Translations from Latin Poetry by Franklin P. Adams (FPA) presented by Michael Gilleland American journalist and radio personality Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960) was an accomplished and witty translator of Latin poetry. Much of his work as a translator is buried in out-of-print volumes of his light verse. These translations deserve the attention not only of Latinists, but also of students of American literature and lovers of poetry in general. Catullus Horace Propertius Martial Home

In one of his "Conning Tower" columns, Franklin P. Adams (FPA) recalled how he started translating Latin poetry:

I know a lot of Latin; and most of it I learned after I left school, though I had a good foundation. But for many years I had a newspaper column to fill, and I had read that Eugene Field, whom all the Chicago boys revered, filled his "Sharps and Flats" with translations of Horace. So I did some. And it was fun, though it often took the best part of two days to do eight satisfactory lines, which doesn't plug much of a columnar gap.

The Field brothers didn't hesitate to insert humorous anachronisms in their versions of Horace -- a shepherd dreams of ice-cream soda-water (Ode 3.29), a flirt giggles à l'Americaine (Ode 3.15), and the ancient Roman lawyer Messalla Corvinus studies the works of Blackstone and Kent (Odes 3.21). FPA is even more exuberant in is his imaginative use of anachronisms -- Horace's Bandusian Spring becomes a drugstore soda fountain (Ode 3.13), his crown of myrtle a Panama hat (Ode 1.38); instead of starting a fire, he wants to turn on the radiator or oil burner (Ode 1.9); signs of spring include bathing suits at Coney Island or newspaper columns on baseball players (Ode 1.4); in the original, Horace's Leuconoe consulted Babylonian horoscopes, while in translation she uses a ouija board (Ode 1.11); the four corners of the globe are Newtonville, Cedar Crest, Cincinnati, and Eau Claire (Ode 1.22); and proverbial rich men are John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan (Propertius 1.14).

Another attractive feature of the Fields' translations of Horace was their use of American slang -- bald as a billiard ball, girly girl, goody-goody, holy Moses, jag (intoxication), monkey with, tony. Likewise FPA didn't hesitate to embellish his translations with American slang, such as bean (verb and noun), biff, bum, cagey, chap, cut-up, daffy, dearie, dope, feller, flapper, flivver, gink, girlie, gosh, heck, hep, hick, honey bun, jinx, lid (meaning hat), ma, minx, old sport, old top, pa, stewed (meaning drunk), vamp, willies, yen.

In a tour de force, Eugene Field paraphrased Horace's Ode 1.23 in the styles of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748). FPA was well-known for his clever imitations of the styles of English literary figures. His Saturday Conning Tower columns mimicked the language and manner of the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and were collected in a volume entitled Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys. FPA followed Field's lead by rendering Horace's Ode 1.38 in the styles of James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) and Robert Service (1874-1958).

FPA cultivated friendships with professional classical scholars, among them Clarence W. Mendell (1883-1970) of Yale and E. Adelaide Hahn (1893-1967) of Hunter College. His translations, though, were far from being stilted, academic productions. He could be accurate, almost literal, when he wanted to be, and he sometimes even reproduced the meter of the Latin originals syllable by syllable, as in his translation of Horace's hymn to Mercury, Ode 1.10, in Sapphics. But more often, his translations are free imitations and parodies.

A knowledge of the Latin originals may help to appreciate FPA's subtlety and cleverness, but most of the translations can be read, understood, and appreciated even by those who know nothing of Latin literature. The translations stand alone as poems in their own right, and deal with themes intelligible to everyone. For example, one poem translated several times by FPA Horace's Ode 3.9, a light-hearted conversation between a boy and girl who break up and then reconcile, a scene repeated thousands of times every day in high schools all across the United States. Anyone who has ever experienced puppy love can recall fragments of conversation such as:

Lyddy, listen, get me right:
Do you think that perhaps we might
Sort of start it up again?

For those interested in the translator's craft, it is fascinating to compare multiple translations of the same poem by the same translator. FPA often translated the same poem more than once. We have half a dozen versions by FPA of Horace's Lalage ode (1.22).

One surprising omission in the corpus of translations by FPA is the absence of any versions of Ovid. Ovid's light-hearted, flippant, cynical love poetry is like FPA's own, in many ways.