The Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition

Front Cover
Macmillan, 2001 - Literary Criticism - 203 pages

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." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, 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.

 

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Copyright

Other editions - View all

The Epistles of Horace
Horace,David Ferry
No preview available - 2001

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2001)

Horace (65 BCE-8 BCE) was a Roman lyric poet during the reign of Augustus whose major themes included politics, love, philosophy, social role, and poetry. He wrote Satires, Odes, and Epistles as well as Carmen Saeculare and Ars Poetica. Much more is known about Horace than other ancient poets because he included many autobiographical details in his writing. Horace's Epistles later influenced the style of Ovid and Propertius. David Ferry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his translation of Gilgamesh, is a poet and translator who has also won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, given by the Library of Congress. In 2001, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College.

Bibliographic information

QR code for The Epistles of Horace
TitleThe Epistles of Horace: Bilingual Edition
bilingual edition
AuthorHorace
Translated byDavid Ferry
ContributorDavid Ferry
PublisherMacmillan, 2001
ISBN0374528527, 9780374528522
Length203 pages
Subjects › 

Literary Criticism / Poetry
  
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