[Glenn Wright]

Horace’s Ode 1.11 contains the famous phrase, “Carpe diem.” This is usually rendered “Seize the day,” but actually means “Pluck the day (like a ripe fruit).” It was a standard sententia among Epicureans, who did not believe in an afterlife and who thought that the goal of life should be to achieve peace and happiness in this life.

The meter of this poem is Fifth (Greater) Asclepiad:

— — — * * — / — * * — / — * * — * *

Traditionally the second syllable is anceps, but in Horace, it is always long. This line is printed stichically (without stanza breaks). Even though each line has sixteen syllables, I have chosen to render my English translation in fourteener rhymed couplets. I feel that this rhythm and tempo, comparable to a ballad in cut time, approximates the poem’s energetic encouragement to live in the present and to make the most of whatever life gives you.

Odes: 1.11
by Quintus Horatius Flaccus

You should not ask, it is a sin to know for you and me,
the final fate the gods will give to us, Leuconoe.
Don’t waste your time with horoscopes. It’s better to accept
the winters, many or only one, that Jupiter has kept
in store, with hostile pumice clearing out the western sea.
Savor it, strain your wines, cut back your wilder plans, and be
resigned that life is fleeting, while we’re speaking we have lost
rude time: so pluck the day, and trust tomorrow at your cost.

————————
Edits:
L1: You should not ask, it is a sin to know, for you and me, > You should not ask, it is a sin to know for you and me,
L5: in store, exhausting navigation in the western sea > in store, with hostile pumice clearing out the western sea.
L6: with hostile pumice: Savor it; strain your wines; be free > with hostile pumice: savor it; strain your wines; be free > Savor it; strain your wines; cut back your wilder plans; be free. > Savor it, strain your wines, cut back your wilder plans, and be
L7: of long-range hope with life so short. While speaking we have lost > With life so short and fleeting, while we’re speaking we have lost > resigned that life is fleeting, while we’re speaking we have lost



Original Latin from Perseus Project

Odes: Liber I, Carmen xi
Quinti Horati Flacci

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

Notes:
L1-2: Babylonios . . . numeros— The Babylonians were famous for developing systems for measuring time and predicting the future by astrology. We still use their sexagesimal system for timekeeping, and the wise men who visited the Christ child in the Book of Matthew were understood to be Mesopotamian astrologers.
L5-6: mare . . . Tyrrhenum—Because this is neuter, it could be either the direct object or subject of debilitat. Is Jupiter weakening the Tyrrhenian Sea with opposing pumice stones from the storms, or is the sea weakening from the resisting pumice stones? I chose door number one. Pumice floats and can do damage to ships if it washes into navigation lanes after a storm causes a landslide. Pumice is volcanic, so we might conclude that Horace is writing this by the Bay of Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea near Mt. Vesuvius.
L6: sapias—The verb, sapio, can mean “to know” or “to taste.” Most translators choose to translate sapias as “Be wise.” Looking ahead to the discussion of wine-straining, I chose “Savor it.” In his Epistulae, Horace says, Sapere aude, which is always translated “Dare to know,” but could also be translated “Dare to taste.”


Crib:

You should not seek, it is forbidden to know, to me, to you,
the end the gods will have given, Leuconoe, nor should you
attempt Babylonian numbers. How much better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has assigned more winters or a final one
which now weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea with opposing/dangerous pumice rocks:
Be wise/Savor it, strain your wines, and in the short span
cut back far-reaching hope. While we are talking, the jealous/hateful age/lifespan
Will have fled. Pluck the day, believing very little in the future.

[Christine P'legion]

Glenn, I think the bulk of your post has disappeared into the aether.

[Carl Copeland]

This is really lovely, Glenn. So smooth and free of filler. Here are my first thoughts:

You should not ask, it is a sin to know, for you and me,

The comma after “know” is splitting a natural clause; I’d drop it.

“Sin” sounds like the proto-Christian Horace again.

the final fate the gods will give to us, Leuconoe.
Don’t waste your time with horoscopes. It’s better to accept
the winters, many or only one, that Jupiter has kept
in store, exhausting navigation in the western sea

“Horoscopes” seems an excellent translation: so much clearer to us than “Babylonian numbers.”

