This opus amounts to a labor of love, which is a genteel way of saying that no one is willing to pay for it. What we have here are selections from the Interlinear Horace, first published in 1894. The selections correspond to those poems of Horace cited in Volume III of the Oxford Latin Course—with one exception. In the case of the Odes and Epodes, the full text is shown. Epistle I, 4 is shown in full, as it is very short, and Satire II, 6 is presented in full, even though it is very long, because it is cited three different times in the Oxford Latin Course. The other Satires and the one other Epistle cited are excerpted in their relevant passages.
The benefit of an interlinear translation will be obvious at first glance. In these pages, Horace’s original word order has been shuffled to mimic a normal English word order. This resequencing destroys the meter, of course, but it allows students to approach their translation in a less cumbersome fashion. This is a useful interim step between facility with grammar and true fluency.
The one poem cited in the Oxford Latin Course that is not presented here is the Carmen Saeculare, which for some reason was omitted from the Interlinear Horace. If there is a Latin class out there that is especially game, I will be happy to make a web page from your efforts.
It is worth noting that this is potentially a violation of copyright. Neither of the corporate entities named in the volume I worked from exists any longer, but it is possible that some heir or assign retains some rights. I am using substantially less than five percent of the original, which is arguably a fair use, but, obviously, I will respond at once to a request to desist. I would respond even more readily, however, to permission to bring this book back into print, in some netwise fashion or other. The Interlinear Horace is not marketable, at least not at present, but it would be a valuable thing to preserve it in its present form. More valuable still would be to reset the whole book as HTML with links to define obscure usages and proper nouns. Vetted, linked and mirrored around the globe, the Interlinear Horace could be a monument to Quintus Horatius Flaccus more lasting than bronze...
As to the files, the pages you are seeing represent a pocket history of the typesetting art. This book was set by hand, one line at a time, in individual letters drawn one at a time from a job case. In contrast to the Linotype, which you may have seen in old movies, the type was not cast on demand, so it had already seen hard use when it was deployed to make this book. In consequence, it’s badly beaten up. I scanned the pages as images, oversampling madly, but my renderings are necessarily somewhat worse than what was already a fairly bad original. Everything is readable, but you will be amazed at the quality improvements in typography one hundred years have wrought. And: My oversampling makes for some fairly large files; my apologies.
The pages are rendered as PDF files, which means you’ll need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print them.
These are the files and the poems presented on them, along with the page numbers on which they are cited in Volume III of the Oxford Latin Course.
Horace01.pdf — Epode 2, pp. 49-50
Horace02.pdf — Ode II, 7, p. 56; excerpt from Satire I, 6, pp. 61-62
Horace03.pdf — excerpt from Satire I, 5, pp. 66-67
Horace04.pdf — excerpt from Satire I, 9, pp. 72-73; Ode III, 8, pg. 80
Horace05.pdf — Ode I, 37, pp. 91-92; Ode III, 26, pg. 101; Epistle I, 4, pg. 106
Horace06.pdf — Ode I, 3, pg. 107; Ode I, 20, pg. 118; excerpt from Epistle I, 7, pg. 118
Horace07.pdf — Ode II, 14, pg. 123; Ode IV, 7, pp. 123-124
Horace08.pdf — Satire II, 6, pp. 79, 117, 119 (continues)
Horace09.pdf — Satire II, 6, pp. 79, 117, 119 (continues)
Horace10.pdf — Satire II, 6, pp. 79, 117, 119 (concludes)
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Errors and amendments: Greg Swann