`Diffugere nives': on Englishing Horace

Abstract

There is in English a long tradition of Horatian poetics. The works of Horace, particularly the Odes, have been used by generation after literary generation, in quotation, in allusion, in imitations, in thematic borrowings, and very commonly in the kind of translation process here called 'Englishing'. 'Englishing' involves the attempt to represent in English the content of a source poem, with a possible equivalence of some salient stylisitic features, but at the same time to relocate the work in the environment of English (or Anglo-American) culture and poetic tradition, with the intention, perhaps, of creating something at once old and quite new, faithful to the past yet relevant to the present. This article discusses the problems of 'Englishing' Horace's 'Diffugere nives' (Odes, iv, 7). The language and phrasing of the Latin text are closely studied, in relationship to several English versions, made in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but with fullest reference to a translation by A.E. Housman, dating from 1897 but not made familiar to a general reading public until the (posthumous) publication, in 1936, of the volume More Poems. The general tenor of the article is that 'Englishing' becomes a personal matter, raising questions of aesthetics and taste not readily accommodated within the framework of a theory of translation.