Ach so, Herr Major

Nicholas Horsfall

Horace: Odes and Epodes edited by Niall Rudd
Harvard, 350 pp, £14.50, June 2004, ISBN 0 674 99609 7

At Mrs H.G. Wells’s funeral on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a Companion of Honour and a trustee of the Reform Club. Page was an admirable Latinist, independent, commonsensical, and sharply aware of a world outside books. Even when wrong, he was sensible. This was the man whom James Loeb, a retired banker and huge benefactor of cultural causes and institutions, appointed in 1910 co-editor of his new Classical Library. His aim, Loeb wrote, in his prefatory ‘Word’ in the first 20 volumes, published in 1912, was to remedy the failure of schools to teach the young enough Latin or Greek ‘to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich’; the ‘average reader’, he said, therefore now needed help. Whether the top-heavy prose (or risible verse, if the translator had ambitions that way) and poor reliability of many of the earlier volumes really helped the good cause is open to doubt. Page’s supervision was in some cases patently slack.

You are not Logged In

If you have already registered login here
If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[*] Oxford, 420 pp., £70, May 2004, 0 19 926314 0.

[†] Oxford, 622 pp., £89, October 2003, 0 19 925324 2.

Vol. 27 No. 12 · 23 June 2005 » Nicholas Horsfall » Ach so, Herr Major (print version)
Pages 35-36 | 2799 words

Letters

From Niall Rudd

I should like to make a few comments on Nicholas Horsfall’s review of my translation of Horace’s Odes (LRB, 23 June). The purpose of the Loeb series is to help the student who has some Latin (or Greek); that is why the original is printed en face. I also chose to translate certain names or titles which might not mean anything to the British or American reader. Thus the craggy Acroceraunia appear as ‘Thunder Peaks’, a name which few, apart from Horsfall, will associate with soap operas. Similarly, Carmen Saeculare, according to Horsfall, ought not to be rendered as ‘Hymn for a New Age’, because ‘new age’ carries all manner of inappropriate associations. But that is what the title means. And what is the alternative? ‘Secular Hymn’, in addition to being seriously misleading, might suggest something like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. How appropriate would that be? The name Rhode is translated as ‘Rosy’, which is what it meant to educated Roman readers. Whether it is appropriate to a fashionable courtesan is perhaps debatable; I think it is.

I am also taken to task for referring to Maecenas and Horace as patron and client. In English terms that is what they were. Granted, they did not refer to one another as patronus and cliens. They were amici, and the evolution of their relationship, which came to transcend their positions in society, is a remarkable story. Yet even when Horace no longer needed Maecenas’ support he often called him rex and pater.

Finally, Horsfall congratulates me on having ‘chosen my time well’ because the abundance of works available (in particular those of Nisbet, West and Watson) meant that, whenever I got stuck, help was ‘not more than a couple of phone-calls away’. In fact I did not choose my time: I was invited to do the translation. My typescript was sent in before the appearance of Watson’s Epodes, West and I agreed to work independently, and while I naturally used Nisbet and Hubbard’s commentaries on Odes 1 and 2, and collaborated with the former on Odes 3, I did not consult him on anything else. But no doubt some of the slime of the insinuation will stick. I continue to admire Horsfall’s erudition, but not always his judgment or his manners.

Niall Rudd
Meols, Wirral