The Epistles of Horace Bilingual Edition

by Horace; Ferry, David; Ferry, David

• ISBN13: 9780374528522
• ISBN10: 0374528527
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-30
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

My aim is to take familiar things and make Poetry of them, and do it in such a way That it looks as if it was as easy as could be For anybody to do it . . . the power of making A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much. --from "The Art of Poetry" When David Ferry's translation of The Odes of Horace appeared in 1997, Bernard Knox, writing in The New York Review of Books, called it "a Horace for our times." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, in which Horace perfected the conversational verse medium that gives his voice such dazzling immediacy, speaking in these letters with such directness, wit, and urgency to young writers, to friends, to his patron Maecenas, to Emperor Augustus himself. It is the voice of a free man, talking about how to get along in a Roman world full of temptations, opportunities, and contingencies, and how to do so with one's integrity intact. Horace's world, so unlike our own and yet so like it, comes to life in these poems. And there are also the poems -- the famous "Art of Poetry" and others -- about the tasks and responsibilities of the writer: truth to the demands of one's medium, fearless clear-sighted self-knowledge, and unillusioned, uncynical realism, joyfully recognizing the world for what it is.

Author Biography

David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh, is a poet and translator who has also won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
BOOK ONE
To Maecenas	3	(10)
To Lollius Maximus	13	(6)
To Julius Florus	19	(4)
To the Poet Tibullus	23	(2)
To Torquatus	25	(4)
To Numicius	29	(6)
To Maecenas	35	(8)
To Celsus Albinovanus	43	(2)
To Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar	45	(2)
To Aristius Fuscus	47	(4)
To Bullatius	51	(4)
To Iccius	55	(4)
To Vinius Asina	59	(4)
To the Manager of His Farm	63	(6)
To Numonius Vala	69	(4)
To Quinctius	73	(8)
To Scaeva	81	(8)
To Lollius Maximus	89	(10)
To Maecenas	99	(6)
To His Book	105	(6)
BOOK TWO
To Augustus	111	(22)
To Julius Florus	133	(18)
To the Pisos (The Art of Poetry)	151	(38)
Acknowledgments	189	(2)
Notes	191	(6)
Glossary	197