Satire II, vi

I prayed for this: a modest swatch of land

where I could garden, an ever-flowing spring

close by, and a small patch of woods above

the house. The gods gave all I asked and more.

I pray for nothing more, O Mercury, but

that these blessings last my life's full term.

If I haven't cobbled my property

together by a series of gray deals,

neither will I shrink it by squanderings

or neglect. I'm not one to mope: "O if 10

only I could acquire that neighboring

corner, that mars the shape of my small farm."

Or, "O for the luck of the plowman who unearthed

enough buried treasure to buy the very

land he once had worked for hire, thanks to great

Hercules." I have what I wanted and am

content, and so ask only that my herd

and all else I maintain, except my wits,

grow fat, and that you, steadfast Mercury,

remain my guardian. Now that I've fled 20

the city to my mountain retreat,

what else should I invoke my prosey muse

to help me praise? There's no social climbing

here, no stifling sirocco to promote brisk

trade for the morticians. Father of Dawn,

or Janus, if you prefer, to whom morning

tasks by heaven's will are consecrated,

I start my song with you. The days begin

at a sprint in Rome: you shoo me along

to court to testify for a friend. "Get 30

cracking or someone will beat you to it."

The north wind harries Rome; the dark stays

longer every day; and I'm out early

nonetheless. What I say in court may well

come back to haunt me. Then I'm on the street,

stepping on some laggard's heel. "You moron,"

he assails me. "Well, it's Horace," he says,

knocking anyone aside who might slow

his rush to get back to Maecenas's side."

That name is honey to me, I admit. 40

But once I reach the gloomy Esquiline,

the needs of others flood me. "Roscius

will meet you at Libo's Wall tomorrow

morning before seven." "Quintus, the clerks

remind you to go back to the Forum

today for an important guild matter."

"Please have Maecenas set his seal to these

papers." "I'll try," I say. "You can do it

if you want to," I hear next. It's seven

years now, almost eight, since Maecenas made 50

me his friend for company on trips

and small talk. Such as? "What time is it?" Or,

"Can The Thracian Bantam beat The Hulk?"

Or, "Dress warmly; the cold has filed its teeth."

Chatter you can pour into a leaky ear.

For such intimacy our friend Horace

drew envy. Didn't he and Maecenas

watch the games together; didn't they play

toss on the Campus? "Isn't he the son

of Fortune?" one and all asked. Is there 60

a rumor on the air? Horace will know

the story from his high-placed pals. "What's up

in the Balkans?" "I don't know," I admit,

and hear a knowing snicker. Let the gods

strike me if I lie. "About those land-grants

Caesar promised his veterans, will they

be on Sicily or on the mainland?"

I don't know, and my interlocutors

treat me like the deep grave of state secrets.

While I waste my days on such piffle, 70

I pray under my breath: O farm of mine,

when will I see you next? When will I read

the classics, sleep late, laze thoughtfully through

days rinsed free from care? When will I taste beans,

Pythagoras's cousins, and some greens

cooked with bacon? My lar presides over

nights and dinners the gods might envy, when

my friends and I eat well and there's enough

left over for the noisy slaves. Each guest

drinks without protocol or fuss as much 80

or little as he likes at his own pace.

And then we talk, not about what others

own, or if Lepos is a great dancer

or a bumblefoot, but whether money

or virtue can buy happiness, whether

self-interest or a true heart draws friends,

and what it means to be or to do good.

Now and then my good neighbor Cervius

tells us a fable. If one of us should

forget the dreads of wealth, he'd tell this one: 90

"Once upon a time, a country mouse

welcomed his old pal, a city mouse,

to his sparse hole. It wasn't much. He kept

a rustic larder, but he would open

it wide to guests. How wide? He'd give away

the last chickpea or long oat he'd stored up,

and tote in his teeth a raisin or bacon

scrap to prickle his urban friend's refined

palate. He lay back on his couch of chaff,

eating spelt and darnel, and let his guest 100

dine on the treats. And then his guest spoke up.

'What pleasures, friend, does this hardscrabble life

provide, perched on the edge of a steep wood?

