The Odes of Horace

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Summary: There IS a better translation of Horace out there. . .
Review: David Ferry's translation is simply undeservedly popular and is absolutely NOT the best Horace in English currently in print!

I defy anyone to find Ferry's Horace superior to the wonderfully readable translation done recently by Sidney Alexander and published in Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation. Richard Howard, translator extraordinaire himself, has written a short Preface for the volume, in which he compares a passage from Alexander's work to other versions of the same passage done by Pound, Michie, and Burton Raffel, and Howard justly judges that Alexander's is the "far superior text."

Ferry's language is too often simply muddled, the syntax unclear. Do yourself a great favor, buy the Sidney Alexander translation, and you'll be rewarded with a vastly more enjoyable reading experience!

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Summary: The BEST English Horace is NOT this one!
Review: his translation of Horace is flat and frankly boring, which is whatclassic literature should not be!

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Summary: Unreadable!
Review: Horace's odes are particularly difficult to translate because the poet modulates his tone, the emotional registers of his voice, and the speed of his verse suddenly and dramatically. Ferry's translations above all capture these swift changes in Horace's voice, providing the English versions that best reproduce the remarkable range of Horace's style.

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Summary: Middle of the road translation
Review: I bought this at the same time as Michie's translation and prefer the latter. Ferry does a decent job of capturing the simplest level of the poems readably and easily, but the subtlety and deeper levels of the originals seem to be missing.

For someone wanting the Latin texts, however, this book might be a good buy, since the poems are attractively presented, each starting on a fresh page, in a pleasant typeface.

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Summary: I wanted to like this but . . .
Review: I wanted to like this translation after all the nice things that D.S. Carne-Ross said about it in the useful and enjoyable "Horace in English." But this is a translation that is made more for image-by-image accuracy than for the ear. Often you read Ferry describing the right word rather than saying it. (Phrases like "too unrestrainedly joyful in good fortune" read like a dictionary entry.) In the difficult-to-render i.5 he ends up phrasing things like Yoda - "Hapless are they enamored of that beauty." Too academic are they who write as this one.

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Summary: Uncommon Poems of the Commonplace
Review: No doubt that a command of Greek and Roman mythology adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of Horace's Odes but in many cases the context explains the reference. Horace's commonplace themes are deeply imbedded in our culture and he illuminates them with uncommon insight and poetry: love is cruel, seize the day, greed wants more, death equalizes, happy the one who wants nothing, don't be beguiled by past success, luck changes, accept your place, beauty fades, death comes, money can't buy peace, a friend is our other half. I love Horace the man, the Odes and the Ferry translation which brings a contemporary idiom to the poems without seeming contrived.