Carpe Diem: Horace Depoetized

(I have revised and made corrections to this book. For information about the new edition, please go to the blog posting for March 26, 2015 or click here:

http://jamesrumford.blogspot.com/2015/03/carpe-diem-revised.html

Everything takes longer than expected. A ten-minute repair job on your son’s bike: days. A two-day paint job in the living room: a week. So it is with my collection of Horace’s odes turned into prose. What I thought to be a simple task last spring has turned into quite a struggle—right up to the first days of fall.

But, at last, the book is ready. It is called Carpe Diem: Horace De-Poetized.

(The image on the cover, by the way, is my portrait of Horace. None exists from BC times, not even a statue. He is supposed to have been short and prematurely grey. I thought he might have been a bit thin, too. Who knows? Maybe he was fat, debauched, and hung over most of the time.)

Carpe Diem sells for $11.50 on Amazon.com. It is paperback, 322 pages long, and printed on cream-colored paper. It contains a prose rendition and notes for each ode as well as the original ode. The meter is given for each poem and long vowels are marked. Translations for many of the odes are given at the back of the book.

Sample pages can be found at my March 26, 2015 post: http://jamesrumford.blogspot.com/2015/03/carpe-diem-revised.html