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.

Metamorphoses XI (1820): Midas

Ovid in English. Edited by Christopher Martin.
Poets in Translation. London: Penguin, 1998. 308-09:

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:
Midas: A Drama in two acts. 2: 83-120
[from Metamorphoses 11.106-30] Midas’s epiphany

Mid. (lifting up the cover) This is to be a king! to touch pure gold!
Would that by touching thee, Zopyrion, I could
transmute thee to a golden man;
A crowd of golden slaves to wait on me!
(Pours the water on his hands)
But how is this? the water that I touch
Falls down a stream of yellow, liquid gold.
And hardens as it falls. I cannot wash —
Pray Bacchus I may Drink! And the soft towel
With which I’d wipe my hands transmutes itself
Into a sheet of heavy gold. — No more!
I’ll sit and eat — I have not tasted food
For many hours, I have been so wrapt
In golden dreams of all that I possess,
I had not time to eat; now hunger calls
And makes me feel, though not remote in power
From the Immortal Gods, that I need food,
The only remnant of mortality!
(In vain attempts to eat of several dishes)
Alas! my fate! ‘tis gold! this peach is gold!
This bread, these grapes, & all I touch! this meat
Which by its scent quickened my appetite
Has lost its scent, its taste, — ‘tis useless gold.

Zopyrion. (aside) He’d better now have followed my advice
He starves by gold yet keeps his asses’ ears.

Midas. Asphalon, put that apple to my mouth;
If my hands touch it out perhaps I eat.
Also! I cannot bite! as it approached
I felt its fragrance, thought it would be mine,
But by the touch of my life-killing lips
‘Tis changed from a sweet fruit to tasteless gold.
Bacchus will out refresh me by his gifts,
The liquid wine congeals and flies my taste.
Go, miserable slaves! Oh, wretched king!
Away with food! its sight now makes me sick.
Bring in my couch! I will sleep off my care,
And when I wake I’ll coin some remedy
I dare not bathe this sultry day, for fear
I be enclosed in gold. Begone!
I will to rest: — Oh, miserable king!

(1820, pub. 1922)

Written two years after Frankenstein; or, The New Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley's two-act drama "Midas" wasn't published in full until 1922 (though the short lyric "Arethusa" her husband Percy Bysshe wrote for inclusion in it has become a fabourite anthology piece).

What was it that attracted her in the theme? Frankenstein has been linked to everything from fantasies of the Shelley's first child, Clara, who died shortly before that famous "haunted summer" on Lake Geneva, to sexual jealousy of her half-sister Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron (cast as the Bride of Frankenstein?) It's hard to escape the idea that Midas is, somehow, a version of her poet husband.

Consider the parallels: a man who turns everything he touches to gold, but who thereby renders himself impervious to human touch. Midas is finally cured by immersing himself in a river, thus passing on his gold-bearing gift. Shelley's own trial by water proved less favourable. He drowned at sea in 1822.

Walter Crane, “King Midas and His Daughter Who has Turned to Gold” (1892)

The book I borrowed this extract from, Ovid in English, is one of the excellent Penguin Poets in Translation Series. To date the following volumes have appeared. If you see them in a secondhand shop near you (strangely enough, they seem to go out of print almost as soon as they appear), don't buy it - leave it for me instead ...

I've marked in italics the ones I don't yet own (and have therefore had to consult in library copies):

1. Homer in English, ed. George Steiner & Aminadav Dykman (1996)
2. Horace in English, ed. D. S. Carne-Ross & Kenneth Haynes (1996)
3. Martial in English, ed. John P. Sullivan & Anthony J. Boyle (1996)
4. The Psalms in English, ed. Donald Davie (1996)
5. Virgil in English, ed. K. W. Gransden (1996)
6. Baudelaire in English, ed. Carol Clark & Robert Sykes (1998)
7. Ovid in English, ed. Christopher Martin (1998)
8. Seneca in English, ed. Don Share (1998)
9. Catullus in English, ed. Julia Haig Gaisser (2001)
10. Juvenal in English, ed. Martin M. Winkler (2001)
11. Dante in English, ed. Eric Griffiths & Matthew Reynolds (2005)
12. Petrarch in English, ed. Thomas P. Roche (2005)
13. [Rilke in English , ed. Michael Hofmann (overdue from 2008)]

Peter Sharpe, “Midas” (1999)

Metamorphoses III (1989): Semele

Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Translated by Charles Boer.
Dunquin Series, 17. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1989. 55-56:

[SEMELE & JOVE]

new cause for anger: Semele Pregnant By Jove!
Juno’s tongue ready to curse, but says,
“What good’s cursing? it’s the girl I want!
I’ll kill her or I’m not great Juno
& my hand’s not fit to hold scepter-flash,
& I’m not queen & sister & wife of Jove!
sister at least! think that sneak would be content,
a little damage to our marriage? no! pregnant too!
proclaims crime with big belly; wants to be mother
by Jove! it should happen to me! the nerve of pretty people!
she won’t get away with it: Styx-drowned by Jove himself
or I’m not Juno!”

