metamorphoses 15.871

My dad is turning eighty on Tuesday, and his birthday gift is going to be a collection of poetry I've been compiling for him.

It's been harder than I thought it would be, because he's extraordinarily well read and I'm trying to do poems he wouldn't know. I've been soliciting recommendations from everyone I know (like, I'm asking my Latin professor tomorrow), but by Friday I was only at twenty-three poems when I was aiming for thirty.

So I have resorted to translation. This collection is meant for reading aloud in class,[1] so I strongly prioritized "sounding good" over basically everything else, but honestly, I didn't have to make any grammatical compromises that bothered me.

Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis
nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.
cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi:
parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum,
quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.

I have poured out a work, which not the wrath
of Jove nor fire, iron, gluttonous
posterity could e’er efface. That day
which holds dominion over nothing but
this flesh can make an end of the span of
unpromised years for me. No matter; I’ll
be borne above the high heavens by the
better part of myself, and my name will
be unerasable. Where Roman rule
extends in subjugated lands, I will
be on the people’s lips, and through every
age, in legend, if prophecies of the
poets contain any truth, I will live.

  1. exegi: Here means something like "produced" or "made", but the word has a core sense of "drive out, expel", which makes me wild.[2] I went with "poured out" both to keep that sense of expulsion, at least a bit, and also because I like the idea of the poem poured out as someone might pour out their heart, especially when O. references the "better part of [himself]" later (usually taken to refer to his soul).
  2. edax...vetustas: The idea of a hungry future is so compelling. (Edax, for the record, is also used in reference to fire.)
  3. indelebile: "Unerasable"; only attested in Ovid (twice: here and at Ex Ponto 2.8.25).
  4. fama: Took me forever to decide how to render this. In most cases it's something like "rumor", and in this case "reputation" could work, but it didn't fit well metrically and, more importantly, it just didn't feel right. I am very, very pleased with "legend", though; that and rendering tamen as "no matter" are probably my favorite choices I made in this piece.
  5. vates: This old Latin word for "poet" can also mean "prophet" or "oracle", and is thus extremely fun. I couldn't figure out quite how to get a poet-prophet sense in English (I think we just don't really have the concept), so I let it exert a bit of pull on praesagia, which is usually something like "foreboding" or even "portent".
  1. He likes to read poetry to his students, which wouldn't be nearly as remarkable were he not an economics professor.^
  2. Ovid was famously relegated by the Emperor Augustus; he died in exile in Romania, by the Black Sea.^