality by association.’ Posterity cannot take up many people, so my advice to those who have such ambitions is this: if you cannot be a genius yourself, attach yourself to one who is, and then you will be drawn onwards into the future like a speck in the tail of Halley’s comet.” (Norman St John-Stevas, 1987, The Omnipresence of Walter Bagehot)

“To bring new and valuable knowledge by lecturing before fifty or a hundred students a year is not research, for it is not publication, except in the legal sense. But to print such knowledge in a periodical where only a few will peer at it with skepticism or dismay — that is to enlarge human horizons, to make the university shine in a new glory, and to justify an early promotion.” (Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect)

“The man who has given his heart entirely to the quest for the things of this world is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time to find, possess, and enjoy them. The memory of life’s brevity constantly spurs him on. Beyond the goods he possesses, he is forever imagining a thousand others that death will prevent him from savoring unless he makes haste. This thought feels him with anxieties, fears, and regrets and keeps his soul in a state of constant trepidation that impels him again and again to change plans and places. If the taste for material well-being is coupled with a social state where neither law nor custom still keeps anyone in his place, this restlessness of spirit is further exacerbated. We will then find men constantly changing course for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Goldhammer)

“I am not really the helpless type, but I have never been very fond of the sort of aggressive scholarship that is now encountered everywhere, trying to sell to humanity brand-new laws of nature as if they were used cars. A feeling of tentativeness; an appreciation of the provisional and fragmentary character of human insight into nature; a consideration of how much arrogance and rashness must attend even the deepest understanding before generalizing statements can be made about life: all this will be part of the inheritance with which the many years have burdened the scientist as he grows older. If he is any good, he will become more modest.” (Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire)

“Twenty-five hundred years ago Master Kung recognized clearly that it is the disorder of the language that produces the disorder of the state. It is written in The Analects of Confucius (Waley translation):

If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then rites and music will not flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, then punishments will go astray. And if punishments go astray, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. Therefore the gentleman uses only such language as is proper for speech, and only speaks of what it would be proper to carry into effect. The gentleman, in what he says, leaves nothing to mere chance.

I should be sorry if these words led to the conclusion that all that Master Kung’s gentleman lacked was a word processor.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1986, Serious Questions)

“Eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak are able to hear them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel their self-interest involved, so that self-love leads them the more willingly to think over what has been said. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we try to establish, on the one hand, between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions that we use. This presupposes that we have studied the heart of man in order to know all its workings and that we find the right arrangement of the remarks that we wish to make suitable. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and try out on our own heart the appeal we make in what we say, so as to see whether the one is rightly made for the other, and whether we can feel confident that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is small or diminish that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject and there must be in it nothing excessive or lacking.” (Pascal, tr. Jacques Barzun, 2003)

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football ‘fan,’ and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva her owl, the bird with ever-dazzled eyes.” (Ortega y Gasset, 1930, The Revolt of the Masses)

“…ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.” (The History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Richard Crawley)