Richard Vallance
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Vallance Review 37 September 2004
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, AD LYRAM (1796),
after Casimir's AD LYRAM (1646)
The Art of Translating Poetry
"To the extent that the translator is a literary artist, his inner promptings are very much the same as those of the creator of the original work... passim... I do know that in order to translate poetry one has to be a poet." [1]
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, AD LYRAM (1796)
and Casimir's original Latin lyrics (1646)
Ad Lyram
(Casimir, Book II. Ode 3)
The solemn-breathing air is ended--
Cease, O Lyre! thy kindred lay!
From the poplar-branch suspended
Glitter to the eye of Day!
On thy wires hov'ring, dying,
Softly sighs the summer wind:
I will slumber, careless lying,
By yon waterfall reclin'd.
In the forest hollow-roaring
Hark! I hear a deep'ning sound--
Clouds rise thick with heavy low'ring!
See! th' horizon blackens round!
Parent of the soothing measure,
Let me seize thy wetted string!
Swiftly flies the flatterer, Pleasure,
Headlong, ever on the wing.
1796: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) [2]
Coleridge's scholia on his translation of Casimir's, AD LYRAM
"If we except Lucretius and Statius, I know not of any Latin poet, ancient or modern, who has equalled Casimir in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification. The Odes of this illustrious Jesuit were translated into English about 150 years ago, by a Thomas Hill, I think. [--by G.H. [G. Hils.] London, 1646. 12mo. Ed. L.R. 1836.] I never saw the translation. A few of the Odes have been translated in a very animated manner by Watts. I have subjoined the third ode of the second book, which with the exception of the first line, is an effusion of exquisite elegance. In the imitation attempted, I am sensible that I have destroyed the effect of suddenness, by translating into two stanzas what is one in the original." [Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 'Advertisement' to Ad Lyram, in Watchman, II, March 9, 1796]
If you wish to read Coleridge's AD LYRAM in context with Casimir's original in Latin (1646), along with Richard Vallance's copious notes and his translation into English linear prose, please consult the Summer 2004 issue of SONNETTO POESIA. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, AD LYRAM.
Even more telling than his annotated commentary on his translation of Casimir's AD LYRAM into English in 1796, is Coleridge's intimate revelation in Chapter 1 of the genesis of his masterpiece of English literary criticism, Biographia Literaria, where the great Romantic English poet plainly explains to us not only how, but why he was so inclined to translate Classical Latin poetic masterpieces into English early in his career. Coleridge speaks best for himself:
May I be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer, and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger, than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent. -- During several years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those, who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the Grecian, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm, as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions. [3] italics mine, not STC's
Both in his scholia to AD LYRAM and in this excerpt from Biographia Literaria (BL), Chapter 1, Coleridge has revealed much to us about his considerable skills as a translator, and his even greater genius as a poet, who felt himself, even in the early stages of his illustrious poetic career, more than fully qualified to effect truly poetic translations of original Latin verse into English. From these two excerpta, we may identify and isolate the following skills requisite to any really convincing translation of verse from one language (the source) to another (the target) [7]:
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge reverences the "boldness of conception", and the opulence and vividness of Casimir's Latin lyric, which apparently he's felt honour-bound to mimic in his own version of AD LYRAM (1796). From the colourful vivacity and rhythmic flow alone of his own AD LYRAM, we can readily enough conclude that he appears to have more than amply succeeded in this goal.
2. Coleridge goes on to extol Casimir's austere, natural style, coupled with the former poet's profound insight into the wellspring of lyric inspiration at the all-too capricious behest of the ancient wind lyre. And here, again, his own AD LYRAM vividly brings to life the pulsating vitality of the Latin verse, which, I can assure you, is of the highest order.
3. Duly affirming unfeigned humility, Coleridge warns us that his own AD LYRAM does not, at least in his own opinion, hold a candle to Casimir's original, in so far as he found himself telescoping the fullness of the Latin text, compacting its theme and its imagery in his English translation. His AD LYRAM does in fact omit some specifics of the "lyre" theme and some of the images Casimir more fully explored in the original.