gets up, hides in yellow cloud, heads
for Semele’s house; keeps cloud on till she resembles
the grey-haired wrinkle-skinned bone-bent
cackling hag, Beroe, Semele’s Epidaurian nurse

a long-winded talker; sighs at mention of Jove:
“I hope it’s Jove; I fear it’s others: many men
enter women’s beds using god-names:
it’s not enough to be ‘Jove’: prove love!
if he’s who he says, demand same as Juno,
as much & as good! make him embrace & take you
with his equipment on!”

so Juno cons Semele: girl asks Jove
a gift without naming it

“Anything!” (Jove); “deny you nothing! Styx-god
my witness! one all gods fear”

pleased with herself & too powerful in love,
about to die for it: Semele: “Do me
the way you do Juno!”

god wants to stop her mouth but she gets it
all out; he groans; no unwishing;
no unswearing; extremely sad, he climbs
sky, drags out obedient clouds, joining
storms & thunderclaps & can’t-miss lightning;
tries, best he can, to control these powers:
does not put on firebolt used on
the polybrach giant Typhoeus – too cruel, that! –
instead: a lighter lightning, Cyclopean-made,
its fire not so bad, not so nasty
(the gods’ ‘second force’)

he takes this & enters Semele’s house: her body,
mortal, can’t stand meteorological banging
& burns in his sexual gifts

Foetus Snatched From Mother’s Womb! sewed carefully
(do you believe this?) into papa’s thigh!
till delivery time; Aunt Ino secretly cradles him,
then presents him to nymphs at Nysa Cave: they hide him,
giving food & milk

on earth, this (& Bacchus born safely twice)

[Gustave Moreau, "Zeus and Semele" (1896)]

Critics on Boer's translation:

Here is an Ovid who looks like the Picasso of the Guernica rather than Poussin. … Charles Boer has reshaped The Metamorphoses in a way Olson, Zukofsky and Pound would have approved of, making us see the poem’s violence, turbulence and angular strangeness.
– Guy Davenport

… this is the authentic Ovid ... this was their rock and roll … There’s no drift in Boer’s Metamorphoses, nothing dull … The atmosphere it produces is close to a haunting.
– William Kotzwinkle

Boer on other translators:

Americans have been well-served in the past thirty years with two modern verse translations of the Metamorphoses (the several British attempts at it by comparison seem pedantic and dull). Between the breezy version of Rolfe Humphries (1955) and the lyrical orchestration of Horace Gregory (1958), the Latin-less reader has heard a fine performance of Ovid’s wit and loveliness. [xiii]

My own associations with Semele come mainly from Handel's 1744 "secular oratorio," which is one of my all-time favourite pieces of choral extravaganza. The libretto is by the dramatist Congreve, but it also includes the famous aria "Wheree'er you walk," taken from Pope's "Pastorals." It's an intensely sensual piece of music, almost too lush and overblown some (not I) would say.

As for Boer's translation, it consists mainly of capitalised headlines and breathless telegraphese. Very few of his speakers seem to employ anything resembling idiomatic English. But, to his credit, it reads exceptionally vividly, and he makes absolutely no attempt to gloss over the tell-all sex and violence of the original. I think it's one of the most exciting complete Metamorphoses in existence, and would definitely recommend it.

I really can't imagine why it's been overshadowed by so many duller versions.

Metamorphose the Metamorphoses

Why is it that so many people insist on translating Ovid's Metamorphoses nowadays? There was a time, of course, when it was easy enough for the average educated person to read it in the original Latin, but that time is long gone. Is that really sufficient explanation for the rash of verse translations which have been appearing lately?

Just out of curiosity, I've started to collect them as I come across them – not systematically, but according to the hazards of the marketplace. I now have twelve complete translations in my collection, no fewer than eight of them from the twentieth century, along with two from the twenty-first.

This list, I should say, is in no way exhaustive.

• William Caxton (London, 1480): prose -- unpublished manuscript [Facsmile edition (New York, 1968)]
• Arthur Golding (London, 1565-67): rhyming fourteeners [ed. Madeleine Forey (Penguin Classics, 2002): available here]
• George Sandys (London, 1626-32): heroic couplets [available here]• John Dryden et al., ed. Samuel Garth (London, 1717): heroic couplets [ed. Garth Tissol (Wordsworth Classics, 1998): available here]
• Frank Justus Miller (Loeb Classics, 1916): prose dual-text. [rev. G. P. Gould (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984) ]
• Brookes More (USA: Marshall Jones Company, 1922): blank verse
• Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955): blank verse
• Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1955): prose
• Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Penguin, 1958): blank verse
• A. D. Melville (Oxford: World's Classics, 1986): blank verse
• Charles Boer (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1989): free verse
• Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993): blank verse
• David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994): hexameters
• Michael Simpson (Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) : prose
• David Raeburn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2004): hexameters
• Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2004): blank verse

The ones in italics I don't actually own copies of. I've tried to specify in each case which edition I've used. There’s also, by the by, a good prose crib by the very industrious A. S. Kline, available here.

