Dear Editor,
Humor is one of the hardest strains to bottle and save through time or send to folks with different locations or throats of experience, but surely any reader who wonders about Donald Hall’s humor-in-translation of Horace [“After Horace (Odes III, 5),” July/August 2005] (not your usual comic source anyway) is likely to feel more consternation or confusion than “humor” when—if—he looks up the original.
Odes III, 5 is a longish, serious poem that is unlikely to dazzle us latter-day readers and bears no resemblance to Hall’s poem, which is a pastiche of III, 15. Doesn’t anyone at Poetry know of these things, or look them up?
Humor is one of the hardest strains to bottle and save through time or send to folks with different locations or throats of experience, but surely any reader who wonders about Donald Hall’s humor-in-translation of Horace [“After Horace (Odes III, 5),” July/August 2005] (not your usual comic source anyway) is likely to feel more consternation or confusion than “humor” when—if—he looks up the original.
Odes III, 5 is a longish, serious poem that is unlikely to dazzle us latter-day readers and bears no resemblance to Hall’s poem, which is a pastiche of III, 15. Doesn’t anyone at Poetry know of these things, or look them up?
Shaftsbury, Vermont
Originally Published: December 31, 2005
Letter to the Editor