While his omissions may seem, at first sight, to mitigate against his translation, STC has, I believe, sacrificed some content (though not a great deal) in order to recreate in his English verse the terseness and extreme compactness of the Latin verse on which his poem is based. He succeeds rather admirably on this level, for the English lyrics are every bit as tautly energetic as Casimir's Latin. His feat is all the more impressive, inasmuch as it is particularly arduous to translate not only the content in its own particular context, but the whole range of subtleties underlying the imagery, from a minimalist inflected language such as Latin into a syntactically discursive language like English. No two languages of the same linguistic class (Indo-European) could hardly be more dissimilar structurally than Latin and English. And yet, Coleridge has somehow managed to pull off his miraculously lovely rendition of Casimir's AD LYRAM in English.
In The Art of Translating Poetry, Burton Raffel puts his finger neatly on the crux of the matter, when he asserts:
A translator's choice of a language to work from is -- or in my view should be -- every bit as subjective as the choice of literary genre. It is a very rare bird indeed, even in this aviary of rare birds, who can display a universal sprachgefühl, who can equally well sense and then re-express the subtleties of all languages. (pg. 103) [3]
That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the same conclusion I have just drawn for us about Coleridge's ardent translation of Casimir's AD LYRAM into English.
* * * * * * * * * * *
4. Moving on to the passage we've cited from STC's BL, we find that it reveals even more about the English poet's skills in translating from Latin into English verse, as well as his serious -- and I dare say, well-founded -- reservations about tackling such a daunting endeavour. Coleridge claims, and with good reason, that in much of the poetry he composed in his early to mid-twenties, he was able even to muster "the superiority of an austerer, and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present possess." The key word here is "insight". Insight or perspicacity is also characteristic of true poetic genius, and all the more requisite where the poet is charged with the truly Promethean task of translating, however freely he must, as the dictates of metalinguistic paratransference require, a poem he has encountered in the source language, here, Latin. And here, again, Burton Raffel sheds further light on the enormity of the task at hand.
To understand truly requires more than a mere mechanical application of the rules. The translator must first be able to decipher, through the shifting, sometimes miasmic web which language weaves out of phonology, syntax and lexicon (vocabulary), the "true" meaning of what he is translating. (pg. 38) italics mine [4]
This is paramount to my understanding of the "insight" a truly gifted poet-translator must have at his command to be able to effectively translate poetry from one language into poetry in another. I shall have more to say on this key issue in translating poetry from the source to the target language, irrespective of which languages are concerned, in the conclusions to this review.
5. Coleridge also clearly acknowledges his great debt as a modern poet to (as he calls it) "the manly simplicity of the Grecian, and of our own elder poets". Like almost all well-educated persons of his day and age, the early Nineteenth Century, STC was steeped in the traditions of Classical literature, poetry and criticism, and had a sound grasp of both Greek and Latin. This is more than passingly evident in the uncanny "Grecian" aura surrounding his polished translation of AD LYRAM.
6. Finally, Coleridge affirms that he wrote AD LYRAM, amongst other similar poems he composed in his 20's, such as "Ode to the Departing Year" and especially, AD LYRAM's much lengthier companion piece, "The Aeolian Harp", both dating from 1796, with "such enthusiasm, as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style." I sincerely doubt that he, or any poet, however great, could possibly claim to be able to rewrite in the target language, here, English, "in the same style" as that which informed the original poem in the source language. This is manifestly an impossible goal to achieve.
The style of the translated poem in the target language must of necessity conform to the structural linguistic dictates of that language, leaving the linguistically dependent style of the source language poem to stand on its own merits. That much is apparent to this reviewer and to this poet, whose own style, as we shall shortly witness, must necessarily be at some odds even with that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And why so? -- because the normative poetic style within any language, in this case, English, likewise evolves and transforms itself through the centuries. It is simply not feasible for a contemporary early Third Millennium poet to compose a new translation of AD LYRAM in a style even remotely similar to that Coleridge employed in his own version (1796), without the newer translation sounding archaic, stilted, trite and even bombastic. And the proof is, as the old saying goes, "in the pudding". If you will refer to my own version of AD LYRAM (2004), published in this issue of Poetry Life & Times (Featured Poets, page 2), you will at once ascertain that it differs substantially, not only from Casimir's source poem in Latin (1646), but even from Coleridge's version (1796). The literary, let alone colloquial, linguistic metastructures of modern 21st. Century English are indeed far removed from those of 19th. Century Romantic poetic language.
