Best known to English readers as the author of the imposing Odes, Horace began and ended his career with the more personal and metrically less complex Satires
and Epistles
(the famous "Ars Poetica" among them). Having tackled the Odes
(as well as Virgil's Eclogues), Ferry here uses a base of iambic pentameter as an equivalent to Horace's hexameter, and the freeness of the translation gives free reign to Horace's elegance and aphoristic wisdom. While the volume offers the Latin text on the facing page, those with a more scholarly bent are apt to be somewhat disappointed: no line correspondence or facilitating line numbers, and only a minimal glossary and notes are provided. And the translation may be a little too free. A passage truncated by Ferry as: "It's that I follow whatever is bad for me/ And shun the things that might be good for me," is given in full by Jacob Fuchs (Horace's Satires and Epistles) as: "I seek what injures me, flee what I think may help./ The wind blows me: in Rome I love Tibur, in Tibur Rome." Ferry's language is certainly smoother, but some readers may not know what they're missing. Still, most will find that Ferry's casually metrical renderings get the spirit and formal feeling right. (Aug. 13)
Forecast: Ferry's selected poems,
Of No Country I Know (Univ. of Chicago), recently won $10,000 prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Library of Congress. While not having quite Robert Pinsky's (or even Robert Fagles's) name recognition as a poet-translator, Ferry's versions, backed by the FSG brand, should sell steadily and solidly, reeling in most browsers and comparison shoppers for the foreseeable future.
