Poetry 1: Horace is cold and wants a drink

In previous years, the poetry month has been something for me to enjoy but not participate in: while I did spend a lot of time during my PhD looking at poetry, it was always as an object of study rather than as a pleasure for its own sake. This has changed in the last year. Poems, I've discovered, can set off tiny explosions in my brain, and I find I enjoy that.

So I will post a poem for you to read every day this month. These will be poems in translation, accompanied if possible by the original language text (and sometimes only that if I don't happen to have an English version).

This one is by Horace, a Roman poet from the first century BCE, and it's about winter and wanting the good wine. You may guess why I chose it.


Horace, Odes 1.9 ‘Winter Bids Us Make Merry’

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes, geluque
flumina constiterint acuto.

dissolve frigus ligna super foco
large reponens atque benignius
deprome quadrinum Sabina,
o Thaliarche, merum diota:

permitte divis cetera, qui simul
stravere ventos aequore fervido
deproeliantes, nec cupressi
nec veteres agitantur orni.

quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere et
quem Fors dierum cumque dabit lucro
appone, nec dulcis amores
sperne puer neque tu choreas,

donec virenti canities abest
morose, nunc et Campus et areae
lenesque sub noctem susurri
composita repetantur hora,

nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo
pinusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci.


Do you see how Soracte stands there shining with its blanket of deep snow, how the straining woods no longer support their burden, and the streams have been halted by the sharp grip of ice? Thaw the cold by piling logs generously on the hearth, Thaliarchus, and serve the four-year-old wine lavishly than usual from its Sabine jar. Leave the rest to the gods. Once they still the winds that battle so fiercely over the boiling sea, the old cypress and ash trees are no longer in commotion.

Avoid asking what will happen tomorrow; whatever kind of day Fortune sends you, enter it as a profit, and do not say no to sweet love and dancing, while you are still a lad and your green age is free from peevish whiteness. Now is the time to make for the Park and the city squares, where soft whispers are heard at the time appointed, when dusk is falling, and delightful laughter comes from a secluded corner (giving away the girl who hides there), and a token is snatched from an arm or coyly resisting finger.

Trans. by Jeffrey Henderson

Poetry 1: Horace is cold and wants a drink

In previous years, the poetry month has been something for me to enjoy but not participate in: while I did spend a lot of time during my PhD looking at poetry, it was always as an object of study rather than as a pleasure for its own sake. This has changed in the last year. Poems, I've discovered, can set off tiny explosions in my brain, and I find I enjoy that.

So I will post a poem for you to read every day this month. These will be poems in translation, accompanied if possible by the original language text (and sometimes only that if I don't happen to have an English version).

This one is by Horace, a Roman poet from the first century BCE, and it's about winter and wanting the good wine. You may guess why I chose it.


Horace, Odes 1.9 ‘Winter Bids Us Make Merry’

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes, geluque
flumina constiterint acuto.

dissolve frigus ligna super foco
large reponens atque benignius
deprome quadrinum Sabina,
o Thaliarche, merum diota:

permitte divis cetera, qui simul
stravere ventos aequore fervido
deproeliantes, nec cupressi
nec veteres agitantur orni.

quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere et
quem Fors dierum cumque dabit lucro
appone, nec dulcis amores
sperne puer neque tu choreas,

donec virenti canities abest
morose, nunc et Campus et areae
lenesque sub noctem susurri
composita repetantur hora,

nunc et latentis proditor intimo
gratus puellae risus ab angulo
pinusque dereptum lacertis
aut digito male pertinaci.


Do you see how Soracte stands there shining with its blanket of deep snow, how the straining woods no longer support their burden, and the streams have been halted by the sharp grip of ice? Thaw the cold by piling logs generously on the hearth, Thaliarchus, and serve the four-year-old wine lavishly than usual from its Sabine jar. Leave the rest to the gods. Once they still the winds that battle so fiercely over the boiling sea, the old cypress and ash trees are no longer in commotion.

Avoid asking what will happen tomorrow; whatever kind of day Fortune sends you, enter it as a profit, and do not say no to sweet love and dancing, while you are still a lad and your green age is free from peevish whiteness. Now is the time to make for the Park and the city squares, where soft whispers are heard at the time appointed, when dusk is falling, and delightful laughter comes from a secluded corner (giving away the girl who hides there), and a token is snatched from an arm or coyly resisting finger.

Trans. by Jeffrey Henderson