Based on your crib, I read the relative clause with “that” as restrictive, meaning there should be no comma after “one,” but it’s a hair-splitting issue, so go by your own gut instinct.

with hostile pumice: Savor it; strain your wines; be free
of long-range hope with life so short. While speaking, we have lost
rude time: so pluck the day, and trust tomorrow at your cost.

Judging from your notes, “it” is wine, but even if we look ahead, which is a stretch, “wines” is plural, so we naturally look back and find that what’s most likely to be savored is winter. (Pumice, I think, has to be rejected.) Accepting winter is one thing, savoring it another, unless you’re into winter sports, but it does make a certain sense, especially if it’s going to be the last winter.

I’d lowercase “savor” after the colon, as you did with “so” two lines later.

I see that the word translated as “strain” is “liques.” The sober Greeks advised diluting wine, but this, I suppose, is a different process, yielding a sweeter or more refined wine.

Horace says to “cut back,” not “be free” of long-range hope, but that may be another split hair.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about “long-range.” A lot of my associations aren’t very poetic, but it may be the only option.

What do you think Horace meant by “invida aetas”? If it’s so rude, you might not be all that worried about losing it.

Greatly enjoyed, Glenn.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl—

Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful and generous comments.

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

You should not ask, it is a sin to know, for you and me,
The comma after “know” is splitting a natural clause; I’d drop it. Done.

“Sin” sounds like the proto-Christian Horace again. “Fas” and “nefas” are similar in meaning to the Arabic “halal” and “haram.” Nefas means prohibited by divine law, so “sin,” in spite of its Judaeo-Christian baggage, is the best word for it.

the final fate the gods will give to us, Leuconoe.
Don’t waste your time with horoscopes. It’s better to accept
the winters, many or only one, that Jupiter has kept
in store, exhausting navigation in the western sea

Based on your crib, I read the relative clause with “that” as restrictive, meaning there should be no comma after “one,” but it’s a hair-splitting issue, so go by your own gut instinct. I used commas to set off the parenthetical expression “many or only one.” “That” is restrictive, limited specifically to the winters Jupiter has kept in store, not just any old winters, which Jupiter happens to have kept in store.

with hostile pumice: Savor it; strain your wines; be free
of long-range hope with life so short. While speaking, we have lost
rude time: so pluck the day, and trust tomorrow at your cost.

Judging from your notes, “it” is wine, but even if we look ahead, which is a stretch, “wines” is plural, so we naturally look back and find that what’s most likely to be savored is winter. (Pumice, I think, has to be rejected.) Accepting winter is one thing, savoring it another, unless you’re into winter sports, but it does make a certain sense, especially if it’s going to be the last winter. The problem is that “savor” is transitive. I had to add a direct object (“it”) which I construe as having “winter” as its antecedent. I think winter can be savored by the activities alluded to in the poem: enjoying wines, conversation, and companionship.

I’d lowercase “savor” after the colon, as you did with “so” two lines later. Done.

I see that the word translated as “strain” is “liques.” The sober Greeks advised diluting wine, but this, I suppose, is a different process, yielding a sweeter or more refined wine. There seems to be some controversy about the exact meaning of “liques” here. “Liqueo” means “to melt, make liquid,” or “to make clear or evident.” Apparently the “strain” idea comes from the “clarify” meaning, although some translators might assume that “make liquid” means “add water.” Romans, like Greeks, always added some water to their wine. At convivia, they elected a magister bibendi to control not only those who drank too much, but also those who did not drink enough. Apparently Romans not only made sure that no one would get sloppy drunk, but also that no one would be sober enough to tell stories about what happened at the party.

Horace says to “cut back,” not “be free” of long-range hope, but that may be another split hair. If you take sapias to mean “Be wise/prudent,” then “liques” would seem to advise diluting your wine to remain sober and the wine imagery would be carried through into “spem longam reseces,” with hope being imagined as a grapevine that tends to send out long, far-ranging branches that need to be pruned. I didn’t see how the poem’s advice to “live in the moment” was compatible with this advice to be careful and plan ahead. Thus I went in a different direction and translated sapias as “Savor it.” I also thought that by “pruning” his hopes, Horace is advising us to “be free of long-range (i.e. unreasonable, overly ambitious) hope.”

