Metamorphoses I (1997): Chaos

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
Corpora. Di, cœptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
Adspirate meis: primaque ab origine mundi
Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
Ante mare et tellus, et, quod tegit omnia, cœlum,
Unus erat toto Naturæ vultus in orbe,
Quem dixere Chaos; rudis indigestaque moles,
Nec quicquam, nisi pondus iners, congestaque eodem
Non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum.
Nullus adhuc mundo præbebat lumina Titan:
Nec nova crescendo reparabat cornua Phœbe:
Nec circumfuso pendebat in aere tellus
Ponderibus librata suis: nec brachia longo
Margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite.

[Ovidius. Metamorphoseon, I: 1-14. In Gulielmus Sidney Walker, ed. Corpus Poetarum Latinorum, 1827 (Londini: Apud C. Knight, 1835) 325.]

These are the opening lines of Ovid's epic, taken from a bizarre old book I bought years ago in Edinburgh, which contains the complete works of all the principal Latin poets, printed in incredibly small type on an unwieldy mass of dogeared pages.

Saturn devouring his own children

Here's my attempt at a translation / transmutation, from a poem I wrote in the mid-90's called "Jack's Metamorphoses." The idea was supposed to be to construct a narrative out of bits of other texts, manipulated and retooled in the best postmodern manner. The pieces I chose included the Border Ballad "Thomas the Rhymer," Rilke's "Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes" and three poems about Theseus and the Minotaur by Jorge Luis Borges, as well as this bit of Ovid.
It still seems like an interesting idea, though possibly carried out on too condensed a scale to do justice to all the meanings (personal and poetic) I wanted to code into it:

In new moves Jack’s muse mutated to tell forms
of bodies. Gods, starts (since by you changed, and others)
inspire me with: first & from birth of world
to my perpetual spin-out era song.

Before sea and earth, and, which covers all, Sky-tower,
united was all Nature’s face in sphere
called Chaos; raw & undigested mass
nor naught which wasn’t weight inert (Les Mills),
not well joined-up discordant seeds of things.
Nor as yet Auckland offered light the Titan,
nor new by growing swelled her horns Marina,
nor circum-harboured hung in air the earth
weight balanced by its: nor arms along long
stretch of shoreline edged out Rangitoto.

- "Jack's Metamorphoses"
[included in brief 15 (2000): 57-62 and brief 19 (2001): 70-79]

Kathy Acker (1948-1997)

The method of translation I was using echoed Kathy Acker's word-by-word transliterations of Sextus Propertius from her classic Blood and Guts in High School (1978):

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
In new moves Jack’s muse mutated to tell forms
Corpora. Di, cœptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
of bodies. Gods, starts (since by you changed, and others)
Adspirate meis: primaque ab origine mundi
inspire me with: first & from birth of world
Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
to my perpetual spin-out era song …

For Rilke I used the aural, sound-for-sound techniques of Zukofsky's Catullus (1969), and for Borges the more traditional method of straightforward verse translation.

I've found these three approaches useful for teaching poetic translation workshops ever since. For more on that, see my entry on the Bluff O6 poetry festival from the earlier pages of this blog.