Horace has long been revered as the supreme lyric poet of the Augustan
Age. In his perceptive introduction to this translation of Horace's Odes
and Satires, Sidney Alexander engagingly spells out how the poet
expresses values and traditions that remain unchanged in the deepest
strata of Italian character two thousand years later. Horace shares with
Italians of today a distinctive delight in the senses, a fundamental
irony, a passion for seizing the moment, and a view of religion as
aesthetic experience rather than mystical exaltation--in many ways, as
Alexander puts it, Horace is the quintessential Italian. The voice we
hear in this graceful and carefully annotated translation is thus one
that emerges with clarity and dignity from the heart of an unchanging
Latin culture.
Alexander is an accomplished poet, novelist, biographer, and translator
who has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. Translating a poet of
such variety and vitality as Horace calls on all his literary abilities.
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 bce), was born the son of a freed
slave in southern rural Italy and rose to become one of the most
celebrated poets in Rome and a confidante of the most powerful figures
of the age, including Augustus Caesar. His poetry ranges over politics,
the arts, religion, nature, philosophy, and love, reflecting both his
intimacy with the high affairs of the Roman Empire and his love of a
simple life in the Italian countryside. Alexander translates the diverse
poems of the youthful "Satires" and the more mature "Odes" with
freshness, accuracy, and charm, avoiding affectations of archaism or
modernism. He responds to the challenge of rendering the complexities of
Latin versein English with literary sensitivity and a fine ear for the
subtleties of poetic rhythm in both languages. This is a major
translation of one of the greatest of classical poets by an acknowledged
master of his craft.
