Odes: With the Latin Text

Timeless meditations on the subjects of wine, parties, birthdays, love, and friendship, Horace’s Odes, in the words of classicist Donald Carne-Ross, make the “commonplace notable, even luminous.” This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by James Michie. “For almost forty years,” poet and literary critic John Hollander notes, “James Michie’s brilliant translations of Horace have remained fresh as well as strong, and responsive to the varying lights and darks of the originals. It is a pleasure to have them newly available.”

Timeless meditations on the subjects of wine, parties, birthdays, love, and friendship, Horace’s Odes, in the words of classicist Donald Carne-Ross, make the “commonplace notable, even luminous.” This edition reproduces the highly lauded translation by James Michie. “For almost forty years,” poet and literary critic John Hollander notes, “James Michie’s brilliant translations of Horace have remained fresh as well as strong, and responsive to the varying lights and darks of the originals. It is a pleasure to have them newly available.”

James Michie was born in 1927 and studied classics at Trinity College, Oxford. His other translations include The Poems of Catullus and Virgil’s Eclogues. His Collected Poems was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.

Gregson Davis is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Duke University and the author of Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse.