Geoffrey Hill’s Sapphics: A Translator’s Perspective

Abstract

The various possibilities of scanning and enacting some Latin metres imply that modern poets or translators trying to reshape them in their own language have first and foremost to choose what to reshape. Though Latin metres govern syllabic duration, verse ictus and word accent, their modern equivalents tend to stick to ictuses or accents alone. The most prominent feature in the few exceptions to this rule is attention to counterpoint. Having translated Odi Barbare into Portuguese, keeping the original metre and style, I argue that Hill is one of these exceptions, study his debts to Carducci, Sidney, and Horace, and show how he deals with counterpoint in one programmatic ode (whose Portuguese translation is given in an appendix).