Laudator Temporis Acti presents a set of translations of Horace, Epistles 1.20.5, “addressing his soon to be published book”:
Indulge the fond Desire, with which You burn,
Pursue thy Flight, yet think not to return. (Philip Francis)Well, you’re keen to be off. Goodbye. (Niall Rudd)
Off with you, down to where you itch to go. (H. Rushton Fairclough)
But off you go, down where you’re itching to go (David Ferry)
But follow your urge for a come-down (Colin MacLeod)
Vete, pues a donde tan ansiosamente deseas ir (Alfonso Cuatrecasas)
Foge para onde estás louco por descer (Frederico Lourenço)
Vai, scappa a precipizio dove hai tanta voglia (Enzo Mandruzzato)
Fuggi pur dove sogni di scendere (Luciano Paolicchi)
Va donc où tu brûles d’aller. (Ch.-M. Leconte de Lisle)
Flieh, wohin du Lust hast hinabzusteigen (Epstein)
I’ll add a Russian version (I can’t find the translator’s name): Ну что же, ступай, куда хочешь! [Well then, go wherever you want!] But Roland Mayer provides a “dissenting voice”; in his commentary he says:
Fuge quo avoid (10.32n.) the place to which …; the verb cannot imply dismissal yet, but it gives a warning. descendere ‘to go down (to a place of business or other activity)’ (OLD 4).
10.32 fuge magna ‘avoid (OLD 10) anything grand’, fuge echoes fugitivus 10[…].
Correspondingly, John Davie has “Avoid the place you are so eager to go down to”; again, I’ll add a Russian equivalent, Nikolai Ginzburg’s Избегай, куда тянет, спуститься [Avoid going down to the place you are drawn to]. Eric Thomson, who provided the quotes, says “My opinion’s not worth a fig, but I don’t find Mayer wholly convincing except in so far as there have may been for the Roman reader/listener a jolt of ambiguity, one that would underline how pained a bon voyage it was”; my opinion is worth even less, but I enjoy this kind of dissection of the semantics of verse.
I suppose either reading makes sense in context. But I think the “avoid” reading doesn’t really go as well with the preceding lines and with the following non erit emisso reditus tibi, which seems to have more point to it if it’s taken as implying “on your head be it” rather than a somewhat lame first illustration of what the book should be afraid of. The “avoid” reading makes the transition between the information-wants-to-be-free yearnings of the book and the dire realities of publication prematurely and too abruptly.
This is the one where Horace foresees that his works will become mere provincial school texts:
Makes sense to me.
Hoc ludum ludere volo, sed onus laboris meum praesens id impossibile reddit.
Anatoly Vorobey sent me this great bit of detective work:
How about that indeed!
I’m even less qualified than Eric Thomson or our gracious host to second-guess any Latin translation of Roland Mayer’s, but was classical Latin truly that ambiguous? I’m pretty sure living languages I’m familiar with aren’t, in the sense that both “Flee whither you long to descend” and “Flee the place whither you long to descend” are unambiguous statements, and the former cannot be read to mean the latter.
was classical Latin truly that ambiguous?
Aio te, Aeacida, Romanos vincere posse.
was classical Latin truly that ambiguous?
All natural languages, as far as I know, are capable of being that ambiguous; logic and clarity are not primary features of human communication. To take a couple of English examples I just googled up:
The cat chased the mouse until it stumbled and fell. (Which fell, the cat or the mouse?)
My mother never made chocolate cake, which we all hated. (Did we hate chocolate cake, or did we hate that our mother never made it for us?)