Horace

by Tim Atkins

Poetry. "Tim Atkins does for translation what Gertrude Stein did for nouns. He's turned Horace inside out, and booby-trapped the works with strategically explosive pregnant shock and awe. Pope and Dryden have nothing on this Horace has arrived"--Lisa Jarnot. "The Latin Horace wrote, 'Dulce est desipere in loco'--sometimes acting out is the best revenge--and here comes our contemporary, Tim Atkins, with a Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory.... Today Horace finds him the room and the canvas to stretch out, in toga Augustan, dripping wet, while garlands of goldfish nibble his private parts from underneath.... 'Sometimes,' Atkins hears him say, 'you just have to / count the grapes & the plums / or an empire will fall out.'"--Kevin Killian.

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Tim Atkins is a British poet, editor, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of East London. His works include 1000 Sonnets (if p then q 2010) and Folklore (Salt 2008).

Reviews

[Holly Raymond]

Cruder and ruder than his versions of Petrarch! For those that love to declaim Latin on jet-skis.

[Peter Brown]

I latterly started rereading this alongside David West’s translation of the Odes and Epistles (Oxford World Classics). Atkins’s takes are not so much translations but reflections and launch pads for observations of the weird, the eccentric and the madness of our own post-millennial world - just as Horace illustrates his own two thousand years earlier.

As Atkins writes in his final poem ‘Horace’:

‘you can’t put the shit back in the donkey
…
I am Horace, a sportswriter
ozone leaking from every pore’