Horace's Epode IX [translated by Ron Horning]

Epode IX

When, under your high roof so pleasing to Jupiter,
            shall we praise Caesar’s victory,
blesséd Maecenas, by drinking the Caecuban wine
            you cellar for holiday feasts
and by hearing without listening to flutes and lyre
            a foreign air, familiar strings?
Just as we did when the sea god’s self-appointed son
            fled Naulochus in burning ships
after threatening the capital with rings and chains
            struck from the necks of slaves, his friends.
Now Roman legionaries (their children will say no)
            sold outright for a woman’s kiss
shoulder their spears and erect palisades to protect
            the shriveled tits of the eunuchs
whose mosquito netting ripples and flows in sunlight
            among the dishonored standards.
Rearing back, two thousand Galatians wheeled for our lines,
            chanting “Caesar,” horses snorting,
while the enemy galleys rowed smartly to the left
            and gave a fine view of their sterns.
We’ve won already. Why not parade the golden cars
            and slit the throats of spotless bulls?
We’ve won already, and no war in Numidia
            sent back a general as great,
nor was Scipio such, who with exquisite courage
            made of Carthage a salted grave.
Beaten on land and on sea, Mark Antony has changed
            royal purple for soldier black
and sails to Crete of the one hundred noble cities
            or, perhaps, to the Cyrene coast,
driven onward by bad luck, plunging through rough waves
            and fighting head winds all the way.
So break out the larger bowls, boy, and fill them for us
            with flasks from Chios or Lesbos,
or, because it stays down better in battering seas,
            pour the last of the Caecuban.
Let our fears for Octavian and our own sweet selves
            the charming wine god wash away.

—Horace
translated, from the Latin, by Ron Horning

Comments

[Bernard England]

Wondrous this translation that captures the heroic measure of the Latin.

[DL]

I second the motion. "Crete of the one hundred noble cities" is grand, as is the invocation of the "charming wine god." Shades of Callimachus -- or Pound and Robert Fitzgerald. Heroic is the right word for the elegiac mode: "the shriveled tits of the eunuchs /whose mosquito netting ripples and flows in sunlight / among the dishonored standards."