The phenomenon whereby the meanings of words and phrases gradually change, adopting new nuances and shades of meaning cumulatively acquired over the centuries, meanings they once never had, is referenced in linguistic parlance as semantic shift [10]. In essence, semantic shift means that a modern, twenty-first century poet would be committing literary suicide by translating an original source poem, such as in this instance, Casimir's AD LYRAM, into anything remotely like the high Romantic English of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's version two hundred years earlier. It simply cannot be done. It requires a beast of a different persuasion, a lyric poem truly of our own day and age, speaking directly to its intended audience, present-day English readers in contemporary English, and not in the language of the Romantic Era.
Historical Precedents
Ancient Latin Poets as "Translators" of Ancient Greek Poetry
A Question of Fluency through Familiarity
The most renowned of the ancient Latin poets not infrequently resorted to translating lock-stock-and-barrel scores and scores of original Greek epics, lyrics, paëns and odes. For instance, large passages of Vergil's (70 - 19 B.C.)Aeneid are directly pastiched on earlier Greek epics (though not necessarily Homer's Iliad and Odyssey), while Horace (65 - 8 B.C.) borrowed heavily from the odes of Pindar and the Lyrics of Alcaeus, Archilochus and Sappho [5]. Horace freely modelled his odes, epodes and lyric poems on those of his Greek forbears. Both of these poets often copied earlier texts without compunction or fear of recrimination, for after all, they were constructing their own poetic monuments on the shoulders of the Greek giants, the great classical poets who had preceded them.
Moreover, the ancient Latins routinely considered Greek literature and poetry as superior to their own, since Greece was (at least to them) the very fountain and source of divine inspiration. Bear in mind that to the ancient Greek and Latin poets alike all poetic inspiration was divine, no questions asked. Last, but not least, the modern notion of copyright, which began to emerge with the invention of printing in the Renaissance, was virtually unknown to the ancients; so translation could easily be and often was very close to literal.
At other times, however, the great Latin poets, amongst them Catullus, Horace,Vergil and Ovid, were unable to "translate" literally, because the linguistic metastructures of ancient Greek and Latin were, more often than not, greatly at variance. There is nothing particularly surprising in that. Yet, the greatest of the Latin lyricists, in particular Horace, were able to infuse new life and refreshing nuances into the Greek poems they had originally set out to mimic, only to equal or even, in some instances, to surpass them.
Just a few examples of Horace's Odes unequivocally invoking the lyre as his source of inspiration will suffice to set the record straight. On this single page citing the Odes from Liber (Book) I, Opera: Carmina, liber primus (Odes, 1), we discover no less than 5 direct references to the lyre as the true source of poetic inspiration, and in one of these instances, the entire Ode (XXXII, AD LYRAM) is dedicated to the lyre. Apparently, Casimir's AD LYRAM (1646) was inspired by Horace's magnificent ode (no. XXXII) in Classical Latin. For the great Roman lyricist, Horace, the lyre was indeed one of the wellsprings of his whole poetic inspiration: that much is abundantly clear from these few citations from just the first of four Books of his Odes. And we should also keep in mind that Horace has translated, albeit on occasion rather freely, many of these odes from original Greek poems he used as his sources, whether or not any of the Greek originals have come down to us through the annals of history. If some of the Greek originals have been lost to the recesses of history, as undoubtedly they have, we can, like Horace, rest on our laurels, thankful in the knowledge that this most gifted of ancient Latin poets had the prescience to render these Odes into such highly polished Latin, and that the Odes still remain with us today, mainstays in the world's repertoire of lyric poetry literature.
VI (AD AGRIPPAM - To Agrippa)
inbellisque lyrae Musa
the Muse of my unwarlike lyre
X (AD MERCVRIVM - To Mercury Apollo)
curuaeque lyrae parentem,
(Hail to thee), parent of the crooked lyre
XII (AD AVGVSTVM - To Caesar Augustus)
Quem uirum aut heroa lyra uel acri
tibia sumis celebrare, Clio?
What man or what hero will you presume
to celebrate with the lyre or the shrill reedpipe?
XXI (IN DIANAM ET APOLLINEM - in praise of Diana and Apollo)
fraternaque umerum lyra.
and with the fraternal lyre on your shoulders.
XXXII (AD LYRAM)
... age, dic Latinum,/barbite, carmen,
... Come, oh Lyre,/ and sing a Latin song.
