“I love music so much”, said Peter Porter, “that in poetry I’m always looking for an authority in language that is not wholly dependent on meaning. I want meaning to be elsewhere.” In a review of Better than God (2009), the collection of poems in which “Horace Takes the Waters” appeared, published just a year before Porter died, Tim Liardet recognized his success in this respect. “What Porter does”, he wrote, “is to create a new language which has rhyme as one of its natural characteristics. In this way, he … makes it not merely a way of structuring a poem’s aesthetic space [but] a means of expanding the rhyme lexicon itself.” In another poem in the same collection, “No Infelicitous Phrases Need Apply”, form becomes “a sort of Eden” in which “the whole close patterning is seen at once / Everything is perfect and of no concern”. Porter strives not merely for formal excellence but for what he calls “the lyric density of weightlessness”.
Porter’s “creamy ear” makes him the ideal translator of Horace’s Odes, described as being “among the densest lyric poems ever written”. But he is also keenly aware of Horace’s political relevance. In his poem “Horace’s Odes Translated” from Afterburner (2004), which refers to J. D. McClatchy’s edition of contemporary Horace translations (2002), Porter finds a number of teasing parallels both between Horace and the largely American translators in this collection (“The fine scribes of America are herded here together / subsidised Aediles, the Ivy League Grammarians … beneficiaries of a Military-Industrial Estate”) and between first-century BC Rome and twenty-first-century America (“the Parthians inhabited / What is now Iraq, and it upset the Emperor / when one of his pet legions was brought home / in body-bags”). The sumptuous verbal surfaces of “Horace Takes the Waters”, Porter’s translation of Ode 3.13 (O Fons Bandusiae), are themselves almost an act of homage to the fountain Horace described and the divinity he perceived in it – a god he implicitly compares to the Greek Muses. “Of legendary fountains, none / Will be so cherished as this place”, writes Porter. In the waters of that “enigmatic face” we might also see the poet’s own “immortality”.
Horace Takes the Waters
Odes 3.13
This spring which seems concurrent glass,
Bandusia, with flowers amid
Its wine-bright eddies, smiles on us
As if it knows that here a kid
With little peering snail-like horns
Tomorrow shall be sacrificed.
A death to crown both love and war
But all in vain: the blood will tip
Into the icy stream a store
Of wanton crimson, staining all
That lives and grows, the flocks that sip
The generations of the grass.
Though dog-star Sirius bares his teeth
Upon the scorching Summer air,
His brittle snarl which all beneath
The sky cringe from shall lose its force
Where wandering herds and ploughman share
The water’s still beneficence.
Of legendary fountains, none
Will be so cherished as this place
Where living lace descends and sun
Commands the ilex tree to brush
The water’s enigmatic face
And picture immortality.
PETER PORTER (2007)
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