Latin and English poetry and language work in such different ways that even very good literary translations rarely capture the mood and atmosphere of the original, as well as its content. This one captures them brilliantly, perhaps partly because Housman, born 1859, was both an outstanding classicist and a Cambridge professor of Latin as well as an outstanding English poet. But, successful though it is, Housman’s poem is very unlike Horace’s original in almost all respects and achieves its effects using very different technical means.
Horace uses alternating long and short lines: Housman, lines of the same length. Housman’s verses rhyme; Horace’s do not. Both are slow-paced and dignified in tone, but achieve this in very different ways: Horace by the use of the hallowed rhythms of epic metre, with a pause implied at the end of his shorter, alternate lines; Housman by the use of archaic word-forms, associated by his time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with ceremonial and liturgy (thee, thou, -est, -eth). Horace’s poem consists of spondees and dactyls (dum-diddy or dum-dum); Housman’s lines have a very different, basically iambic rhythm (di-dum, di-dum, di-dum).
Such differences are one of the reasons why it can be so rewarding to take a look – and a listen – to Latin poetry in the original.
You can compare Horace’s poem with a less free translation here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To listen, press play: