“Happily, only a small proportion of Horatian translators have had the hardihood to give their lucubrations to the press. The first to do this extremely hazardous thing was, it would seem, one Thomas Colwell, whose effusions were originally seen in print three hundred and fifteen years ago. What a number of followers that bold man has had! … And what a variety has been exhibited by these writers both in metre and in merit! To whom shall the palm be given among all the candidates — to Professor Conington, to the first Lord Lytton, or to Sir Theodore Martin? These take the lead, the rest being (in comparison) nowhere. Yet can any man lay his hand upon his heart, and say, honestly, that he is satisfied with any one of the three, learned and skilful and enthusiastic as they are? Is it, indeed, in the power of any one man — save he be another Horace, born in English guise, to supply us with ‘Englishings’, even of any one section of the Works, which should obtain the suffrages of all men? Rather is the successful translation of Horace an affair of co-operation among many — of a lucky hit here, of a happy thought there — of a gradual accumulation of worthy specimens produced by individual effort from time to time. A collection of such specimens has been made, and it is much better worth our notice than any wholesale rendering which anybody, greatly daring, has produced of his own mind and motion.” (William Davenport Adams, With Poet and Player, 1891)

Available HERE.

• 190 English Translations of Horace’s Carpe Diem (1.11)
• 215 English Translations of Horace’s Integer Vitae (1.22)
• 151 English Translations of Horace’s Aequam Memento (2.3)
• 202 English Translations of Horace’s Otium Divos (2.16)
• 235 English Translations of Horace’s Donec Gratus Eram (3.9)
• 181 English Translations of Horace’s Diffugere Nives (4.7)

George Meason Whicher, To Gilbert Murray, 1926

To translate Horace! And to send the verse
For Murray’s eyes! What folly could be worse?
If one before such Presences may come,
Should Littleness not tremble and be dumb?

Yet I can face them. Though the tiniest spark
Be mine, to glow amid the encircling dark,
True to its ether-home it still aspires
And claims its kinship with those greater fires.

Like the poor votary of that buried faith,
Who shrank to meet the Lords of Life and Death,
Yet bore within his hand on graven gold
The charm to make his very weakness bold, —

I too, the very least of them that sing,
May give this answer to their challenging:
“O Mighty Ones! I know you who you are;
But lo! I also am a Wandering Star.”

Imitated by Anthony C. Deane, 1892

O covet not, Leuconoe, to be told
What destinies on each of us await;
Neither by those astrologers of old,
Nor those of latter date.

Seek not by post an oracle to fetch,
For oft fulfilment expectation damps,
Although “Professors” will your future sketch
For eighteen penny stamps.

Heed not the spiteful weather-forecast man;
When he announces rain and tempest strong;
Make up your mind, as quickly as you can,
The chances are he’s wrong;

And treat those sages with becoming mirth
Who speedy doom to all the world proclaim;
They’re always at it, but our ancient earth
Still rolls on much the same.

To know our destiny the gods forbid;
Strive not in vain the unseen to descry;
In darkness is the fate of all men hid,
In darkness let it lie.

Horace’s Integer Vitae, Translated by John Quincy Adams, 1841

The man in righteousness array’d,
A pure and blameless liver,
Needs not the keen Toledo blade,
Nor venom-freighted quiver.
What though he wind his toilsome way
O’er regions wild and weary —
Through Zara’s burning desert stray;
Or Asia’s jungles dreary:

What though he plough the billowy deep
By lunar light, or solar,
Meet the resistless Simoon’s sweep,
Or iceberg circumpolar.
In bog or quagmire deep and dank,
His foot shall never settle;
He mounts the summit of Mont Blanc,
Or Popocatapetl.

On Chimborazo’s breathless height,
He treads o’er burning lava;
Or snuff the Bohan Upas blight,
The deathful plant of Java.
Through every peril he shall pass,
By Virtue’s shield protected;
And still by Truth’s unerring glass
His path shall be directed.

Else wherefore was it, Thursday last,
While strolling down the valley
Defenceless, musing as I pass’d
A canzonet to Sally;
A wolf, with mouth protruding snout,
Forth from the thicket bounded —
I clapped my hands and raised a shout —
He heard — and fled — confounded.

Tangier nor Tunis never bred
An animal more crabbed;
Nor Fez, dry nurse of lions, fed
A monster half so rabid.
Nor Ararat so fierce a beast
Has seen, since days of Noah;
Nor strong, more eager for a feast,
The fell constrictor boa.

Oh! place me where the solar beam
Has scorch’d all verdure vernal;
Or on the polar verge extreme,
Block’d up with ice eternal —
Still shall my voice’s tender lays
Of love remain unbroken;
And still my charming Sally praise,
Sweet smiling and sweet spoken.

