Metamorphoses V (1997): Arethusa

‘I was a nymph of Achaia.
None loved the woods,
And setting their hunting nets, as keenly as I did.
I was all action and energy,
And never thought of my looks.
Even so, my looks, yes, my beauty
Made others think of me.
The fame of my appearance burdened me.
The attractions
That all the other girls were sick to have
Sickened me, that I had them.
Because they attracted men, I thought them evil.

‘There came a day
I had exhausted myself
In the Stymphalian Forest. The heat was frightening.
And my efforts, harrying the game,
Had doubled its effect on me.
I found a stream, deep but not too deep,
Quiet and clear – so clear,
Every grain of sand seemed magnified.
And so quiet, the broad clarity
Hardly dimpled.
The poplars and willows that drank at it
Were doubled in a flawless mirror.
I waded in – footsoles, ankles, knees.
Then stripped,
Hung my clothes on a willow
And plunged.
As I played there, churning the surface,
To and fro, diving to the bottom,
Swimming on my back, my side, my belly,
I felt a strange stir bulge in the current –
It scared me so badly
I scrambled up on to the bank.
A voice came after me:
“Why leave in such a hurry, Arethusa?”
It was Alpheus, in the swirl of his waters.
“Why leave in such a hurry?” he cried again.
I saw my clothes on the willow across the river.
I had come out on the wrong bank.
Naked as I was, I just ran –
That brought him after me
All the more eagerly – my nakedness
Though it was no invitation
Gave his assault no option.
I was like the dove in a panic
Dodging through trees when the hawk
Rides its slipstream
Tight as a magnet.

‘The peak of Orchomenus went past,
And Psophis –
They were stepping stones
That my feet barely touched. Then Cyllene
And the knapped, flinty ridges
Of Maenalus, Erymanthus, and Elis –
The map rolled under me
As in a flight in a dream. He could not
Overtake me
But he could outlast me.
Over savannahs, mountains black with forest,
Pathless crags and gorges. But soon
The sun pressed on my back and I saw
That I ran in a long and leaping shadow
The very shape of my terror –
And I heard the stones flying
From his striding feet, and his panting breath
That seemed to tug at my hair.

‘In an agony of effort
I called to Diana:
“Help, or it’s all over with me.
Remember how I carried your bow,
Your quiverful of arrows. Help me,
Help me, Oh help me.”

‘The goddess heard and was stirred.
She brought up a dense mist
And hid me.
I smothered my gasping lungs. I tried
To muffle my heartbeat. And I froze.
I could hear the river-god, Alpheus,
Blindly casting about -
Twice he almost trod on me
Where I crouched under deep weeds.
“Arethusa!” he kept shouting, “Arethusa!”
As if I would answer!
You can imagine what I was feeling –
What the lamb feels when the wolf’s jaws
Are ripping the edge of the shed door.
Or what the hare feels
Peering through the wall of grass blades
When the circling hounds lift their noses.
But Alpheus persisted.
Circling the clump of mist, he could see clearly
My track that had gone in had not come out.
When I understood this
A sudden sweat chilled my whole body.
It streamed from me.
It welled from my hair. It puddled under my feet.
In the time it takes to tell you this
I had become a spring, a brisk stream,
A river, flowing away down the hillside.
But the river-god recognised me.
And he too dissolved his human shape,
Poured himself into his true nature
And mingled his current with my current.

‘But Diana helped me again. She split earth open.
I dived into the gorge
And underground I came to Ortygia –
This land,
Which bears the name of my own beloved goddess,
Brought me back to light. That is my story.’

Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the Metamorphoses. London: Faber, 1997. 68-71.

Ted Hughes included four pieces in the book After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann & James Lasdun (London: Faber, 1994). I've suggested elsewhere that his subsequent book has tended to overshadow this anthology of different pieces in multiple voices unjustly, but that could hardly be said to be Hughes's fault. One might, in fact, argue that the immense success of his translation / adaptation of crucuial passages from the epic served as a kind of advertisement for the Hofmann / Lasdun book (it's a pity he makes no reference to it on his copyright page or in his preface, but them's the breaks).

Anyway, I think this story, the Arethusa story, shows the strengths of Hughes's method. He uses a vaguely iambic, free-verse line rather than the blank verse or loose hexameters which other, more conventional translators tend to employ. He also picks and chooses far more when it comes to the detail of each particular story. And, after all, if you really do want all the detail of an original, best to read it in the original - time spent poring over a translation might well be better employed with a Loeb classics crib ...



