Today’s Poem: The Pyrrha Ode

John Milton Englishes Horace’s Latin

Georg Pauli, Roman Bath, 1882 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I

by John Milton

Rendered almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.

What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
    Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
    In wreaths thy golden hair,
Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he
Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas
    Rough with black winds, and storms
    Unwonted shall admire!
Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold,
Who, always vacant, always amiable
    Hopes thee, of flattering gales
    Unmindful. Hapless they
To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d
Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung
    My dank and dropping weeds
    To the stern god of sea.
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Joseph Bottum writes:

Christopher Childers is a favorite of us here at Poems Ancient and Modern, since he’s that rare bird: an amiable classicist who wants, most of all, for us to get it — the it of Latin and Greek. (He once almost persuaded me that I had to drop everything that, you know, actually pays the bills and devote a few years to Sanskrit, but I managed with heroic effort to break free from his spell.)

Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, which was recently selected by A.E. Stallings as one of the Best Books of 2024. His own poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, 32 Poems, Best American Poetry 2024, and elsewhere. A recent transplant to Los Angeles, he teaches Latin and writes the Substack newsletter Callida Iunctura, to which you should subscribe.

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Christopher Childers writes:

Some poets speak from so deep inside their language that the language seems to speak through them, like Apollo through the mouth of the Sibyl. Others bend the language, stretching, clipping or contorting it to produce novel modes of expression.

Horace can be strange, especially in the way he forces novel meanings onto familiar words, but his syntax comes straight from the heart of Latinity, making his poetry an ultimate expression of what distinguishes Latin among languages: the un-linear, architectural quality made possible by its inflected grammar, along with its methodical logic and marmoreal solidity. Nietzsche compares the words in a Horatian ode to tesserae in a mosaic, observing, “In certain languages that which Horace has achieved could not even be attempted.”

The Pyrrha Ode is a prime example of Horace’s mosaic-making, but how far can it be brought over into English? John Milton (1608–1674) certainly had the Latin for the job, serving as Cromwell’s Latin secretary for ten years and writing his own Latin poetry. To understand his attempt at Horace, we need at least a sense of the orginal Latin:

Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
cui flavam religas comam,
simplex munditiis? Heu quotiens fidem
mutatosque deos flebit et aspera
nigris aequora ventis
emirabitur insolens,
qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea,
qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem
sperat, nescius aurae
fallacis. Miseri, quibus
intemptata nites. Me tabula sacer
votiva paries indicat uvida
suspendisse potenti
vestimenta maris deo.

The first line creates a suggestive word picture, with “you” (te = Pyrrha) at its center, enveloped by the “slender boy” (gracilis puer) whose body presses hers (urget), the knot of them environed in turn by “many a rose” (multa … in rosa). In line 5, simplex munditiis (“plain in thy neatness”) is an example of Horace’s signature technique, callida iunctura (“apt adjacency” or “clever collocation”).

The collision of opposites resonates through the poem: simplex (plain, simple, unified) is immediately qualified by the plural munditiis (with elegances / ablutions), suggesting that there is more to Pyrrha than meets the eye. In the last stanza Horace’s verbal mosaic is most exquisitely realized. The syntactical suspense does not resolve until the final word, deo, which agrees with and completes the meaning of potenti; before this, vestimenta answers uvida and suspendisse grammatically fulfills the first word, me. The reader is kept hanging, even as Horace hangs, in the eternal present of the votive image, his wet clothes on the wall for the god. Through a near miracle of word painting, the stanza shapes itself around the tablet it describes. At this point, if he makes it this far, the poor shipwrecked translator will feel himself in a similar position as Horace’s speaker, happy to have escaped more or less intact.

Milton sounds both proud and defensive when he claims his translation is “rendered almost word for word” — “as near as the language will permit.” One hears in this boast an acknowledgment of his much-maligned habit of manhandling English as if it were Latin. As Samuel Johnson complained, in both his prose and poetry, Milton “had formed his style by a perverse and pedantic principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom.” Similarly Ezra Pound (1885–1972) chides him for wronging English by writing “Him who disobeys me disobeys," when he means “Who disobeys him disobeys me.”

