by Diana Spencer
(2011), in S. McElduff and E. Sciarrino (eds.) Complicating the History of Western Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing), 101-116. ISBN 9781905763306.
At the heart of this volume is the cultural and linguistic multivocality of the ancient Mediterranean. At Rome, the... more
At the heart of this volume is the cultural and linguistic multivocality of the ancient Mediterranean. At Rome, the political and ideological stresses of first century BCE made choice of language, and choice of discourse within language, into far more than a matter of personal taste (as noted by Cicero, for example, at de Oratore 1.35). For the litterateurs of the late Republic and early Principate, composing in Latin meant developing new linguistic registers and modes of self-expression which were always and inevitably read against an overwhelmingly Greek canon and its genres.
To participate in the project of creating Latin verse in particular was to confront a dilemma: to be distinctive and to accrue cultural capital meant tackling the acknowledged doyens—from Homer to Theocritus onwards, Greek voices controlled the centre—and beating them at their own game. But in a world where reading was a minority, élite activity, this also meant composing for an audience whose education had familiarised them intimately and structurally with the texts at the heart of this struggle. Hence, these poets wrote for audiences for whom the educational system made allusivity part of the process of composition and reception. Not just versed in the canon, their horizons of expectations drew Greek texts and epistemologies into the frame even when direct translation was not at issue.
To escape from the margins, or to redefine the centre and locate it at Rome, is a project that finds its way through most of the extant cultural production of this era, and in one poet in particular, Horace, we find it informing almost every aspect of his verse. This essay is particularly interested in translation and topographic appropriation as a feature of Horace’s verse, and asks how Horace addresses the issues of performance context and site-specific qualities that characterised Greek lyric verse, and how he reinvents them for an audience alert to the linguistic and scenographic shift.
Motifs from and echoes of these authors flicker more or less strongly throughout Horace’s verse. Eschewing word-for-word translation these allusions parade a poet at work in a milieu in which direct translation (replicating one text as fully and closely as possible in the language of another) spoilt the intertextual game. Instead, Horace’s success suggests, burying fragments of the target texts of the Greek canon in a self-consciously new lyric idiom transformed them from looming works of art into raw materials for a new Latin agenda.
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