The story is one of those whose essential lines are recognisable long before it meanders to a conclusion. It's Apollo and Daphne, Scylla and Glaucus all over again. A nymph flees a god intent on raping her, until she's tranformed into some feature of the landscape, and thus escaping him forever - but also losing her human attributes at the same time.

I guess, in aggregate, the stories are a kind of parable of attraction / repulsion, those fundamental forces behind the universe, visible in the form of gravity and centrifugal force, but also - especially significant in the medieval and classical world - in the form of love and hate.

It's love which moves the sun and the other stars, says Dante in the Commedia, faithfuly repeating Aristotle and his other Classical sources. The (male) gods in these mythological stories of Ovid's seem instantly attracted by beauty, the (female) nymphs as automatically repelled. They're like magnets with reversed polarities, in fact. Nor is it masculine roughness or ugliness which repels them necessarily. Apollo could hardly be said to be unattractive in his human garb.

Rather, it seems to be an instant revulsion from the whole cycle of sex and preganancy and childbirth and child-rearing - mortality, in short - which sends them haring off. It's that they're punished for, perhaps. Not so much punished as fulfilled - given the stasis they were seeking (however unconsciously) all along.

Ted Hughes should know about all that, with his emotional history - not one but two women committing suicide after being involved with him.

Metamorphoses IV (1986): Daughters of Minyas

- Francisco Benitez, "Daughters of Minyas" (c.2002/3)

The daughters of Minyas impiously reject the cult of Bacchus. To pass the time as they work, they tell the stories which take up the first half of Book IV: one of Ovid’s ‘framing’ devices ... (Melville, 395)

The Daughters of Minyas transformed

The tale was done but still the girls worked on,
Scorning the god, dishonouring his feast,
When suddenly the crash of unseen drums
Clamoured, and fifes and jingling brass
Resounded, and the air was sweet with scents
of myrrh and saffron, and – beyond belief! –
The weaving all turned green. the hanging cloth
Grew leaves of ivy, part became a vine,
What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp
Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen,
Matching the purple with their coloured sheen.
And now the day was spent, the hour stole on
When one would doubt if it were light or dark,
Some lingering light at night’s vague borderlands.
Suddenly the whole house began to shake,
the lamps flared up, and all the rooms were bright
With flashing crimson fires, and phantom forms
of savage beast of prey howled all around.
Among the smoke-filled rooms, one here, one there,
The sisters cowered in hiding to escape
The flames and glare, and, as they sought the dark,
A skinny membrane spread down their dwarfed limbs,
And wrapped thin wings around their tiny arms,
And in what fashion they had lost their shape
The dark hid from them., Not with feathered plumes
They ride the air, but keep themselves aloft
On parchment wings; and when they try to speak
They send a tiny sound that suits their size.
And pour their plaints in thin high squeaking cries.
Houses they haunt, not woods; they loathe the light;
From dusk they take their name*, and flit by night.

A. D. Melville, trans. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. The World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1986). 86.

* take their name: ‘bat’ in Latin is uespertilio, from uesper ‘evening’; In ’flit by night’ Ovid also alludes to its Greek name, nykteris, from nyx ‘night’. In Nicander’s much more elaborate version of the story the sisters are changed into a bat, an owl, and another, unidentified, bird. (Melville, 399)

- Pablo Picasso, "Daughters of Minyas" (c.1930)

"In more recent years translations have appeared in the USA whose main value is as a warning of the difficulty of the task," [xxx] says A. D. Melville in his “Translator’s Note.” Bold words.
Presumably he has in mind Rolfe Humphries (1955) and Horace Gregory (1958), but it's hard to see just why he supposes his own pentameters so superior to theirs. I suspect Charles Boer had this remark in mind when he commented on the "pedantic and dull" nature of the several British attempts to represent the Metamorphoses in verse.
Melville's lines may be unexciting, though, but his book is clearly laid-0ut, engagingly annotated, and generally extremely accessible, especially for the first-time Ovidian.

