Most of my contact since that time came after he had lost Anne, and after the move first to Brookline, then to Brookhaven. I don’t recall the exact date, but I think David’s translation of The Odes of Horace of 1997 was out by then, since I remember discussing some versions of his Odes with him that I had found particularly memorable. Sometime in the late 1990s Anne and David had Joan and me over for drinks at Dana Street in Cambridge, along with my Harvard Latinist colleague, the late Wendell Clausen and his wife Margaret. I met David Ferry rather late in the game, but we became friends and have made up for lost decades. And anyway he does not need me to discuss these translations since he has them fresh in his mind, having beguiled the days, weeks, and months of the pandemic by reading them in the virtual but lively company of his own grandchildren Isaiah and Sebastian, along with the intervening generation that rounds out his beloved family. I know David will understand the limitations of my gift since he too is a lover of grandchildren. I would also write about about David’s own poetry, in particular the poems of the great collection Bewilderment, and the ways so many of those poems map onto what was happening at the time, in his life as in the poetry of his translations, and in the wonderful readings that he gave, in my own classes and beyond. I would, to paraphrase Catullus, provide a store of quotations and appreciations from this monumentum aere perennius, if I had them to hand. He has translated more of the two great Roman poets Virgil and Horace, on whom I have spent most of my professional life, than any other translator I am aware of: all of Virgil- Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid - and almost all of Horace only that poet’s Satires remain, some of them already translated, and I remain hopeful that David will finish those complex and deceptive poems too. Were I back among my books, I could talk in detail and quote from the many translations that David has produced over the years. Finding myself, at the risk of sounding grandiose, in a similar plight as I help out following the arrival of a granddaughter in the Berkshires, I offer only this brief tribute. Tantalizingly, Catullus omits to identify what was in it. The Roman poet, a great favorite of David Ferry’s, was off in his native Verona, his library back in Rome, with only one book box following him. So Catullus, in a poem apologizing to his friend Manlius, or whatever his name was, for not sending Manlius a poem-and in the process so doing. …….huc una ex multis capsula me sequitur.Īs for my not having a good supply of authors with me here, that’s because I live at Rome: that is my home, that’s where I’ve settled, there my life is spent but when I’m up here one small box out of many comes with me. Illa mihi sedes, illic mea carpitur aetas …….hoc fit, quod Romae vivimus: illa domus, Nam, quod scriptorum non magna est copia apud me,

The aeneid david ferry