“I attach a certain amount of importance to the spirit of a few old Latin tags and quotations. Some of them, not more than three lines long, give one the very essence of what a man ought to try to do. Others, equally short, let you understand once and for all, the things that a man should not do — under any circumstances. There are others — bits of odes from Horace, they happen to be in my case — that make one realise in later life as no other words in any other tongue can, the brotherhood of mankind in time of sorrow or affliction. But men say that one can get the same stuff in an easier way and in a living tongue. They say there is no sense in dragging men up and down through grammar and construe for years and years, when at the last, all they can produce (‘produce’ is a good word) is a translation that would make Virgil, Horace or Cicero turn in their graves. Here is my defence of this alleged wicked waste of time. The reason why one has to parse and construe and grind at the dead tongues in which certain ideas are expressed, is not for, the sake of what is called intellectual training — that may be given in other ways — but because only in that tongue is that idea expressed with absolute perfection. If it were not so the Odes of Horace would not have survived. (People aren’t in a conspiracy to keep things alive.) I grant you that the kind of translations one serves up at school are as bad and as bald as they can be. They are bound to be so, because one cannot re-express an idea that has been perfectly set forth. (Men tried to do this, by the way, in the revised version of the Bible. They failed.) Yet, by a painful and laborious acquaintance with the mechanism of that particular tongue; by being made to take it to pieces and put it together again, and by that means only; we can arrive at a state of mind in which, though we cannot re-express the idea in any adequate words, we can realise and feel and absorb the idea… Our ancestors were not fools. They knew what we, I think, are in danger of forgetting — that the whole background of life, in law, civil administration, conduct of life, the terms of justice, the terms of science, the value of government, are the everlasting ramparts of Rome and Greece — the father and mother of civilisation. And for that reason, before they turned a man into life at large, they arranged that he should not merely pick up, but absorb into his system (through his hide if necessary) the fact that Greece and Rome were there. Later on, they knew, he would find out for himself how much and how important they were and they are, and that they still exist.” (Rudyard Kipling, The Uses of Reading)

Translated by Thomas De Quincey, 1800, Aged 15

Fuscus! the man whose heart is pure,
Whose life unsullied by offence,
Needs not the jav’lines of the Moor
In his defence.

Should he o’er Lybia’s burning sands
Fainting pursue his breathless way,
No bow he’d seek to arm his hands
Against dismay.

Quivers of poisoned shafts he’d scorn,
Nor, though unarmed, would feel a dread
To pass where Caucasus forlorn
Rears his huge head.

In his own conscious worth secure,
Fearless he’d roam amidst his foes,
Where fabulous Hydaspes pure,
Romantic flows.

For late as in the Sabine wood
Singing my Lalage I strayed,
Unarmed I was, a wolf there stood;
He fled afraid.

Larger than which one ne’er was seen
In warlike Daunia’s beechen groves,
Nor yet in Juba’s land, where e’en
The lion roves.

Send me to dreary barren lands
Where never summer zephyrs play,
Where never sun dissolves the bands
Of ice away:

Send me again to scorching realms
Where not one cot affords a seat,
And where no shady pines or elms
Keep off the heat:

In every clime, in every isle,
Me Lalage shall still rejoice;
I’ll think of her enchanting smile
And of her voice.

Translated by Leigh Hunt, 1801, Aged 17

The man, my friend, that in his breast
With ev’ry purer virtue’s blest,
Safe in his own approving heart
Needs not the Moor’s protecting dart,
Or seeks to bend against the foe
With nervous arm the pliant bow,
Nor o’er his neck throws, proudly great,
The quiver big with pois’nous fate.

Whether on Afric’s desert coast,
Mid burning sands his steps are lost;
Or where Caucasian rocks on high
Lift their proud summits to the sky,
Heap’d with inhospitable snow
Pale gleaming o’er the plains below,
Or where the streams romantic glide
Of soft Hydaspe’s silver tide.

For, as along the Sabine grove
I sung the beauties of my love,
And, free from care, too distant stray’d
Within its dark embow’ring shade;
The prowling wolf, with blood-shot eye,
Unarm’d, beheld me wand’ring nigh;
And, while I shook in silent dread,
With howls the rav’ning monster fled!

Such, the grim terror of the wood,
Ne’er learnt to lap the trav’ller’s blood,
Or from the panting victim tore
The quiv’ring limbs with stifled roar,
Where Daunia’s spreading oaks arise
In rugged grandeur to the skies;
Or where the Moorish lion stalks
With monarch pride his arid walks.

O lay me where Sol’s gayest child,
Refulgent Summer, never smil’d;
Nor Zephyr’s mild refreshing breeze
Fann’d the rich foliage of the trees;
Where ev’ry black portentous cloud
And all the foggy vapours croud,
When angry Jove in noxious air
Extends his arm for vengeance bare;

O lay me where Sol, driving high,
Flames wide along the sultry sky,
No roof, beneath his parching ray,
To soothe the pilgrim’s weary way;
Yet, yet will I, nor ask for more,
My lovely Lalage adore;
Her, who each love-wing’d hour beguiles,
As soft she speaks, and sweet she smiles!