English versions of Horace abound; a recent translation of the Odes and Carmen saeculare by S. Lombardo (with introduction and notes by A. Corbeill) appeared in 2018, joining those lyric translations still widely available by N. Rudd (the Loeb edition of 2004), D. Ferry (1997), D. West (1997), W.G. Shepherd (1983) and J. Michie (1963), as well as J.D. McClatchy's 2002 anthology of translations from a host of contemporary poets. The somewhat crowded field of Horatian lyric in English invites the prevailing question of what McC.'s new edition/translation brings to bear that others have not. This handsome and polished volume contains original translations of the Epodes, Odes 1–4 and the Carmen saeculare. A bilingual edition, the book aligns the Latin text (which generally follows the 1901 edition of E.C. Wickham and H.W. Garrod) with McC.'s facing English, arranged in verses that mirror the structure of the Latin. After a thorough introduction that covers Horace's historical and political context and surveys the Epodes and the Odes, the poems themselves occupy the large majority of the book; it concludes with a useful appendix of rhetorical and literary terms and bibliography. This is a hefty tome; the 121 poems it contains span more than 520 pages, owing to a generous (and admittedly attractive) presentation; the rich commentary that unfolds below the English translation as a series of footnotes is a true highlight of this edition, arguably its strongest feature, and receives more comment below. Typographical errors are scarce, none very glaring or detracting.

As McC. explains, the collection ‘has its genesis entirely in the classroom’ and is geared primarily, though not exclusively, to student use (p. 30). It is in this capacity – as an academically engaged, pedagogically oriented edition of Horatian lyric rather than a straightforward modern translation – that McC.'s contribution is most successful and unique among similar works on the market. As a bilingual edition with copious explanatory notes, the book exists in a happy medium between an accessible translation like S. Lombardo's, which offers a pleasing English version and lighter scholarly commentary, and a Latin-only edition of the poems aimed at advanced students, with more rigorous annotation (like D.H. Garrison's 1991 Latin edition of Horace's lyric corpus, also in the Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture).

McC.'s translation prioritises accuracy, ensuring recognisable correlation (for those with some Latin) between the English rendering and the facing original text. The result is a generally conservative translation that does not seek its own limelight with excessive verbal flourish or ingenuity, where ‘each word is translated, since each is meaningful’ and ‘nothing extraneous’ is added to the text, so as not to ‘detract from the stylistic economy at the heart of these poems’ (p. 31). While clear, enjoyable and flowing in its own right, its quality as a faithful reflection of the content and (to the degree possible) the form of Horace's Latin is its chief asset.

The perennial issue facing any translator of Horace is how to convey the music of his lyric metres, whose exceptional variety and dexterity are defining features of the corpus. McC.'s approach aims to capture the structure of the original works, by maintaining the stanzaic arrangement of each piece, as well as the feel and rhythm of poetry, with the use of iambic metre throughout the translation. Her stated intention is that the poems should ‘sound like poetry to an English speaker’, and iambic was chosen on the grounds that its rhythms ‘are very much at home in English verse’ (p. 31). McC. uses the iambic metre flexibly, modulating the length of individual lines to evoke Horace's stanzaic structures, and sometimes loosely, allowing the natural stress of some words to override a uniform iambic rhythm. Take, by way of example, her opening of the famous Pyrrha Ode (1.5.1–5):

This middle path between a translation free from regular rhythms and one strictly versified largely succeeds in giving the collection the flavour of poetry, while retaining a natural English cadence.

The running commentary below the translation, linked by footnotes, elaborates on many of the untranslatable features of Horace's Latin as well as each poem's historical, literary and cultural context. Every piece receives an introductory paragraph that identifies the metre and subgenre and surveys the main points of interpretation; the individual notes that follow offer biographical comments on the characters who appear and cross-references to related Horatian poems, highlight rhetorical devices, explain interpretative controversies in modern criticism and justify some of the translator's choices (e.g. favouring one line of textual interpretation over another or rendering a word in a specific way). All the generic, metrical and rhetorical terminology that appears in the commentary is alphabetised in the concluding appendix. Earlier in the collection McC. occasionally utilises the correlation between Horace's Latin and her facing English to represent Horace's verbal trademarks visually, using bold and italic text and underline to illustrate features like word pictures, chiastic arrangements and interlocking word order for an audience with little or no Latin.

As noted above, this book's high pedagogical value – best supported by its extensive commentary – makes it a unique offering among contemporary lyric translations. If one is simply looking for a good, lively English rendering of the Epodes and the Odes, there are plenty of options, many more affordable than this one; but they would not offer the same opportunities for layered study as this comprehensive edition promises. Readers brand new to Horace, or to Latin literature more broadly, will benefit from the groundwork laid in the introduction and commentary; those more seasoned will find an annotated translation carefully crafted and well versed in current scholarship. My main critique is in fact unrelated to the content itself, but rather its deluxe presentation. The book commands a price higher than other softcover Horace translations on the market, which may deter its use in classrooms where costs are a factor; and its premium size does not always seem warranted, as a notable amount of empty space beneath the facing Latin text inflates the total page count. That aside, for instructors, students and all manner of general readers McC.'s fine edition would be a worthy investment, whose combination of a faithful, effective translation with especially robust scholarly annotation sets it apart from other English iterations of Horatian lyric.