The Ifs and the Ases

“The great division between human beings is into the Ifs and the Ases… This is the meaning of those two words as I interpret them: If it were, — if it might be, — if it could be, — if it had been. One portion of mankind go through life always regretting, always whining, always imagining. These are the people whose backbones remain cartilaginous all their lives long, as do those of certain other vertebrate animals, — the sturgeons, for instance. A good many poets must be classed with this group of vertebrates.

“As it is, — this is the way in which the other class of people look at the conditions in which they find themselves. They may be optimists or pessimists, — they are very largely optimists,– but, taking things just as they find them, they adjust the facts to their wishes if they can; and if they cannot, then they adjust themselves to the facts. I venture to say that if one should count the Ifs and the Ases in the conversation of his acquaintances, he would find the more able and important persons among them — statesmen, generals, men of business — among the Ases, and the majority of the conspicuous failures among the Ifs. I don’t know but this would be as good a test as that of Gideon, — lapping the water or taking it up in the hand. I have a poetical friend whose conversation is starred as thick with ifs as a boiled ham is with cloves. But another friend of mine, a business man, whom I trust in making my investments, would not let me meddle with a certain stock which I fancied, because, as he said, ‘there are too many ifs in it. As it looks now, I would n’t touch it’.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

What a Desperate Business

“I thanked Heaven, the other day, that I was not a critic. These attenuated volumes of poetry in fancy bindings open their covers at one like so many little unfledged birds, and one does so long to drop a worm in, — a worm in the shape of a kind word for the poor fledgling! But what a desperate business it is to deal with this army of candidates for immortality!” (Oliver Wendell Holmes sr., Over the Teacups, 1890)

An Affair of Cooperation

“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)

Collections of Translations

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)

Varied Translations

“It is the age of accurate translation. The present generation has produced a complete library of versions of the great classics, chiefly in prose, partly in verse, more faithful, true, and scholarly than anything ever produced before. It is the photographic age of translation; and all that the art of sun-pictures has done for the recording of ancient buildings, and more than that, the art of literal translation has done for the understanding of ancient poetry. A complete translation of a great poem is, of course, an impossible thing. The finest translation is at best but a copy of a part; it gives us more or less crudely some element of the original; the color, the light and shade, the glow, are not there, lost as completely as they are in a photograph. But in the large photograph — say of the Sistine Madonna — the lines and the composition are there, as no human hand ever drew them. And so, in a fine translation, the thought survives. One method gives us one element, another method some fresh element, and together we may get some real impression of the mighty whole. Now, when some of us may have partly lost touch of the original, and some may never have acquired it, the use of translations, especially the use of varied translations, may give us much.” (Frederic Harrison, The Choice of Books, 1891)

To Translate Horace!

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.”

Horace’s Carpe Diem

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.

Latin in the Twelfth Century

“Latin in the twelfth century was a study of as much practical importance as English composition in the twentieth. It was not only the language of literature, of the Church, of the law-courts, of all educated men, but of ordinary correspondence: the language in which a student will write home for a pair of boots, or suggest that it is the part of a discreet sister to inflame the affection of the relations, nay, even the brother-in-law, of a deserving scholar, who at the moment has neither sheets to his bed, nor shirt to his back, and in which she will reply that she is sending him two pairs of sheets and 100 sol., but not a word to my husband, or ‘I shall be dead and destroyed [mortua essem penitus et destructa]. I think he means to send you something himself’; or, a more delicate matter, to a sweetheart, that he sees a fellow-student ruffling it in the girdle he had given her, and fears her favours have gone with it. ‘I could stand the loss of the belt’, says he magnificently. Clearly, an even livelier language than the Latin of Erasmus or More.” (Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, 1927)

John Quincy Adams

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.

The Whole Background of Life

“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)