What about people, and the great city?

Come there with me. We're all slated for death,

whether we be grand or ordinary;

thus we should avidly pursue life's joys

the whole of our short course on earth.' These words

burned in the rustic's heart, and happily

he left his bare home behind. The two mice 110

set out for the city, planning to wriggle

under the city wall at night. And night

had reached the halfway point of heaven

when they set paw in a rich man's palace,

where crimson cloth gleamed from ivory couches

and leftovers from last night's feast were piled

high in baskets. The city mouse installs

his pal on the plush covers and scurries

about like a deft waiter, serving course

after course and tasting each one first just 120

like a proper slave. The country mouse

knows how to play the pampered guest

and settles in to enjoy his changed lot.

Suddenly the doors bang open and the mice

tumble from their couches. Fear speeds the pair

the whole length of the room and the house

begins to vibrate with the harsh barking

of tremendous hounds. Then the country

mouse says, 'I don't need any of this, and so

good-bye to it. I long for my safe woods 130

and bare hole, and a small meal of vetch.'"

(Translated from the Latin by William Matthews)

---

Notes to Horace's Satire II, vi

line 5: literally, Maia nate: son of Maia. Horace's readers would know this was Mercury, god of luck and gain.

line 16: Hercules is god of, among other things, treasure troves.

line 25: Janus is invoked as "Father of Dawn" because dawn is when Horace is writing these lines. His peaceful writing regimen makes a sharp contrast to the blithering pace of Roman life at the same hour.

line 39: Maecenas, a wealthy Roman, close friend and advisor to Octavian (later Augustus Caesar), gave Horace his "Sabine Farm," the very plot of suburban land this satire describes.

line 41: The Esquiline was once a cemetery (thus "gloomy") where paupers, criminals, etc. were buried. Maecenas built some splendid gardens there.

line 43: Libo's Wall: the site of the Roman exchange.

line 44: The Quintus addressed here is Horace. Horace was formerly a scriba, a bureaucrat in the Treasury.

lines 60-61: "is there / a rumor on the air?" Maecenas was in charge of Rome during Octavian's absence in 31 BC.

lines 74-75: "beans, / Pythagoras's cousins. . ." Pythagoras forbade eating meat because of his doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He also forbade eating beans, and here Horace wryly pretends to think that proscription is for the same reason.

line 76: "lar:" a household god.

line 80: at fancy Roman banquets, elaborate procedures governed drinking and toasts.

line 100: "spelt and darnel:" the culinary equivalent of millet.

---

Translating Horace's Satire II, vi

Quintus Horatius flaccus (65-8 BC) published his second book of satires, eight of them, in 30 BC. There's internal evidence in II, vi-a reference to Maecenas's stewardship of Rome during Octavian's travels in 31 BC-that suggests it might have been the last satire Horace wrote. In any case, II, vi has been the most widely admired of his satires, and, because of its fable of the country mouse and the city mouse formed an episode in Disney's "Fantasia," the only one much known out of the precincts of literature.

I've translated all of Horace's satires now. I did this one next to last. Thus a number of decisions that perplexed me when I was translating the first satires I undertook had already been made (and remade, when necessary) long before I got to this one.

Because I haven't tried to translate a line of Horace with a line of English, my versions are some lines longer than their Latin originals. In this case the Latin runs 117 lines and my translations uses 131. But Horace wrote in hexameter, and my line is blank verse; if we were counting syllables, my version would be shorter than the original.

I decided to incorporate footnotes into the text of my translations whenever possible. Thus where Horace apostrophizes the "son of Maia," whom Roman readers knew to be Mercury, I finesse the American reader's likely need for a footnote by rendering Maia nate as "Mercury."

There are other passages where the exact references of the Latin are unlikely to be known to the general reader, but where the context of the poem's development makes it clear what's under discussion. For example, who's "Roscius" in line 42? Obviously enough, someone whom the beleaguered Horace, seen here in his urban manifestation, must meet in the morning. Who are The Thracian Bantam and The Hulk, in line 53? Probably gladiators. "What's up in the Balkans?" (lines 62-63). It doesn't matter. The point is that Horace is close enough to Maecenas that people are trying to pry inside information from him. It would be pedantic to footnote such passages; their effect is clear enough.

