From Sophie Grace Chappell
Tribute to Sarah Broadie
I quite often showed my poems and my translations to Sarah Broadie, and she was always generous (perhaps tactful) in her responses to whatever I showed her.
Unfortunately I only discovered after she died that we shared an enthusiasm for Horace; so I never showed her this, my version of Horace’s uncompromisingly bleak Eheu fugaces, Odes 2.14.
Sophie Grace Chappell
Dundee, 15 September 2021
Our sorrow, Postumus, is time gone past,
lost years, sunk, buried, never to reseek.
Our prayers cannot postpone the wrinkled cheek
nor looming age. Death always wins at last.
Sacrifice him two thousand bulls a week,
dear Postumus—you’d only waste your breath.
No pleading stays the hand of the god of Death;
not even giants wade back, once crossed his creek.
For all of us, some day, that’s all that’s left:
no matter what our portion in this life—
fat kings or peasants inanition-rife—
we all will sail in Charon’s one-way craft.
No help forgoing bloody warfare’s strife,
pointless to heed some seer’s “Avoid the sea”.
No tricks nor hacks can fix mortality;
the fever-wind’s not the real threat to your life.
Like it or not, that meandering stream you’ll see,
the black sleek Cocytus, hell’s languid river
where the Suppliants, damned, fill leaking pots for ever,
while Sisyphus strains at his stone eternally.
Like it or not, your home, your land, your lover—
you’ll lose them all. Your saplings grew so fast,
now taller than you, and you they will outlast.
Your cypresses will be your grave’s shade-cover;
your heir will drain your cellars to their last,
will break their locks for the brandy you kept as antique,
will ruin your lapis floors with the red-stain leak
of wines too fine for the high priests’ fat repast.
19.4.20