“What exile ever fled his own mind?”: On reading Horace in South Africa and Italy

Abstract

The Roman poet Horace provides an unlikely-seeming source of inspiration and consolation to a writer emerging in South Africa in the late 1980s. This account essays some history of the way one poet can work on another across cultures and millennia, noting the mediating force of W.H. Auden and the significance of form over content in brokering a stylistic affection that has lasted. The essay follows also Gilbert Highet’s premise in his Poets in a Landscape, by following the author in his tracks to Italy and the valley of Horace’s Digentia, now the Licenza river. Whether the essay is about the formation of a twenty-first century echo or the recovery of a two-thousand year-old exemplum in outlandish circumstances is moot, and probably entangled.
This essay in creative non-fiction expresses a long affinity for the Roman poet Quintus Hotarius Flaccus (Horace), and the circumstances of that affinity with particular reference to the author’s encounter with him across South Africa and Italy, in youth and maturity. The essay makes elliptical reference to the work of the poet but does not set out any extended critical analysis; it is more gently interested in the formation of the author’s own intellectual and poetic community with the ancient Roman. In broad canvas it problematises the reception of the so-called classics in the global South, but more pronouncedly represents the formation of a writerly and philosophical outlook in a time of transformation. The essay is preoccupied also with the endurance of place, or ideologised space, in the persistence of a canonical classic, and extends its encounter with Horace’s Sabine hills and villa to the remote-but-related landscape of the (South African) mind.