Just as the poem has two mice, it has two Horaces. The country Horace contentedly writes the very poem we read. The city Horace is a frenetic figure, sped up and comic, like a Keystone Kop.

The poem is beautifully structured around these two figures' worlds. It starts on the Sabine Farm (1-28), switches to the city Horace and his urban dither (29-76), returns us to the comparative ease and simplicity of the farm (76-110), and then takes the two mice back to the city to be terrified and chastened (110-131).

Each of these sections has a characteristic tone and pace in the Latin, and a good translation must register them in English. The first passage is both thankful and prayerful; the reader must hear Horace's gratitude and contentment. The second passage is crowded and sped up, and then begins to slow its pace (70-76) until, after "bacon" in line 76, we're back on country timing. The fable of the two mice (91-131) starts off at a relaxed and anecdotal pace, but at the point where the mice enter the city (110) the diction grows more literary. "And night / had reached the halfway point of heaven" (112-113) is meant to suggest a more sophisticated narrator than Horace's neighbor Cervius; a reader who hears the extra loftiness in the language may well suppose that a gentle parody of the descent-into-the-underworld motif is now in progress. The sweetly comic play-acting of the mice serves as a lull, and then the poem speeds to its end and rueful moral.

Horace called these poems sermonae, meaning not "sermons" in the modern sense but suggesting a tone-informal, personal, instructive and entertaining. A similar tone in modern writing is more likely to be found in a "personal essay" (cf. "prosey muse" in line 22) than in a satire. E. B. White's essays sound to me more Horatian than most contemporary poetry I can think of.

All translators strive for accuracy, of course, by which we mean fidelity to the text, and to what we can know from it of what the author meant. Horace poses a challenge because he is both a classical author, thus requiring of his translators more than casual knowledge of Roman life and poetry, and a classic, the most quoted author of antiquity. He is alike playful and thoughtful, passionate and ironic, and the poise these balanced attributes create is something to which a translator must also be loyal-Horace didn't sound like a classic to his contemporaries.

Sometimes what the translator knows about the cultural background of the originals must serve the freshness and accessibility of the translation, yet go unnoticed by the reader of the translations. For example, consider this brief passage from another (II, viii) Horace satire.

Vibidius dum

querit de pueris num sit quoque fracta lagoena,

quod sibi poscenti non dentur pocula, dumque

ridetur fictis rerum Balatrone secundo,

Nasidiene, redis mutatae frontis, ut arte

emendaturus fortunam.

A dinner party is underway and fast becoming a disaster. A wall hanging has broken loose and fallen on the pretentious main course. Vibidius and Balatro are raucous guests. Nasidienus, the host, is at first driven from the room by the debacle, then comes back in determined to save the evening. I translate the passage thus:

Vibidius

asked the servants if the wine-jugs, too,

were broken, since the wine he clamored for

had not arrived. Balatro echoed him.

Anything seemed funny. Nasidienus,

meantime strode in, his shoulders squared: he would

tame chaos with art.

The phrase I translated as "with shoulders squared" is mutatae frontis, literally "with changed brow" or "forehead."

But here's how three contemporary translators of Horace handle the phrase. First, Smith Palmer Bovie:

"with a brand new look on your face. . . ."

Jacob Fuchs gives us

"You looked better, . . ."

And Niall Rudd, the formidable Horace scholar, offers

"Nasidienus re-enters wearing the face of a man

resolved. . . ."

Rudd comes closest to the sense of the passage, I believe. The brow was in Roman physiognomy the seat of will, and the fun of this passage is that our dithering host is about to apply will where only grace will get the job done.

But of course the brow is not the seat of resolve to an American reader, unless he or she has spent a lot of time staring at Roman bust portraiture. When we're about to commit the mess Nasidienus makes, we square our shoulders. . . . -New York City, July 29, 1996

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