To Pyrrha
What svelte youth in this rose-canopied room nags you, drenched all through with a sweet, odorous liquid fume, in this love-grotto, Pyrrha? Who’s it for that you bind your blonde, cleanly elegant? And how many times, alas, will he mourn lack of faith, changeable gods and, un- tried in love, gawp at cruel waves lashed by blackening wind gusts, who now basks in you, crediting your golden glow, who prays that you will be always available, always lovable? He does not feel the false breeze. Sad, those hoodwinked, dazzled by your glitter. But I myself (the tablet on the wall points out my vow) have hung up all my dripping garments, consecrate to the strong sea god.
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Today I present to you a translation of Horace’s Odes 1.5! You can find the original Latin here. I tried to follow the original meter (fourth Asclepiadean) as closely as possible—lately I’ve been finding putting Greek and Latin meters in English a fun challenge, and Horace himself adapted Greek meters into Latin for his Odes.
The scene here is one of a graceful boy (gracilis… puer), untutored (insolens, nescius) in the ways of love, enjoying a dalliance with an experienced courtesan, Pyrrha. Because of his inexperience, he cannot help being taken in by Pyrrha, her charm, her glow, her blonde locks, which she conspicuously pins up in one of those elegant, suggestive gestures exactly calculated to charm a teenage boy (somehow what comes to mind is Katharine Hepburn right at the beginning of this scene in The Philadelphia Story).
Our speaker, however, has experience. He knows that the little cavern of love, all hung about with many roses (multa… in rosa), is no lasting bower of bliss, that the faith the youth is so eager to believe in will prove false, that golden glitter of her hair and love is a fool’s gold. The warm sunshine and mild breezes, the glistening smooth surface of the sea, will soon cloud over and darken with storm clouds, the waves be whipped up by a treacherous gale.
There is a lovely parallel between the youth at the beginning drenched and dripping with too much perfume, anointed for his first tryst with Pyrrha, and the speaker at the end of the poem with his clothes drenched and dripping from the shipwreck of love. As the speaker muses over the youth’s future troubles and the sorry fate of his fellow victims, we sense his relief in finally hanging up his hat. His career in love over (at least for now), he can look back on its vicissitudes with a clearer eye. Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity in the god he consecrates his soaked clothes to—is it to Neptune, as sailors, grateful to have survived shipwrecks, do, or is it to Venus, equally “strong,” whose power the poet, even as he warns others about it, attests to in this ode?
Dear Readers, I thought it would be a nice change to post one of my translations. I am thinking about maybe making the Friday Frivolity series an every other week thing now so that I can post other kinds of writing (essays, poems, reviews, translations, etc.) on the alternate Fridays—I think it would be a fun way to experiment and challenge myself as a writer without tiring you out as a reader. Let me know what you think in the comments—either about this or the translation above, or anything else! As always, please like this post if you enjoyed, share with a friend, and subscribe to Soul-Making for more.