I shall soon undertake to translate Horace's Ode Liber I:XXXII (AD LYRAM) into both English and French sometime this Fall or Winter, and to publish the translations in an upcoming issue of Poetry Life and Times, sometime in early 2005. Keep posted.
Concluding Comments on the "Ancients":
The point to keep uppermost in mind is this: while it was a relatively commonplace affair for Latin poets to translate whole passages of ancient Greek poems into their own tongue, there exists a vast divide, on the one hand, between both Greek and Latin poetry (whether the latter is borrowed from the former or not), and, on the other, Renaissance and modern poetry, even where the latter valiantly strives to translate its ancient models. The difficulty lies squarely in this one fact: no one, not even the Renaissance poets, spoke ancient Greek or classical Latin with any degree of fluency anymore [6], although it is obvious many of them read it with a good deal of competence. The greater impediment is that ever since at least the Nineteenth Century, the translation of ancient Greek and Latin poetry is no longer a matter of writers freely translating languages with which they are familiar. If anything, we cannot be even remotely familiar with the languages of antiquity, nor indeed with the genesis of their poetry.
On the other hand, the Latin poets all spoke and read Greek fluently, almost without exception, and their very cultural propinquity to classic Greek literature lent a freshness and a vividness to their translations far removed from our latter-day experiences of reading, let alone, translating ancient poems, efforts which pale in comparison. This is not to say that certain modern poets cannot do a fine job of translating ancient poetry, or even more recent Latin poetry, as Coleridge has demonstrably shown in his felicitous rendering into English of the Jesuit Casimir's, AD LYRAM (1646), itself pastiched on the Odes of the Greek lyricists and of Horace. But already, Coleridge is several steps removed from the sources of antiquity. And now, at the outset of the 21st. Century, here am I, even more removed from the Latin of Casimir in my second translation of AD LYRAM, however well I may claim to read and understand Latin.
The Traditions of Poetry Translation from the Renaissance until the Modern Era
Ever since Dante and Petrarch arrived on the scene in the late 13th. and early 14th. centuries, poets have routinely taken to translating either the ancient Greek or Latin classics, or to translating poems from other modern languages into their own. Two early Renaissance Italian poets stand out head and shoulders over a crowd of poets who have since attempted translations of ancient Greek and Latin verse into their own volgare, i.e. modern spoken language, and these two are, of course, none other than Dante Alighiere (1265-1321) and his compeer, Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), both of whom mastered Latin so thoroughly that their masterpieces, Dante's "Inferno" and Petrarch's "Canzoniere" or "Songs". Both of these chefs d'oeuvre are remarkable for their amazing similarity to the ancient Latin originals on which they are modeled. Countless other poets since Dante and Petrarch have struggled to emulate their magnificent achievements, but few, if any, have reached the summits of poetic eloquence they did in their adaptations of the Greek and Latin classics into the volgare Italian.
Historical Precedents (Renaissance and Modern Poetry):
Following hard on the heels of Petrarch, the greatest of the French lyric poets of La Pléiade, Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560) and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) replicated the great Italian poet's sonnets in French with brilliant results. One need only read but a few of the sonnets of either of these magnificent French Renaissance masters to realize how very felicitously they had translated Petrarch's sonnets into their language. But here we are dealing no longer with the translation of an ancient language (whether Greek or Latin) into a modern one, but of one modern language into another (Italian into French). And with this new development, the advent of translation from a source modern language into a target, we have at last bridged the vast divide between the poetry of the ancient world and early modern poetry. We also find ourselves coming full circle back to situations where the poet-translator is yet again either fluent in the source language from which he is translating, or at the very least, familiar with the source language.
Sir Thomas Wyatt's, "Whoso List to Hunt":
Manuscrits, enluminures: Gaston Phébus, Livre de la Chasse, XVe s. (BNF, FR 616) [9]
Unquestionably, one of the most felicitous "translations" ever of original verse from a source into a target language is Sir Thomas Wyatt's justly illustrious sonnet, "Whoso List to Hunt", one of the first ever Petrarchan sonnets in English, and indeed one of the mainstays of English sonnet literature from time immemorial. But, I hear you protest, isn't this review about translating lyrics about the lyre? Not really, and certainly not exclusively so. Our review focusses primarily on the consummate act and the sublime art of translation of lyrics from one language (the source) into another (the target) [7], whether the translation is from an ancient to an ancient language (Greek to Latin), an ancient to a modern language (Latin to English), or from a modern language to a modern, as in the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt's, "Whoso list to hunt...", which is a free translation of Petrarch's Sonetto 190.
