Translator's Note

      Wrestling with Horace's Satires word by word and line by line was a privilege, but also an enormous frustration. All translators who take on important poetry fail; the only questions are “By how much?” and “In what ways?”

      I translated the Satires because I believed that the other available translations failed to capture the essence of the work—its wit and tone—in a way I thought should be attempted. I started from the simple premise that readers deserved a faithful version of the Satires that was fun to read.

      Hundreds of poets from Milton to Pound have translated Horace's odes. However, few contemporary poets have taken on the Satires—undoubtedly because we lack free verse models for extended satirical poetry.

      Until the twentieth century, translations of the Satires and similar works relied on traditional forms, meters, and assumptions of the English light verse tradition. Generally these efforts were peppy and popular, if often so cavalier about the meaning of the texts that they were desecrations. The last major formal translation of the Satires was John Conington's in 1874. As with Pope's imitations of the Satires, Conington used heroic couplets; despite its deficiencies Conington's take on the Satires was the standard for many years.

      In the twentieth century, translation of the Satires became the province of academics who largely drained the text of its vigor, wit, and conversational tone. The 1926 Fairclough version (Harvard University Press) is reasonably accurate but prose. The 1959 Bovie version (University of Chicago Press) is a “sixties” precursor loaded with trendy extratextual references ranging from Paradise Lost to existentialism. The 1973 Rudd version (Penguin) claims to be written in hexameter, but it is in fact a prose translation that tangles sense and syntax by forcing Horace's many long sentences into an order dictated by line-by-line translation rather than fluidity.

      The 1993 “literal” translations of Brown and Muecke (Aris & Phillips) are extremely well done and their notes were invaluable to me. Their work, however, has the weakness of all such translations—it is tough reading because it is meant for scholars parsing the Latin and not for general readers who can't access the Latin.

      The most recent literary translation, the 1996 Alexander version (Princeton University Press), rests on a seriously mistaken premise. Alexander declares about the Satires that “Though written in hexameters they