Preface
Like many people of a certain age and educational background, I encountered Horace at school. But if, as they say, youth is wasted on the young, Horace is certainly wasted on the youthful – or most of them. Only in middle age did I begin to see what I had been missing.
I had originally met Tom Stoppard at just that point of my life. He came to Oxford to give generous help and support to a 2010 undergraduate production of his Housman play, The Invention of Love, which was being produced by my son. One of the most memorable scenes in the play, taken from life, is of Housman reading his own translation of Horace’s Ode Diffugere nives. He said that it went through him like a spear. The effect on me was similar.
Years later, in another place and other circumstances, Tom gave me a copy of the anthology which this essay is about, the collection by an English proconsul, Ronald Storrs, of translations into many languages of one of the poet’s most celebrated and compressed compositions – the so-called Pyrrha Ode, l.v. The book is a gem, and Storrs’ introduction to the translations is a masterpiece of learning, eccentricity, wit and allusion. Few people now have any appetite for such a combination, fewer still outside England (which for these purposes includes New England). More’s the pity.
Incidentally, a man called Isaac Waisberg has looked out many translations of other Odes as well as this, and – in an excellent and public-spirited gesture – posted them online: see https://iwpbooks.me/collections-of-translations/.