Updates, Live: Horace

(click here for the Romanian version)

Quintillian regarded the Odes of Horace as almost the only Latin lyrics worth reading, justifying his estimate with the words, he can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace)

My first encounter with Horace was in my teens' years, at a Bucharest theatre. A great Romanian actor (George Vraca) was playing the poet, an old noble man hoping to find in the Bandusian Spring the rejuvenating force to love and to be loved; instead he was founding there the wisdom to renounce and the force to be generous. It was a play created in 1883 by Vasile Alecsandri, a great Romanian poet who by that time was in his old ages, too, and thus he had a subtle empathy for the sentimental dreams and the sagesse of giving up of the old author of the Odes.

I had at home a book that I hadn't opened yet, I was constant in postponing it for later. It was in my home library, and I was promising to myself to open it one day, when time would come. Maybe, without being aware, I was waiting for the years to pass, to come at the age when I could empathize with what the two old poets had been feeling.

And here we are, that day came. Some verses have kept on coming to my mind throughout the years, that Exegi Monumentum,and that Eheu Fugaces. Maybe Eheu Fugaces fits better with the mood of the poet as he was described by Alecsandri, an old man whose heart could still be pierced by a flame, yet having the elegance to make a step back and to be generous.

I opened the Book of Odes. An edition in Latin, with French annotations, published by Librarie Hachette.

I opened it and I found on the first page a signature: Nicolae C. Banu. He was one of the brothers of my maternal grandfather. About his great-uncle I knew virtually nothing.

A handwritten inscription on the book is the only thing that I know about him: Nil mortalibus arduum est.