Horace and Harry

Slow down, you move too fast

Gotta make the moment last

My apologies for injecting you with a melody that may not leave you for a while. At least that is what happened when these Simon and Garfunkel lyrics popped into my head as I thought about Harry Eyres’ book Horace and Me, Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet. This 1966 song from my youth just about summed up what Eyres was trying to say, what Horace was trying to say, what a thousand poets down through the ages have been trying to say.

Slow down, and carpe diem

For Eyres, as representative of the worldwide Slow Movement, this notion is central to his worldview, to his raison d’être, I suppose. I don’t really know Mr. Eyres except for what I gleaned from reading his book, which tends toward the autobiographical, a diary really of his thoughts on Horace’s poetry.

I only came to know Harry Eyres recently because he posted a comment a month ago on my verbal wanderings about Horace’s ode III:25, “Quō Mē Bacche” (September 10, 2010). He made mention of his book published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2013, which contained his translation and an invitation to look at the book, if I felt so inclined. I was intrigued and bought a copy.

And I am glad I did. I enjoyed finding out about a man who came to Latin and Horace in a way so different from mine. I came to Latin because I found a Latin grammar book in snowy Afghanistan years ago. Eyres, on the other hand, came to Latin the time-honored way—that is, if you believe in Masterpiece Theatre. He went to an English public school. His father was a wine merchant and this too became a path to Latin and Horace. He got scholarships and went to Cambridge. He became a poet, a writer, an oenologist. But above all, he became a connoisseur of Horace’s words—of the richness of the Latin sounds, the bouquet of meanings lingering on the palette. I will stop with the wine-talk words, except for this: if you are interested in really tasting Horace, I would suggest that you get a copy of his book.

Eyres’ translations are lively and up-to-date—no academic language here. He sometimes uses Frenchy words like “off-piste,” “grands crus.” (This last leaves me, a French speaker, wondering how the word is pronounced. Is it “granz crews” or does it have the Gallic nasal quality, the dropping of the s, the umlauted ü?) But in every case, Eyres captures in his translations the music and the spirit of what I think Horace was saying about dying for one’s country, about living in the now, about being a friend.

Eyres mentioned that he carries around a Loeb edition of Horace’s odes. This small fact alone painted a vast picture for me. I saw in my mind not only him sitting in a noisy airport lounge pouring over Latin words and seeking their meaning and music but I saw my Chinese teacher at UCI, in the days when the campus was just a few buildings. She, a refugee from the 1949 Liberation, had her own vademecum. It was not Horace she was reading but the eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Dongpo (蘇東坡). In the winter sunlight, she was scrutinizing the complexities not only of his ideas but the beauty of his style. Harry Eyres and my Chinese teacher Mrs. Loh were both seeking the same thing: a moment when time slowed down—an attempt “to make the moment last” and commune with a fellow human being.