The Odes of Casimire — Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski
The Odes of Casimire Hils This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils Author : Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski Commentator : Maren-Sofie Roestvig Translator : G. Hils Release date : April 12, 2008 [eBook #25055] Language : English, Latin Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25055 Credits : Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. *** START OF HILS *** This text uses utf-8 (unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. The Greek word παραφραστικῶς ( paraphrastikôs ) occurs three times in poem headers. There is no other Greek in the text. Spelling and punctuation are unchanged unless otherwise noted. The Latin -que was variously written out in full or abbreviated; the abbreviated forms are shown as -q ue . The original text used long “s” (ſ) consistently. In this e-text it is used only for titles and headers. Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups . Longer notes are at the end of the e-text. Editor’s Introduction The Odes of Casimire Augustan Reprints Transcriber’s Notes In addition to the ordinary page numbers, the printed text labeled the recto (odd) pages of the first five leaves of each 24-page quire. These will appear after the page numbers as A, A2, A3... Page numbers added by the transcriber are shown in [brackets]. The Augustan Reprint Society MATHIAS CASIMIRE SARBIEWSKI The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils (1646) With an Introduction by Maren-Sofie Roestvig Publication Number 44 Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1953 GENERAL EDITORS Richard C. Boys , University of Michigan Ralph Cohen , University of California, Los Angeles Vinton A. Dearing , University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell , Clark Memorial Library ASSISTANT EDITOR W. Earl Britton , University of Michigan ADVISORY EDITORS Emmett L. Avery , State College of Washington Benjamin Boyce , Duke University Louis Bredvold , University of Michigan John Butt , King’s College, University of Durham James L. Clifford , Columbia University Arthur Friedman , University of Chicago Edward Niles Hooker , University of California, Los Angeles Louis A. Landa , Princeton University Samuel H. Monk , University of Minnesota Ernest C. Mossner , University of Texas James Sutherland , University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. , University of California, Los Angeles CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis , Clark Memorial Library INTRODUCTION Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski (1595-1640) vas a Polish Jesuit whose neo-Latin Horatian odes and Biblical paraphrases gained immediate European acclaim upon their first publication in 1625 and 1628. 1 The fine lyric quality of Sarbiewski’s poetry, and the fact that he often fused classical and Christian motifs, made a critic like Hugo Grotius actually prefer the “divine Casimire” to Horace himself, and his popularity among the English poets is evidenced by an impressive number of translations. G. Hils’s Odes of Casimire (1646), here reproduced by permission from the copy in the Henry E. Huntington Library, is the earliest English collection of translations from the verse of the Polish Horace. It is also the most important. Acknowledged translations of individual poems appeared in Henry Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651), Sir Edward Sherburne’s Poems and Translations (1651), the Miscellany Poems and Translations by Oxford Hands (1685), Isaac Watts’s Horae Lyricae (1706), Thomas Brown’s Works (1707-8), and John Hughes’s The Ecstasy. An Ode (1720). Unacknowledged paraphrases from Casimire include Abraham Cowley’s “The Extasie,” 2 John Norris’s “The Elevation,” 3 and a number of Isaac Watts’s pious and moral odes. 4 Latin editions of Casimire’s odes appeared in London in 1684, and in Cambridge in 1684 and 1689. Another striking example of the direct influence of Casimire upon English poetry is presented by Edward Benlowes’s Theophila (1652). This long-winded epic of the soul exhibits not only a general indebtedness in imagery and ideas, but also direct borrowings of whole lines from Hils’s Odes of Casimire . One example will have to suffice: Casimire, Ode IV, 44 Theophila , XIII, 68 Let th’ Goth his strongest chaines prepare, Then let fierce Goths their strongest chains prepare; The Scythians hence mee captive teare, Grim Scythians me their slave declare; My mind being free with you, I’le stare The Tyrants in the face.... My soul being free, those tyrants in the face I’ll stare. Casimire’s greatest achievement was in the field of the philosophic lyric, and in a number of cases he anticipated poetic techniques and motifs which later grew popular also with the English poets. Thus, long before Denham and Marvell, he practised the technique of investing the scenes of nature with a moral or spiritual significance. A comparison of Casimire’s loco-descriptive first epode on the estate of the Duke of Bracciano with Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1642) reveals that the Polish poet was the first to mix description with moral reflection, and to choose the gentle hills, the calmly flowing river, and a retired country life as symbols of the Horatian golden mean. Some of Casimire’s richest imagery is found in his paraphrases of Canticles , and particularly in Ode IV, 21. Parts of this od