-- Latin text in large, reproducible format -- Literal translation -- Sample tests -- Extensive, up-to-date bibliography

At a time of extraordinary political upheaval, Horace wrote poetry and proudly boasted that his Odes were bringing to Rome the metres and subject matter of the Greek lyric poets who had flourished some six centuries earlier. His achievement ensured that the Odes remained unique in Latin literature, and they have continued to be read and loved for two thousand years. Horace’s metrical diversity is fundamental to his artistry, so these translations recreate the original thirteen metres in English. They are written in elegant verse which is always alert to the poems’ structure, register, rhetoric, sound and syntax. Special attention is given to the nuanced meanings of words in their context and to the implications of Horace’s often highly unusual word-order—no Roman ever spoke such Latin, except when reading the Odes aloud. The translations are supported by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides biographical, historical and literary context, and shows several ways in which the Odes can respond to literary analysis. The extensive notes constitute a commentary on all the poems, drawing the reader from the translations to the facing text of Horace’s Latin, and offering brief discussions of textual, literary, linguistic, metrical, historical, geographical, mythological and religious issues. Students and general readers will find the tools here to help them develop their own personal response to Horace’s exceptional poetry, while teachers will welcome the opportunity to compare poems across all four books of the Odes in equal detail.

David Ferry, the acclaimed poet and translator of Gilgamesh, has made an inspired translation of the complete Odes of Horace, one that conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own. The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages. This ebook edition includes only the English language translation of the Odes. As Rosanna Warren noted about Ferry's work in The Threepenny Review, "We finally have an English Horace whose rhythmical subtlety and variety do justice to the Latin poet's own inventiveness, in which emotion rises from the motion of the verse . . . To sense the achievement, one has to read the collection as a whole . . . and they can take one's breath away even as they continue breathing."