Waiting for the Barbarians (24 page)

Indeed, each ode within the larger groupings (the individual
books, and all the books taken together) is arranged with as much “mosaic” precision as are individual words within individual odes. To cite just one example: odes II.2–11 are arranged in pairs of poems treating (roughly) the same subject, one poem in skipping Sapphics, the other in more weighty Alcaics. Part of the pleasure this sequence affords is the undulating shifts in tonality and rhythm between, first, the poems within each pair, and then among the pairs themselves.

Of this Horace, McClatchy’s collection can give you no impression whatever. The multiple-translator approach works better for epic, whose narrative momentum helps to thread discrete cantos or books, themselves often fairly weighty and substantial, together; the continuities among lyric poems, carefully organized by their creator into a collection, are more fragile. (A device that better suits both the original work and its contemporary admirers is the one employed in R. Storrs’s 1959 Oxford University Press collection of 144 translations of a single ode, I.5:
Ad Pyrrham: A Polyglot Collection of Translations of Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha
, a work that actually illuminates the ancient original while showing the variety of choices available to translators.)

And of course some of the approaches on display here work less well than others. Rachel Hadas’s use of singsong rhyming couplets in the Regulus ode give it a fatally Gunga Dinish ring; Carl Phillips’s decision to cast I.32, a crucial poem that quite self-consciously concerns Horace’s formal achievement (“give me a Roman song, / my lyre, though Greek yourself”) in loose-limbed free verse that trickles down the page makes it, in a way, far too easy—it deprives you of an essential component of the experience of reading Horatian verse, that of an aesthetic and emotional effect achieved by means of a serious intellectual effort. Horace is hard in Latin, and he should be hard in English. Without the formal rigor, the odes are reduced to little
more than their apparent content, which is of course much less than what they’re really “about.”

So the individual talents of translators are on show here at the expense of Horace himself. You wonder, indeed, just who it is this collection is meant to serve. Certainly it will be of little use to those interested in ancient, as opposed to modern, poets: a major and distressing omission is the utter lack of notes of any kind. As nice as it is to think that the average intelligent reader will be able to make sense of (I have opened the collection to a random page) references to Gyges, Peleus, Magnessian Hippolyte, Oricum, and Chloë, you suspect this is a touch optimistic. The importance of the poems’ specific references isn’t, as the current collection might suggest (one translation leaves out the proper names altogether, substituting blanks), pedantic: when Horace chides Venus for starting up old battles again in the Ligurinus poem, for instance, it’s useful to know that Augustus claimed descent from that untrustworthy deity, and hence that the poem thus slyly questions both the erotic and political compulsions responsible for its own creation. To miss such nuances, easy enough to explain in a sentence or two, is to miss much of Horace’s wit, and a lot of his seriousness, too.

The startling failure to offer even simple clarifications that would enhance ordinary readers’ appreciation of Horace’s deeply constructed meanings suggests again that the real focus here is on the translators; there is, indeed, a whiff of clubbiness about the present collection. (I kept wondering why none of the so-called New Formalists—Timothy Steele, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Dana Gioia—appears in these pages: their emphasis on formal rigor, and particularly Steele’s temperament, with its wry celebrations of emotional restraint, would make them ideal candidates for translating Horace.) That hermetic quality will surely have the unfortunate effect of making Horace
more rather than less forbidding to the poetry-reading public. Whatever the pleasures it affords,
Horace, The Odes
isn’t, finally, Horace’s
Odes
. For the present
saeculum
, at least, their strange music—exotic and plainspoken, Greek and Roman, fluid and lapidary, yearning and complacent, earthy and effete—continues to hover in the air, just out of reach.

—
The New York Review of Books
, May 13, 2004

WHEN ASKED WHAT
he intended to do after finishing at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde—who was already well known not only for his outré persona (“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” etc.) but for his brilliant achievements as a classics scholar—made it clear in which direction his ambitions lay. “God knows,” the twenty-three-year-old told his great friend David Hunter Blair, who had asked Wilde about his postgraduate plans, and who later fondly recalled the conversation in his 1939 memoir,
In Victorian Days
. “I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”

As we know, his prediction would be spectacularly fulfilled. Like a character in one of the Greek tragedies he was able to translate so fluently as a student, his short life followed a spectacular trajectory from fame to infamy, from the heady triumphs of his post-Oxford days, when he was already famous enough to be lampooned by Gilbert and Sullivan in
Patience
, to the dreadful peripeteia of the trials
and imprisonment. But to some of those who knew him at the time, Wilde’s emphatic rejection of the scholarly life must have come as something of a surprise.

He had, after all, shown a remarkable flair for the classics from the start. At the Portora Royal School, where he’d been sent in the autumn of 1864, just before his tenth birthday, he won the classical medal examination with his extempore translations from Aeschylus’
Agamemnon
(the tragedy he loved above all others) and the Carpenter Prize for his superior performance on the examination on the Greek New Testament. Later, at Trinity College, Dublin, he took a first in his freshman classical exams and went on to win the Berkeley Gold Medal for his paper on a subject that was, perhaps, not without augury: the
Fragmenta comicorum graecorum
, “Fragments of the Greek Comics,” the great scholarly edition by the early-nineteenth-century German philologue Augustus Meineke. According to his friend Robert Sherard, he occasionally pawned the medal when he needed money, but managed always to redeem it, keeping it until the end of his life.

