Michaelmas Term
Neither should one, Licinius, beat forever
For the open sea, nor from a fear of gales
Become too cautious, and too closely hug
The jagged shore.
Clare College
Horace
Ode, II, 10
Richard Wilbur, translation
J.D. McClatchy, editor
Princeton University Press, 2002©
A man who cherishes the golden mean
ReplyDeleteHas too much sense to live in a squalid house,
Yet sensibly eschews the sort of mansion
That asks for envy.
Yet it is envy, or aspiration as it is also known, that drives today's interior design industry. Where would we be without the Seven Deadly Sins - or this particular one, at least?
This is the first blog comment to exert the effect of revising an entry, about which I had been uneasy in the first place, not least for its likelihood of eliciting this kind of remark. I keep BRH’s comment in place because it recites a stanza I’ve since erased from the page, along with debris aligning this entry with a play and screenplay on the teaching of Classics to youths. What you now see is the entry as its conception first struck me, and I’m content with it.
ReplyDeleteHorace’s ode cannot be taken as a reflection on ‘today’s interior design industry.’ Although nominally secure in favour, with the public and with his imperial patron, Horace was addressing the political delicacy of a figure with his slave background, living in quite extravagantly privileged circumstances at Tivoli and at his Sabine farm. The predicament is deeply moving, the more one thinks about it; but out of context, this strategist’s stanza sounds merely didactic, not unlike Polonius’ unctuous corruption of Laertes. (How many schoolboys have been malformed by preaching this to them, backwards!).
I included this stanza, originally, for an immaculately different purpose: to enrich the praise of teaching, which I had in mind to dedicate to a generous professor of music, who has lately introduced himself through this page. Highly conscious of the positive effect of luxury on the formation of a major composer’s musical consciousness, this correspondent has himself renounced the prospect of a visibly enviable life, for the incomparable luxury of endless refreshment in teaching. As I regard the the Odes as infinitely refreshing, I think the luxury to be extracted through introducing them or anything worthy to the young must be beyond conventional calculation of treasure. The river Cam is not in this posting by accident.
But no blog entry can juggle so many variables without indulging a discursiveness I prefer to avoid. As to BRH’s quite welcome comment, I am sorry to have instigated it by miscalculation of expression, but grateful for the inspiration to revert to this posting’s original concept. Moreover, a city of coffee is often more interesting beneath its meniscus, and BRH's comment allows us the refinement of seeing what Horace was actually saying.
Finally, the crux and sounding board of this entry is the boatman. His expression and position respond precisely to Horace’s motive, which is more one of encouragement than of caution. (This, too, was a quality of that composer’s style of teaching his own works). His presence, I’m told, is alienating to some readers, but I believe they recoil too soon. This is a figure who is always present; he doesn’t respond to some mere shopping spree, he is immanent in every thought. He cannot be extracted. A city of coffee is not a shot of elective mocha on the fly. It is an ambience, of nourishing, resonatingly relevant timelessness. I freely concede one’s failures to make this clear.
Our music professor reader has reminded us in e-mail of Nietzsche's characterisation of Horace --
ReplyDeleteThe mosaic of words in which every word, by sound, by position and by meaning, diffuses its force right, left and over the whole, that minimum in the compass and number of signs, that maximum thus realized in their energy,--all that is Roman, and if you will believe me, it is noble par excellence. All other poetry becomes somewhat too popular in comparison with it - mere sentimental loquacity.
The exacting problem this poses for translation has created such a gauntlet for young scholars that Maurice Bowra, JD McClatchy, David Ferry and Gilbert Highet have all apologised in their way, in labouring to win them back, once the scars of preceptorials have healed. But Nietzsche's model of the diffusing mosaic is so elegant and apt, that if more students were to conceive of their project from this perspective, the signage in its structural compass would make itself only more obvious. Chronically, of course, there is always the risk of the preceptor of greater leniency to his own reading than the poetry would sustain - against which, as we recently saw, AE Housman argued without mercy ("Playing fair," Oct 31st).
By the way, Tassos, do you suppose you are alone in thinking that Oscar Wilde saw his rôle in life, essentially, as plagiarising "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" for the mass market?
:)
"What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' " F.N. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
ReplyDeleteI have met my demon... holding a red mug!
Then I greet, most gratefully, its Hφαιστος - who molded it and fired it; whose ejection from the household brought discovery to Brazil, and whose dalliance with Athena did not fail, but gave us the berry known as .. coffee. If you think your sentence, divine, it's because you wrote it.
ReplyDelete:)