Here are the first quatrains from Petrarch's original sonnet and Wyatt's adaptation into English:
Canzoniere - Sonetto 190
Una candida cerva sopra l'erba
verde m'apparve, con duo corna d'oro,
fra due riviere, all'ombra d'un alloro,
levando 'l sole a la stagione acerba.
Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Who so list to hount : I know where is an hynd,
But, as for me : helas , I may no more.
The vayne travail hath werid me so sore,
I ame of theim, that farthest cometh behinde.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
To read both of these sonnets in their entirety, along with Richard Vallance's translation into a more literal English sonnet, please consult Vallance Review 4, December 2001 [8.1].
It would be an understatement, to say the very least, to assert that Wyatt's translation of Francesco Petrarch's sonnet into English is excellent. It is far more than that. It is masterful. Wyatt has really improved on the original, infusing Petrarch's original imagery with new life and fresh vigour, for by couching his English sonnet in the first person singular, he has made it, if you will pardon the pun, a singularly personal, intimate, and viscerally emotional flight of his own vivid imagination. To this very day, this mainstay of the early Renaissance sonnet stands head and shoulders above almost the entire English sonnet repertoire, not to be outshone even by William Shakespeare's most brilliant sonnets. What is all the more remarkable in this light is that Wyatt's sonnet is not just a mere translation, but a stunning tour de force few poets since have ever been able to repeat to such a refined degree of sensibility. Recall what I originally had to say in an early Vallance Review about Wyatt's erudite "translation", which actually amounts to far more than a mere translation or even a consummate adaptation into English of the Italian master's original, but indeed an entirely new imaginative creation in its own right. It is, in fact, a brand new sonnet, easily the equal of Petrarch's original.
It is more than passingly apparent from his extensive peripatetic adventures that Wyatt spoke and read, not only English and French, but also Italian and Spanish, was undoubtedly familiar with the poetry of his contemporaries and forbears in England, Spain and, not least of all, in Italy, where he read Petrarch's "Canzoniere" or "Songs" in extenso, and then went on to translate them into English for the first time ever. And it was also from Petrarch's polished lyrical gems that he drew the inspiration for his own felicitous early experimentations with the sonnet form in his native English. It was, in fact, largely because of Wyatt's tireless efforts that English poetry found itself wholly rejuvenated for the first time since Chaucer. [8.2]
Of course, Wyatt was far from being the only one to "translate" the works of previous poets from Italian or French or any other language, for that matter. We could in fact cite hundreds of examples, but for our purposes here, a few more will suffice to whet your appetites.
The Art of Lyric Translation in the Third Millennium
It is well nigh time for us to leap forward over two centuries from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's AD LYRAM (1796) all the way to the present-day, where we discover ourselves face to face, yet again, with two more translations into English of original lyric poems centred on the theme of the lyre as the source of poetic inspiration.
Alphonse de Lamartine, 1790 ~ 1869
The first of these poems is Alphonse de Lamartine's exquisite ode, Réponse de M. A. de Lamartine à M. Jules de Rességuier, which Richard Vallance has duly translated into an English version of the same, "Alphonse de Lamartine's Response to Jules de Rességuier", in the Winter 2004 issue of SONNETTO POESIA (ISSN 1705-4524). What is truly remarkable, if not indeed amazing, about Lamartine's Ode, is that it is so strikingly similar to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, AD LYRAM, with which it is approximately contemporaneous. Lamartine's poem is, admittedly, not a translation. However, Richard Vallance's English version of the same is. So here again, we encounter a free translation of an original lyric ode from a modern source language to a modern target language.
The second of these translations is Richard Vallance's own version of Casimir's AD LYRAM, newly minted this very year (2004), and just now published in this very issue of Poetry Life and Times, September 2004 (see, Featured Poets, page 2). While the poet does not claim to have effected a translation the equal of Samuel Taylor Coleridige's highly polished AD LRYAM, he has nevertheless attempted to infuse fresh life into Casimir's original (1646), by couching it in modern English of the early Third Millennium, an English which is two centuries removed from the Romantic Era British English informing STC's earlier version.