You'll notice the pace gradually starting to pick up as we reach the late twentieth century. Caxton's pioneering translation was never published at all, but remained in manuscript until the late twentieth century. After that Golding's Elizabethan version (one of Shakespeare's principal sourcebooks, described by Ezra Pound as "the most beautiful book in the language") held sway for sixty years or so, until Sandys decided to update it for the seventeenth century. He, in his turn, needed to be updated for the eighteenth century, after which we reach a long desert of neglect throughout the later Augustan and Victorian periods. Virgil was the poet to suit empire-builders, not frivolous, honey-tongued Ovid.

The present explosion of interest was perhaps prompted more by selections than by complete translations, though:

• After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann & James Lasdun (London: Faber, 1994): various metres & styles
• Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (London: Faber, 1997): free verse
• Ovid in English, ed. Christopher Martin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1998): various metres & styles

The New Metamorphoses was certainly an idea whose time had come. In a way it was unfairly overshadowed by Ted Hughes' subsequent book. His versions are undoubtedly powerful, but lack the variety of Hofmann and Lasdun's compilation (which, in any case, started him off on the project in the first place). Ovid in English is one in an excellent series of anthologies of responses to major Classical and European poets over the centuries.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to compare some of these translations and see how they treat crucial episodes in The Metamorphoses. There are fifteen complete English translations listed above, twelve of them in verse (one in rhyming fourteeners, two in heroic couplets, two in hexameters, six in blank verse and one in free verse). Of these, I own – or have access online – to eleven. If you add the Hughes, Hofmann & Lasdun, and Martin selections to the list, that brings us up to fourteen.

There are fifteen books in Ovid's epic. I've therefore decided to add myself to the list as well, and to include a passage from my own poem "Jack's Metamorphoses" (published in brief 15 (2000): 57-62 and 19 (2001): 70-79).



Verse translations (partial & complete):
1. Arthur Golding (1567): Bk XIV (Pomona)
2. George Sandys (1632): Bk XV (Hippolytus)
3. John Dryden, Samuel Garth, et al. (1717): Bk VII (Theseus)
4. Rolfe Humphries (1955): Bk XIII (Glaucus)
5. Horace Gregory (1958): Bk VIII (Icarus)
6. A. D. Melville (1986): Bk IV (Daughters of Minyas)
7. Charles Boer (1989): Bk III (Semele)
8. Allen Mandelbaum (1993): Bk II (The Crow)
9. After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1994): Bk VI (Marsyas)
10. David R. Slavitt (1994): Bk IX (Iolaus)
11. Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (1997): Bk V (Arethusa)
12. Jack Ross, “Jack’s Metamorphoses” (1997): Bk I (Chaos)
13. Ovid in English (1998): Bk XI (Midas)
14. David Raeburn (2004): Bk XII (Rumour)
15. Charles Martin (2004): Bk X (Pygmalion)

Books of the epic:
Book I: Chaos, Four Ages, Flood, Daphne, Io, Syrinx, Phaethon
Book II: Phaethon’s fall, Callisto, Coronis, Aglauros, Europa
Book III: Cadmus, Actaeon, Semele, Tiresias, Narcissus, Pentheus
Book IV: Pyramus, Daughters of Minyas, Ino, Cadmus, Perseus
Book V: Perseus, Calliope, Proserpine, Arethusa, The Pierides
Book VI: Arachne, Niobe, Marsyas, Procne, Philomela, Boreas
Book VII: Jason, Medea, Theseus, Minos, Myrmidons, Procris
Book VIII: Scylla, Daedalus, Icarus, Meleager, Philemon and Baucis
Book IX: Hercules, Alcmene, Iolaus, Galanthis, Dryope, Byblis, Iphis
Book X: Orpheus, Pygmalion, Myrrha, Venus and Adonis, Atalanta
Book XI: Death of Orpheus, Midas, Peleus, Ceyx, Alcyone,Aesacus
Book XII: Rumour, Cycnus, Caeneus, Lapiths and Centaurs, Achilles
Book XIII: Ajax,Ulysses,Polyxena, Hecuba, Memnon, Galatea, Glaucus
Book XIV: Scylla, Sibyl, Polyphemus, Circe, Picus, Pomona, Romulus
Book XV: Pythagoras, Hippolytus, Cipus, Aesculapius, The Caesars