In the May 22 New Yorker (I'm way behind), Anthony Lane's article on adventurer and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor brought up a passage from Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, which I've never read and probably never will. Towing a captured general across 1944 Crete and trying to make it to the coast, Leigh Fermor gave us this passage, which Lane quotes:

During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alte stet nive candidum
Soracte …

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine — and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

Lane went on to name Horace Odes 1.9 — so the Soracte did seem familiar. I got to Googling and came up with an Oxford translation that seemed too stiff. Looking deep on my drive, I came up with my high school translation and it seemed too amateur. Googling again, a University of Chicago-printed version turned up on a Purdue site, and it was just right.

See, the snows on Mount Soracte glare against
the sky, and the branches strain, giving way
eneath the weight, and the fluent
waters stand fast, fixed by the bitter freeze.

Take the chill off, piling plenty of logs
by the fireside, and pour out the wine, four years
aging, from the Sabine jar,
Thaliarchus, with a free hand.

Leave the rest to the gods, for once they quiet
the winds that are warring with the roaring
sea, cypress and ancient
ashtree are troubled no longer.

Do not ask of tomorrow what it may hold;
mark in the black each day you are granted
by Chance: you are young, no
sneering at loving and dancing

while the sap rises and whining old age
stays away. now is the time for playing field
and public squares with soft
whispers as night covers lovers meeting,

and now is the time for giveaway giggles
from the far corner and the girl in hiding,
and the prize snatched from her
arm or finger that (almost) resists.

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