What do you think Horace meant by “invida aetas”? If it’s so rude, you might not be all that worried about losing it. Invideo literally means “to see into,” in the sense of “to put the evil eye on (s/one, s/thing). It is usually translated either as its English cognate “to envy” or as “to hate.” I imagine our lifetime/time as being “envious,” “hateful,” or “rude” because it is jealous of the things that bring us joy and quickly takes them away from us.

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Glenn Wright

… hope being imagined as a grapevine that tends to send out long, far-ranging branches that need to be pruned.

The image of cutting back vines that have gotten out of control is a beautiful one and ties in with “pluck” in the last line. I wonder if there’s a way of recovering it. You could play with the space filled by “navigation.” I don’t want to disturb your gem of a translation, but that imagery would give it an extra facet.

[mignon ledgard]

Dear Glenn, Carl, and Friends,

I hope you don't get rid of the pumice. Instead, you must find the name of a much larger rock because pumice rocks are small volcanic eruptions and the porous ones used for distilling rain water are quite large. The image in my mind is fresh, from my childhood. These were common then and maybe wine was distilled in a similar way. Here's a link to a photo--it is Facebook, but you can see it, as I did:

https://www.facebook.com/Lanoriasana...6707789784702/

This one is said to have been 'shaped', but is still large and it had to be carried by mule, somewhere in Mexico. This was or maybe still is used in some places in Africa. Nothing tastes better than that water, which is also always cool. At the bottom, my grandmother had a wider clay container and enough space beneath the stone to get one's head in there to serve ourselves water with a ladle--this was in Peru.

I wish I were knowledgeable enough to participate in the fun you are having. This is but a grain of the mighty sandy stone.

There are more photos. I'll have to find those links again. One of them shows fern growing out of the stone. My grandmother's had a beautiful thich fine moss. But I've read that one could use the small cylantro and it does well and looks pretty.

More later, I hope,
~mignon

[mignon ledgard]

Pinning a tail to the above:


You should not be curious, we are forbidden, to me, to you,
to know the destiny the gods have for us . .? Ha.
I see about astrology, but could it also be numerology?

So, no mules, but sea vessels, as in those called ‘caballitos de totora’ in Peru—made with reeds— the big rocks could cause them to sink?

From the crib, it looks like sound advice applicable today.

Smiles,
~m

I wish I had taken Latin in school. A free period is a vanished opportunity.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl and mignon—

I took your advice, Carl, and reworked the last four lines. I wasn’t very confident about the lines where Jupiter exhausts navigation with pumice stone. I concluded that in the winter, the pumice both on the coast and in the water made navigation dangerous during storms, so the marine traffic in the Tyrrhenian Sea was “weakened” (i.e. diminished). The advice seems to be to stay home, drink some wine, invite some friends over, and don’t try to go sailing. Accordingly, I used “clearing out” instead of “weakening” or “exhausting” to translate debilitat. This is less literal, but clearer, I think. I added the vine cutting image and got rid of the “long-range” anachronism. I think it passes muster metrically. An alternative for L6 might be: Savor it; strain your wines; cut back your importunity. This eliminates the fillery “be free,” but I don’t like using a sesquipedalian word in a poem that otherwise uses deliberately simple diction. What do you think?

I enjoyed your posts, mignon! The stone distiller in the picture you sent is similar to the one my daughter-in-law’s parents have in Valledupar, Colombia. Theirs is made of limestone, which they tell me gives the water a good flavor and keeps it free of impurities and disease. Their family is originally from La Guajira, a desert area in the northernmost part of Colombia, and they have to collect rainwater there, which they keep in ceramic ollas and stone destiladoras.

You asked whether Babylonios . . . numeros could refer to numerology, and the answer is yes. Some translators use “numerology,” but I think it could refer to any calculations that attempt to foretell the future.

My sincere thanks to both of you for your comments. I treasure your friendship.

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

I like the way you’re going, Glenn, but I have two new nits: “be free” is very prominent for something that is, as you say, filler, and “short and fleeting” is redundant. My suggestion would be something like:

Savor it, strain your wines, cut back your wilder plans, and be
aware that life is fleeting. While we’re speaking, we have lost
rude time, so pluck the day, and trust tomorrow at your cost.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl—

I’m glad to get rid of “be free.” I also got rid of the ponderous semicolons in line 6. I think lines 6-7 move much better now. Thanks for your suggestions.

Glenn