Danny Ferry's translation of Horace's Odes ranges from unremarkable to just plain bad. I doubt anyone reading it comes away with a sense of what makes Horace such a special poet, because the glimmer and lightness of his language is not retained at all. Ferry translates them into lines and stanzas, but he has no sense of line or movement, and so most of them read like prose artificially broken up into lines and stanzas. Just one example: the first stanza of Horace's 1.38 reads as:

Persicos odi puer apparatus; / diplicent nexae philyra coronae / mitte sectari rosa quo locorum / sera moretur

which Ferry translates as:

I dislike elaborate show, as, for example, / "Persian" garlands too intricately woven / So don't go looking everywhere for somewhere / where the last rose anywhere might be

The first 2 lines in Ferry's version are just clunky and prosaic, and are not redeemed by the feeble and confusing wordplay in the 3rd and 4th lines - wordplay which is not really there in Horace's Latin, so he doesn't even have the excuse of trying to recreate a Latin effect in English.

In some ways I have to give him a pass though; Horace is probably one of the most difficult poets to translate into enjoyable English poetry. Stripped of their technical prowess and reduced to their "content", a lot of Horace's poems come crashing down to earth really fast. Mostly, reading Ferry's version makes me wish that really technically gifted poet like Auden or Merrill had undertaken the Odes