A Log Cabin Out of Stone: - Dartmouth College

Introduction
This thesis is about the process of disassembling and reassembling a piece of
poetry. I have been working with ways to take apart poems and reassemble them such
that they more accessible to new audiences. By applying various translation theories
during this process, I have explored the consequences of translating and the implications
of a “translated” piece of work. The process also involved discovering the relationship
between a translation and its original author, original audience, and new audience.
I focused on Horace’s Epodes. Horace was born in Apulia to a freed slave in 65
BCE, and was educated in both Rome and Athens. At twenty, he joined Brutus’s army
and returned to Rome to discover his father had died and that his land had been
confiscated. Facing poverty, he turned to poetry to earn money. After meeting people in
the Roman circle of poets, he was introduced to Maecenas who later became his patron. 1
The Epodes were written early in his career, between 41 and 31 BCE. 2 The work
remains largely mysterious; it is a collection of seventeen poems with no clear
organizational principle. In the Epodes, Horace jumps from politics, to love, to sex, to
friendship, to hate. Also, the work does preserve a single metrical form. Horace
combines many different meters throughout the collection, but manages to maintain
iambics in all of them. Historically iambic poetry is invective—or angry—poetry. Yet,
so much of this collection is not angry, but sad; one naturally questions the thematic
cohesion of the group. 3 Certainly there are many poems in this collection that are attack
poetry, but also there are poems about the loss of love, the ache of love, the search for
1
Cary, M, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, H.J. Rose, H.P. Harvey, A. Souter (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1949), 438.
2
Cary, 438.
1