A Translation and Interpretation of Horace’s Iambi

A Translation and Interpretation of Horace’s Iambi
Author: Andy Law
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2024-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 103640028X

Horace’s book of seventeen iambi (by convention called ‘Epodes’) contains some of the most complex and controversial poetry of his entire career. This new interpretation exposes a poet in the throes of the torment of writing. Horace crafts an artwork which reveals the agony of expressing agony. He struggles to find the words as he gives voice to the anticipation of grief. The poet’s inner demons conspire against him. Anything that could go wrong, does go wrong. At the end we realise that Horace might have never wanted to write this book in the first place. But the fate of this writer is to be forever persecuted by his own writing. Horace’s iambi are methodically stitched together. Meter, intertextuality, wordplay, and theme combine strategically to provide an utterly compelling and vivid watercolor in words. It is a work of art which is able to hold its place amongst any top tier poetry, in any language, in any era.

A Translation and Interpretation of Horace’s Sermones, Book I

A Translation and Interpretation of Horace’s Sermones, Book I
Author: Andy Law
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527567419

Horace’s book of Sermones (also called Satires) was his first published work. Rather than a collection of satirical sideswipes, as the genre might have dictated, the book is a wiry, tight, muscular, interlaced hexameter artwork of enormous originality and as far removed from the legacy of satirical writing he inherited as one can imagine. It is the work of a 29-year-old grappling with issues of personal and poetic identity during one of the most important and pivotal times in European history. Geographically, socially and genetically an outsider, Horace earned himself a seat at Rome’s top creative table, close to the heart of the political engine that was to change Rome forever. His book details a transformational journey from ‘nobody’ to ‘somebody’, and is a simultaneous invention of poet and reinvention of poetic genre. Horace’s Sermones have floated in and out of fashion ever since they first appeared, regularly eclipsed by his Odes. Today, rehabilitated, they find space in the higher levels of the school curriculum. This book provides unique insights and will be of interest to all classicists, as well as students studying core influences on European literature.

Horace's Epodes

Horace's Epodes
Author: Philippa Bather
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0191079677

Horace's Epodes rank among the most under-valued texts of the early Roman principate. Abrasive in style and riddled with apparent inconsistencies, the Epodes have divided critics from the outset, infuriating and delighting them in equal measure. This collection of essays on the Epodes by new and established scholars seeks to overturn this work's ill-famed reputation and to reassert its place as a valid and valued member of Horace's literary corpus. Building upon a recent surge in scholarly interest in the Epodes, the volume goes one step further by looking beyond the collection itself to highlight the importance of intertext, context, and reception. Covering a wide range of topics including the iambic tradition and aspects of gender, it begins with a consideration of the influences of Greek iambic upon the Epodes and ends with a discussion on their reception during the seventeenth century and beyond. By focusing on the connections that can be drawn between the Epodes and other (ancient) works, as well as between the Epodes themselves, the volume will appeal to new and seasoned readers of the poems. In doing so it demonstrates that this smallest, and seemingly most insignificant, of Horace's works is worthy of a place alongside the much-lauded Satires and Odes.

The Epistles of Horace

The Epistles of Horace
Author: Horace
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 146689492X

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." In The Epistles of Horace, Ferry has translated the work 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. Available in ebook for the first time, this English-only edition of The Epistles of Horace includes Ferry's translation along with his introduction, notes, and glossary. "Reading these versions we feel as if the streets that Horace walked have opened onto our own" (Peter Campion, Raritan).

The Odes of Horace

The Odes of Horace
Author: Horace
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466894938

David Ferry, the acclaimed poet and translator of Gilgamesh, has made an inspired translation of the complete Odes of Horace, one that conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own. The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages. This ebook edition includes only the English language translation of the Odes. As Rosanna Warren noted about Ferry's work in The Threepenny Review, "We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing."

A Commentary on Horace's Epodes

A Commentary on Horace's Epodes
Author: Lindsay Watson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780199253241

This is by far the most detailed commentary yet on Horace's Epodes. The line-by-line commentary on each epode is prefaced by a substantial interpretative essay which offers a reading of that poem and synthesises existing scholarship. These essays, the first of their kind, will provideessential critical orientation to undergraduates approaching the Epode-book for the first time. Moreover, the scale and density of the commentary will make it an invaluable resource for scholars of Latin poetry. A particular feature is the first in-depth treatment of the two lengthy magical Epodes 5and 17. The author draws extensively on ancient magical texts preserved on papyrus and lead, as well as the recent flood of publications on Greek and Roman magic, to cast light on countless details in these epodes which reveal a marked familiarity on Horace's part with authentic magical belief andpractice.

A Translation and Interpretation of Horace's Iambi

A Translation and Interpretation of Horace's Iambi
Author: Andy Law
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781036400279

Horace's book of seventeen iambi (by convention called 'Epodes') contains some of the most complex and controversial poetry of his entire career. This new interpretation exposes a poet in the throes of the torment of writing. Horace crafts an artwork which reveals the agony of expressing agony. He struggles to find the words as he gives voice to the anticipation of grief. The poet's inner demons conspire against him. Anything that could go wrong, does go wrong. At the end we realise that Horace might have never wanted to write this book in the first place. But the fate of this writer is to be forever persecuted by his own writing. Horace's iambi are methodically stitched together. Meter, intertextuality, wordplay, and theme combine strategically to provide an utterly compelling and vivid watercolor in words. It is a work of art which is able to hold its place amongst any top tier poetry, in any language, in any era.

The Satires of Horace

The Satires of Horace
Author: Horace
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0812207696

The Roman philosopher and dramatic critic Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.), known in English as Horace, was also the most famous lyric poet of his age. Written in the troubled decade ending with the establishment of Augustus's regime, his Satires provide trenchant social commentary on men's perennial enslavement to money, power, fame, and sex. Not as frequently translated as his Odes, in recent decades the Satires have been rendered into prose or bland verse. Horace continues to influence modern lyric poetry, and our greatest poets continue to translate and marvel at his command of formal style, his economy of expression, his variety, and his mature humanism. Horace's comic genius has also had a profound influence on the Western literary tradition through such authors as Swift, Pope, and Boileau, but interest in the Satires has dwindled due to the difficulty of capturing Horace's wit and formality with the techniques of contemporary free verse. A. M. Juster's striking new translation relies on the tools and spirit of the English light verse tradition while taking care to render the original text as accurately as possible.

The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry

The Cambridge Guide to Reading Poetry
Author: Andrew Hodgson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108906710

At the heart of this book is a belief that poetry matters, and that it enables us to enjoy and understand life. In this accessible guide, Andrew Hodgson equips the reader for the challenging and rewarding experience of unlocking poetry, considering the key questions about language, technique, feeling and subject matter which illuminate what a poem has to say. In a lucid and sympathetic manner, he considers a diverse range of poets writing in English to demonstrate how their work enlarges our perception of ourselves and our world. The process of independent research is modeled step-by-step, as the guide shows where to start, how to develop ideas, and how to draw conclusions. Providing guidance on how to plan, organise and write essays, close readings and commentaries, from initial annotation to final editing, this book will provide you with the confidence to discover and express your own personal response to poetry.