Conclusions
How best may we summarize all the multivaried points we have raised in this special review of the Art of Poetry Translation? At first sight, the task might seem gargantuan, in view of the miasmic web we appear to have woven. But, as is so often the case, appearances can be quite deceiving. The conclusions we may draw from our experiences with poetry translations in this month's review are essentially these:
1. While it is undeniably true that the process, the act and in the end, the art of translating lyric poetry from a source language into a target is, as Burton Raffel is so often at great pains to point out, an extremely arduous, if indeed almost thankless task, one fraught with dangers at every turn, it does not necessarily follow, as Raffel himself seems convinced, that the translated poem is going to end up being a paler imitation of the source poem from which it is derived. I particularly wish to stress this point, because professional translators like Raffel Burton himself are apt to think that poets are mere translators, which they most definitively are not. Poets are poets, and the most exalted of these, when they really set their minds to it, and allow their creative inspiration, as well as their metalinguistic intuition (or as Raffel calls it, their sprachgefühl), free reign, can do a really bang-up job of "translating". The resultant translated poem can be, and often is, a chef d'oeuvre of the highest literary order in its own right.
2. Secondly, as a corollary to my first point, the "translated" poem or lyric may be as great a masterpiece as the original, however rarely this miracle may occur. This is surely the case with both Sir Thomas Wyatt's joyous translation of Petrarch's Sonetto 190 and with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's rendition of Casimir's, AD LYRAM. While I wholeheartedly agree with Burton's assertion that practically all translations of lyrical poems from the target to the source language cannot hope to soar to the heights reached by the original poem translated, in a very few, very rare, instances, the "translator", as it were, simply blows us away with a lyric (often a sonnet) in the target language, which is every bit a stellar work of genius as its forbear in the source language.
And on that note, I rest my laurels.
© by Richard Vallance 2002, with the editorial assistance of Louis-Dominique Genest (Translator-Interpreter with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Ottawa), Helga Ross (Canada), Liam Guilar (Australia) and Jim Dunlap (USA) August 15 2004
REFERENCES & NOTES:
[1] Raffel, Burton. The Art of Translating Poetry. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, © 1988. xiv, 206 pp. ISBN 0-271-00626-9. This citation is from Chapter 5, "The Subjective Element in Translation", pp. 101-102
[2] SONNETTO POESIA, Vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 2004. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, AD LYRAM
[3] Raffel, Burton. op. cit., pg. 103
[4] Ibid. Chapter 2, "The Constraints of Specific Languages", pg. 38
[5] Scholia Reviews ns (new series) 13 (2004) 2. AUTHOR: Michael Paschalis, Horace and Greek Lyric Poetry. Rethymnon: Rethymnon Classical Studies, 2002. Pp. ix + 195. ISBN 960-714-318-3. In this volume, John F. Miller ('Experiencing Intertextuality in Horace, Odes 3.4', pp. 119-28), in an engaging discussion of Odes 3.4, demonstrates most succinctly that the ode is based not only on Pindar's Pythian 1, but also on Pythian 8 and other early Greek sources. ... passim... Through an examination of selected odes, Paschalis explores the manner in which Horace constructs his own lyric space, especially by comparison with one of Horace's chief lyric models, Alcaeus.
[6] It is one thing for Renaissance authors and poets to have been able to speak and write Medieval Latin, and quite another to master the classical Latin at its apogee in the Golden Age of the Emperor Caesar Augustus (62 - 19 B.C.)
[7] The terms, "source" and "target" languages vis-à-vis the translation process are Burton Raffel's, used throughout his book.
[8.1] & [8.2] Vallance Review 4, December, 2001. The Legacy of Francesco Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt: an Historical Perspective: The Advent of the Petrarchan or "terza rima" Sonnet in English, ca. 1525
[9] Manuscrits, enluminures: Gaston Phébus, Livre de la Chasse, XVe s. (BNF, FR 616)
[10] "semantic shift" This concept is discussed at some length in: Myers, L.M. The Roots of Modern English. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, © 1966. x, 323 pp. See Chapter Eight, "English Spreads Out", § 144, pp. 245-249.
The Vallance Review is frequently cited in our Canadian sonnet journal, SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1706-4524. To read the current issue or any back issues, you may visit the sonnet journal's Home Page here:
SONNETTO POESIA ISSN 1705-4524
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