Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
Humor is one of the hardest strains to bottle and save through time or send to folks with different locations or throats of experience, but surely any reader who wonders about Donald Hall’s humor-in-translation of Horace [“After Horace (Odes III, 5),” July/August 2005] (not your usual comic source anyway) is likely to feel more consternation or confusion than “humor” when—if—he looks up the original.
Odes III, 5 is a longish, serious poem that is unlikely to dazzle us latter-day readers and bears no resemblance to Hall’s poem, which is a pastiche of III, 15. Doesn’t anyone at Poetry know of these things, or look them up?
Stephen Sandy was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and earned his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University, where he studied poetry with Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish. He was the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Man in the Open Air: Poems (1988), Thanksgiving over the Water (1992), The Thread: New and Selected Poems (1998), Black Box (1999), ...