BiblioVault - Books about Verse satire, Latin

Horace's Odes and Epodes

Translated with an Introduction and Commentary

David Mulroy

University of Michigan Press, 1994

In his new book David Mulroy presents a translation of the Odes and Epodes of Horace, who was one of the Augustan regime’s best known and most talented poets. Intended for those with little knowledge of these works as well as for those with a more experienced ear, David Mulroy’s translations are accompanied by explanatory notes on the individual poems. Appendices are also provided that offer information on Suetonius’ biography of Horace, on ambiguity in Horace’s personal allusions, and on the theme of sadism in Horace’s writings.Teachers of Latin writers in translation will want to use this book to make Horace accessible to their students; scholars of Latin literature will find much of value in the notes and appendices as well as in the linguistically satisfying translations.

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Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter

Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire

T. H. M. Gellar-Goad

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire offers the first comprehensive examination of Roman epic poet Lucretius’ engagement with satire. Author T. H. M. Gellar-Goad argues that what has often been understood as an artfully persuasive exposition of Epicurean philosophy designed to convert the uninitiated is actually a mimesis of the narrator’s attempt to effect such a conversion on his internal narrative audience—a performance for the true audience of the poem, whose members take pleasure from uncovering the literary games and the intertextual engagement that the performance entails.

Gellar-Goad aims to track De Rerum Natura along two paths of satire: first, the broad boulevard of satiric literature from the beginnings of Greek poetry to the plays, essays, and broadcast media of the modern world; and second, the narrower lane of Roman verse satire, satura, beginning with early authors Ennius and Lucilius and closing with Flavian poet Juvenal. Lucilius is revealed as a major, yet overlooked, influence on Lucretius.

By examining how Lucretius’ poem employs the tools of satire, we gain a richer understanding of how it interacts with its purported philosophical program.

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Odes

Horace, Translated with commentary by David R. Slavitt

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

The Odes of Horace are a treasure of Western civilization, and this new English translation is a lively rendition by one of the prominent poet-translators of our own time, David R. Slavitt. Horace was one of the great poets of Rome’s Augustan age, benefiting (as did fellow poet Vergil) from the friendship of the powerful statesman and cultural patron Maecenas. These Odes, which take as their formal models Greek poems of the seventh century BCE—especially the work of Sappho and Alcaeus—are the observations of a wry, subtle mind on events and occasions of everyday life. At first reading, they are modest works but build toward a comprehensive attitude that might fairly be called a philosophy. Charming, shrewd, and intimate, the voice of the Odes is that of a sociable wise man talking amusingly but candidly to admiring friends.
This edition is also notable for Slavitt’s extensive notes and commentary about the art of translation. He presents the problems he encountered in making the translation, discussing possible solutions and the choices he made among them. The effect of the notes is to bring the reader even closer to the original Latin and to understand better how to gauge the distance between the two languages.

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Satire and the Threat of Speech

Horace's Satires, Book 1

Catherine M. Schlegel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

In his first book of Satires, written in the late, violent days of the Roman republic, Horace exposes satiric speech as a tool of power and domination. Using critical theories from classics, speech act theory, and others, Catherine Schlegel argues that Horace's acute poetic observation of hostile speech provides insights into the operations of verbal control that are relevant to his time and to ours. She demonstrates that though Horace is forced by his political circumstances to develop a new, unthreatening style of satire, his poems contain a challenge to our most profound habits of violence, hierarchy, and domination. Focusing on the relationships between speaker and audience and between old and new style, Schlegel examines the internal conflicts of a notoriously difficult text. This exciting contribution to the field of Horatian studies will be of interest to classicists as well as other scholars interested in the genre of satire.

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