Fresco from Pompeii

And why the daughters of Minyas? What is it that interests me about them? Is it the fact that they are turned into bats as a consequence of scorning Dionysos, the god of wine? Dionysos / Bacchus, of course, was the son of Zeus and Semele, conceived before she was burnt to death by seeing the god in his full glory, and rescued from her corpse to be gestated in his father's thigh.

They reject the god in his several aspects as maiden, bull, lion and panther, and as a result one of them, Leucippe, tears her own son Hipassus to pieces and feasts on his flesh.

This idea of the necessity of losing control and submitting to the judgements of the god of intoxicating drugs offers an interesting contrast with our own culture's desire to maintain rationality at all costs.

Whether they became bats or (as other authorities have it) a mouse, a screech-owl and a barn-owl, it's clear that they are guilty of preferring their own ontological certainties to the expanded horizons offered by the god.

Semele was punished for her presumptuous attempt to attain immortality by seeing her lover, the god, as he truly was. The Minyades appear to exemplify the opposite fault, lacking (as they do) the attention-span even to pay heed to their metamorphosing visitor.

Metamorphoses IX (1994): Iolaus

… Making clear
that this was a one-time favor, she had been on the point of swearing
that never again would it happen that an old person be made
young again, but Themis, the Hours’ mother and Mistress
of Seasons and Years, prevented this ill-considered gesture.
And now we get Themis’ list of myths in which time stands still,
moves around, plays tricks. . . not stories but only allusions,
some of them clear, and others oblique or coy. Our attention
wanes, as the voice — of Themis? Ovid? — falters and drones.
Tired perhaps? We strain to follow its murmur and feel
frustration, even annoyance. Why has he thus betrayed us?
Is this a place he’d have fixed had the gods not sent him away
(or, to keep to the pattern, turned him from darling to exile,
the victim of Caesar Augustus’ whim)? But there is a way
to read this passage and turn time back. We are children again,
hide in the hall at the top of the stairs and strain to hear
the phrases that float up from our parents’ conversations.
Greedy for what we can catch, we hold our breath to listen
and to comprehend their words and the world’s unpleasant secrets
from which they have tried to protect us as long and as well as they could.
The question is one of trust, which Ovid invites or tests.
Have we learned in these pages to yield to his moods and moves, to read
with that mixture of love and awe we felt many years ago
in the upstairs hall? The subject, at any rate, is the business
of youth and age, how the gods can turn back the clocks—not often,
but every now and again. We get Amphiarius’ story,
and Callirhoë’s, who prayed that her young sons might be made
mature to avenge their father’s death. ...
… We’re back on track now. This story, a somewhat mannered performance,
is one of those nice rhetorical set pieces Ovid loved
to dazzle with. He could put his lawyer’s training to use
as he made up elaborate speeches for his characters to declaim.
We’re all ears now, or they are sharper for having been jangled
a while, as if, in a concert hall, a composer had scored
a tune-up, white noise to get us into the proper expectant
mood. There’s even a warning, a moral (not quite on target,
but, if it were, the story would be otiose and redundant).
Byblis, he says, is a warning that girls should be careful to keep
their passions in check and direct them only to lawful and licit
persons — and this is a rule it’s difficult not to agree with. ...

The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. David R. Slavitt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 183-85.

Well, that really is a rather remarkable passage to come across in the middle of a verse translation, isn't it? Fine if you call it a verse commentary or rewriting, sure - but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Slavitt is straining the boundaries of the genre here.

That's what Bernard Knox thinks, anyway. In an article in The New York Review of Books he remarks of this section of text:

Slavitt speaks eloquently in his introduction of the reader's (and the translator's) reaction to the poem as a "leap of sympathy, intuition, understanding, and, finally, collaboration." But this seems to go beyond collaboration; it is in fact editorial intervention, or perhaps intrusion would be a more accurate description.

Of course, it's true that Knox's article was written mainly to justify the appearance of yet another version of the Metamorphoses, this time by Charles Martin, and that Slavitt (along with Ted Hughes, the only other translation Knox considers) is really just being set up as a straw man against his pentameter-wielding hero. (In fact, Knox's article was reprinted as the introduction to the 2004 publication of Martin's translation.)

Is Slavitt justified in taking such liberties with the text? Who can say? My own feeling is that this is one of the more impressive passages in his book. I wish he'd done it a bit more often, to be perfectly honest. There's something daunting about endless ranks of advancing hexameters in any language, but especially in English, used as we are to the swift movement of the pentameter.