It is perhaps useful to apply a concept from translation theory to this Miltonic manner. Milton is doing what the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) called “foreignizing”: bringing the reader toward the foreign writer (or the foreign language) instead of the writer toward the reader. At its extreme, such translation produces risible results, as in Robert Browning’s 1877 translation of Agamemnon:

The gods I ask deliverance from these labours,
Watch of a year’s length whereby, slumbering through it
On the Atreidai’s roofs on elbow, — dog-like —
I know of nightly star-groups the assemblage . . .

A.E. Housman hilariously parodies Browning in his “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy” — “O suitably attired in leather boots / Head of a traveler . . . ” (Go read it if you don’t know it, one of the funniest pieces of writing I know.)

Of course Milton’s Paradise Lost is itself strewn with Latinisms, which help lend the poem its epic authority and gravitas, but which also can alienate English readers. And since we’re looking at the Pyrrha ode, it’s worth noticing that his close study of Horace’s Latin may have had an impact on his work in Paradise Lost.

So, for example, whe Milton writes, “And torture without end / still urges” (Paradise Lost, I.67–68), I hear urget from line 2 of Horace’s Pyrrha ode — the slender youth, whose body physically “presses” Pyrrha in Horace, and the torture which “presses” (or “oppresses”) the fallen angels in Paradies Lost.

Similarly, there’ a striking enjambment on the word “erring” in Milton’s mention of Vulcan (“Mulciber”) — who “with the setting Sun / Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star, / On Lemnos th’ Aegaean Ile: thus they relate, / Erring . . . ” (Paradise Lost, I.744–47). And I hear there in Milton’s phrasing Horace’s similarly strong enjambment in the Pyrrha ode on aurae / fallacis — “ignorant of the wind’s / deceit.” It is fascinating to see Milton studying Horace in this Pyrrha translation, picking up tricks he will use in his own Paradise Lost.

But how does Milton’s Latinizing operate in the Pyrrha ode? He certainly doesn’t imitate Horace’s word order, which English would not permit. Milton’s fidelity is to Horace’s syntax. He does his best with the callida iunctura of simplex munditiis, and indeed “plain in thy neatness” is about as good as one can do, if we hear in “neatness” the intended, old-fashioned sense of “inclined to refinement or elegance,” with a secondary meaning of “clean, pure.”

The next sentence, beginning “O how oft,” tracks Horace’s quite closely, down to the unexpected way “seas / rough with black winds, and storms” dangles, at first blush as object of the verb “complain” (flebit), only to force a reappraisal when we reach the second verb “admire” (emirabitur).

Milton continues to follow Horace closely in lines 10–11 (“Who, always vacant, always amiable / Hopes thee”), despite the English lack of Latin’s inflected endings which make quite clear that “vacant” and “amiable” refer to Pyrrha and not to her paramour. Milton gets away with it through sense, not grammar. In his final stanza, Milton’s emphatic displacement of “Me” to the beginning of its sentence is true to Horace but not to English; here the justice of Pound’s criticism is most fully felt. Surely at this point the sort of “monoglot of English” John Berryman claimed to be will be thoroughly exasperated by the wrenched syntax and wonder what is achieved thereby.

How you feel about Milton’s translation may depend on your opinion of foreignizing vs. domesticating translation.

Horace, John Milton, Christopher Childers

For my part, I believe that the best way to bring readers to a writer is to teach them the foreign language, but as a translator, I’d rather try to bring writers to readers. This ode has been translated countless times, with varying degrees of success, an all versions are instructive in their way. But I’ll close by offering my own as an example of domestication which also seeks to imitate Horace’s syntax and enjambments, but which, I hope anyway, still reads like English:

The Pyrrha Ode of Horace

Pyrrha, now who’s the skinny young thing on top of you,
drizzled in perfume, rolling on beds of roses laid
deep in some grotto’s shade?
Who is it for, that blond hair-do

so careful to seem careless? Poor kid! How many tears
he’ll shed at the shifting weather, surprised by the deities’
mood swings, and the rough seas
and black winds, wet behind the ears,

who’s so in love now, thinking you’re golden through and through,
that you’ll be free forever, you’ll be forever kind,
and doesn’t know the wind
deceives. Poor bastards, for whom you

glitter before they sail. Not me — a seaside shrine
shows on a votive tablet I’ve hung this dedication
to the great Power of ocean:
my sailor’s clothes, still wet with brine.

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