PREFACE.
The version of Pindar's Odes which is here offered to the public was first undertaken in compliance with a suggestion contained in a critique written some years ago in the Quarterly Review; to which was annexed, by way of illustrating the plan, a metrical translation of the first two Olympic odes, in which the usual division into strophe, antistrophe, and epode was neglected, after it had been exposed in a strain of playful irony, and that into corresponding paragraphs made use of in its stead.
The versions of these two odes were afterward republished at the end of a small volume of poems by the late Bishop Heber; and this plan appeared to the author of the present translation to be so worthy of adoption, that he has been induced to go regularly through the odes in the same manner; and now submits his effort to the ordeal of public opinion.
If the sentiment of Denham, in his fine panegyric on Sir R. Fanshaw, translator of Il Paster Fido, expressed in the following lines, be well founded,
"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ,
Attempt translation; for transplanted wit
All the defects of air and soil doth share,
And colder brains like colder climates are,"
few would be sufficiently bold to grapple in verse with a poet of so sublime a genius as the Theban bard; the difficulty of transfusing whose peculiar beauties into another language can be appreciated by those alone who have attempted to preserve this poet's sublimity without soaring into empty loftiness; and to adopt his occasional free tone of diction, without degenerating into the language of colloquial familiarity: so high a degree of caution is required in the translator always to be on his guard, lest
"Migret in obscuras humili sermone tabernas;
Aut dum vitat humum, nubes et inania captet."
Horat. ad Pison. 229.