After transferring to Magdalen College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1874, Wilde scored highest marks on his entrance exams, and finished by taking a prestigious double first in “Greats,” the relatively recent, classics-based curriculum officially known as literae humaniores. Always attentive to his image, he liked to imply that these successes came easily—“He liked to pose as a dilettante trifling with his books,” Hunter Blair recalled—but in fact put in “hours of assiduous and laborious reading, often into the small hours of the morning.” Whatever his taste for lilies and Sèvres, he was a grind.

Wilde’s activities immediately following his departure from Oxford suggest an unwillingness to abandon the domain of “dried-up old dons.” While scrounging for ways to keep himself employed, he wrote his old friend George Macmillan, of the publishing family, offering
to take on projects that would have daunted full-blown classics scholars twice his age: a new translation of Herodotus, a new edition of Euripides’
Madness of Hercules
and
Phoenician Women
. He applied, unsuccessfully, for an archaeology scholarship; he had a hand in an 1880 production of
Agamemnon
that was attended by Browning and Tennyson.

Because he did indeed end up traveling down the path he announced to Hunter Blair, we can never know what the mature work produced by this “classical” Wilde might have been like—the Wilde who could easily have gone on to do a D.Phil. in classics, Wilde the don, Wilde the important and perhaps revolutionary late-nineteenth-century scholar of Greek literature and society. Of that Wilde, the extant record affords us only a few tantalizing glimpses: a university prize essay, an unsigned review article, journeyman’s pieces that nonetheless reveal a characteristic bravura. This partial view has occasionally been enlarged over the years by the publication of fascinating bits of juvenilia (“Hellenism,” a fragmentary set of notes about Spartan civilization, was published only in 1979). Now we have
The Women of Homer
, published by the Oscar Wilde Society, a substantial although unfinished paper on Homer’s female characters that reminds you once more how strongly Wilde’s classical training underpinned the sensibility that would make him so famous.

Wilde’s copy of the
Nichomachean Ethics
, dated 1877, contains this suggestive gloss on the text: “Man makes his end for himself out of himself: no end is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.” At the time he was beginning his studies, the tradition of secondary and university instruction in the classics did
not necessarily encourage a profound examination of what one’s “true nature” might be. A great premium was placed on proficiency in the languages. Students were expected to be able to translate passages from the classical languages into English—and from English into Greek and Latin prose and verse. (The author and cleric Mark Pattison, who had attended Oriel College in the 1830s, recalled dreary class hours that students spent “construing, in turns, some twenty lines of a classical text to the tutor, who corrected you when you were wrong.”) While still at Trinity, Wilde was asked on one exam to translate a fragment of a text about Odysseus into Elizabethan prose, and then was required to translate selections from Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Matthew Arnold into Greek. This and other tidbits about the writer’s intellectual formation can be found in Thomas Wright’s admiring intellectual biography,
Built of Books
, a highly useful survey of what Wilde was reading at every stage of his life. (Wright is one of the editors of
The Women of Homer
.)

Luckily, Wilde, whose linguistic abilities were certainly formidable—years later, a former Portora schoolmate recalled his ability to “grasp the nuances of the various phases of the Greek Middle Voice and of the vagaries of Greek conditional clauses”—was to fall into the hands of the right professors. His Trinity master was the Reverend J. P. Mahaffy, a distinguished classicist who had a special interest in later Greek antiquity, and who was, too, a celebrated wit—a quality that must have appealed to his young student. (Informed that the current tenant of an academic post he coveted was ill, Mahaffy replied, “Nothing trivial, I hope?”) In an 1874 book called
Social Life in Greece
, Mahaffy argued for a vision of the Greeks and their civilization as something more than a mausoleum of culture, “mere treasure-houses of roots and forms to be sought out by comparative grammarians.” Among other things, he showed a refreshing willingness to dust off contemporary attitudes toward one Hellenic institution
that would have had a special if secret resonance for Wilde: homosexuality. “There is no field of enquiry,” Mahaffy wrote in
Social Life in Greece
, “where we are so dogmatic in our social prejudices, and so determined by the special circumstances of our age and country.”

Mahaffy’s advocacy of a living engagement with the civilization of the Mediterranean—still somewhat of a novelty at the time—would land the young Wilde in trouble. In the spring of 1877 he accompanied his former professor on a trip to Italy and Greece; after returning to Oxford several weeks late in the term, Wilde was “rusticated”—forced to leave university for the duration of the term. The irony of being temporarily expelled from his classics curriculum for having immersed himself in the Greek world was not lost on the future master of the epigram, who observed that he “was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia.”

The Oxford that punished the unrepentant Wilde had, in fact, been shaking off the old ways, transformed by the energetic reforms of Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek, Master of Balliol, and translator of Plato. It was Jowett who insisted that Greats include important currents in contemporary thought (as a young man he had been devoted to Kant); who saw, indeed, the classics as a natural conduit for modern liberal thought. Instrumental in shifting the emphasis of the curriculum from Roman to Greek authors, he made Plato central to it. Not coincidentally, that philosopher’s dialectical method was embodied in the university’s intimate one-on-one tutorial system—which, as the scholar Linda Dowling reminds us in
Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian England
, her fascinating study of the Victorian passion for high Greek culture, occasionally fomented Platonic passions of a less intellectual variety. The special Platonic emphasis at Oxford was clearly what animated Wilde’s later,
admiring characterization of the curriculum as one in which “one can be,
simultaneously
, brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.” Here, perhaps, is the root of the characteristically Wildean taste for entwining ostensibly incompatible qualities. His work encompassed, sometimes uneasily, what he saw as his “Gothic” and “Greek” sides, veering between a grandiose Romanticism and an astringent Classicism, the fusty nineteenth-century melodrama of most of his theater and the crisp modernism of his critical thought.