Metamorphoses II (1993): The Crow

[The Metamorphoses of Ovid: A New Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harcourt, 1993. 60-61.]

"My father was a king, the famed Coroneus
of Phocis; and I was a lovely princess
with many suitors (do not laugh at this!).
My beauty was my ruin. For, in fact,
while I was walking on the shoreline sands,
as I still do, the sea-god saw me and
grew hot with love; his pleas and honeyed words
were useless; he made ready to use force.
He chased me; as I ran, I left behind
the hard-packed sands and staggered wearily
along the soft and yielding shore -- in vain;
then I invoked both gods and men. My voice
could reach no mortal. But, a virgin, I
did stir the virgin goddess with my plea.
And as I stretched my arms out toward the sky,
they started to grow darker, sprouting feathers.
I tried to free my shoulder, flinging off
my robe; but it, too, had become a cloak
of feathers, rooted deeply in my skin.
I tried to beat my bared breast with my hands:
but I, by now, had neither hands nor breast.
I ran, but now my feet no longer sank
into the sands; I skimmed along the ground,
then I flew off, on high, into the sky:
there I was taken by Minerva as
her stainless, blameless comrade.

But by now
to what does all my serving her amount?
I am supplanted by Nyctimene,
one who became an owl because of her
outrageous sin. Have you not heard men speak
of what is known to all of Lesbos -- how
Nyctimene defiled her father's bed?
And as a bird, yet conscious of her crime,
she flees men's eyes and flees the light: she hides
for shame among the shadows; she has been
cast out by all and exiled from the sky."

The crow is flying along with the raven, Phoebus Apollo's bird, who is anxious to tell his master about his mistress Coronis' adultery. They're gossiping to pass the time away. The number of stories within stories and stories melting into other stories at this point in Ovid's epic is literally beyond exact computation: speakers quoting speakers quoting speakers.

Two points might repay investigation here:

1/ Mandelbaum's translation, "fluid, readable, and accurate" according to his fans -- clunky and uninspired to his rivals, is justified by its author as follows:

... all that is here is not all that semes [sic]. Ovid's fictions form a bacchanalian narrative revel, in which each element may be drunk or delirious, but which -- in its endless deceptions -- provides truth. (Ovid read not only his Gorgias but his Hegel carefully.) [558]

I'm an ignorant man. I'll grant you that. But what precisely does that mean? I guess he intends to say that Ovid's as interested in the facts as he is in the delirious "revel" of language, but it still seems (or semes) an extraordinarily opaque way of putting it. Perhaps that's the point.

To me, I'm afraid, the translation seems a bit clunky: too many internal rhymes and limping pentameters: "on high, into the sky" ... or "And as I stretched my arms out toward the sky." It's a fantastically difficult and finicky task to convert so much verse into other verse, though, so I wouldn't want to overstress such deficiencies. The real worry is when Mandelbaum goes on to quote some verses of his own composition:

Ovidius-the-Garrulous,
The-Copious, the Ever-Swift,
Amir-Of-Metamorphosists,
and Sad-Seigneur-of-Scrutinists ...

"Prelude" to The Savantasse of Montparnasse (1988) [555]

Fucking hell! I thought that kind of thing went out with Lionel Johnson and the poetes maudits of the 1890s. It raises that old issue about whether indifferent poets can make good translators. To some extent, of course, this whole set of meditations on the Metamorphoses is designed to look at that question from a number of different angles.



2/ I guess, however, I mostly chose to reproduce the crow section of Ovid's epic because of my interest in Crow the trickster figure. Not just the one in Ted Hughes' book Crow (1970), nor even the version in The Crow (1994), that dodgy proto-Emo movie Bruce Lee's son Brandon got killed making, but (above all) that Anansi / Maui / Brer-Rabbit-like antihero of the Inuit and other northern cultures.

Crows are battlefield scavengers, cunning and resourceful rather than brave and forthright. The constellation "Corvus" is supposed to be named after one of Apollo's crows who decided to wait for some figs to ripen, rather than hastening back to his master with the water he was supposed to be collecting. He blamed his dilatoriness on a watersnake, but the god saw through the ruse at once.

One wonders if there's some connection here with Noah's raven, sent out from the ark to test the reappearance of dry land. The snake, too, seems to suggest certain Biblical parallels.

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