Orpheish

[Clayton Weatherston]

[after Heinrich Heine]

Es gab den Dolch in deine Hand
Ein böser Dämon in der bösen Stunde –
Ich weiß nicht, wie der Dämon hieß –
Ich weiß nur, daß vergiftet war die Wunde.

There was a dagger in your hand
a demon in an idle hour
I never knew the demon’s name
I only felt his stabbing power

In stillen Nächten denk ich oft,
Du solltest mal dem Schattenreich entsteigen
Und lösen alle Rätsel mir
Und mich von deiner Unschuld überzeugen.

On quiet nights I lie & think
you should come up from where you are
& answer all these doubts for me
confirm to me you were a whore

Ich harre dein – o komme bald!
Und kommst du nicht, so steig ich selbst zur Hölle,
Daß ich alldort vor Satanas
Und allen Teufeln dich zur Rede stelle.

I’m waiting now
You’d better show
If you won’t come I’ll track you down
& there in front of everyone
conduct my cross-examination

Ich komme, und wie Orpheus einst
Trotz ich der Unterwelt mit ihren Schrecken –
Ich finde dich, und wolltest du
Im tiefsten Höllenpfuhle dich verstecken.

gliding like some bright Orpheus
across an underworld of fears
I’ll find you in the deepest ditch
dug out by centuries of tears

Hinunter jetzt ins Land der Qual,
Wo Händeringen nur und Zähneklappen –
Ich reiße dir die Larve ab,
Der angeprahlten Großmut Purpurlappen –

& in that land of tortured dreams
where sinners pay for what they did
I’ll cut off the last shreds of skin
the trappings of your girlish pride

Jetzt weiß ich, was ich wissen wollt,
Und gern, mein Mörder, will ich dir verzeihen;
Doch hindern kann ich nicht, daß jetzt
Schmachvoll die Teufel dir ins Antlitz speien.

& when I’ve found out what I need
I’d like to pardon you, you know
but how can I stop TV scum
from vomiting all over you?

[Sophie Elliott]

R. I. P.

A New Translation of the Arabian Nights

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

A couple of months ago my friend Derek Gordon (aka Bringwonder the Storyteller) asked me which was the best translation of the Arabian Nights. The situation, I had to tell him, was a complex one.

The short answer is that there isn't any completely satisfactory translation of the Nights into English, despite the bewildering number of selections, retellings, adaptations and other attempts at a solution to the problematic nature of the book itself which have appeared over the past couple of centuries. Ridiculous, isn't it?

With the appearance of this new, complete Penguin translation by Malcolm C. Lyons - introduced and partially annotated by Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion, and with new translations of "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" from the French by Ursula Lyons - the situation suddenly looks much brighter. That is if, like me - and, I guess, professional storytellers such as Derek - you're a fanatic for everything to do with the (so-called) Arabian Nights (or Kitab Alf Layla wa Layla [Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night]).

I suppose, though, it was only a matter of time. No-one could seriously question the need for it. There's a brand-new translation in French, just out from the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade; thorough, reliable versions in German and Italian - even in Russian and Czech. So why has English been lagging behind?

Well, the first reason stems from the fact that there are actually two very different manuscript traditions of the Nights.

1. On the one hand, there's the 14th-century Syrian Ms. Galland, which the Frenchman Antoine Galland used for his pioneering multi-volumed translation of 1704-1717. This was the form in which the collection first reached Europe, and the choices Galland made in making his rather free adaptation of the materials available to him have had a huge influence ever since. It was he, for example, who chose to incorporate Sinbad the Sailor (originally from a quite different text) into the Thousand and One Nights. It was he who, forced to supply the insatiable demand of his public for more volumes of stories (rather like an eighteenth-century J. K. Rowling), collected "Ali Baba," "Aladdin" and various other stories from the oral recitations of a visiting Lebanese Christian (the Arabic texts of the stories discovered later turned out to have been adapted from Galland's French, rather than the other way round).


2. On the other hand, there's Z.E.R. [Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension - named for the French scholar who first identified this separate manuscript tradition in the late 1880s]. This forms the basis of most of the "complete" versions of the Nights - i.e. containing 1001 actual nights of storytelling. It was once thought to be the original from which Galland's incomplete version was extracted, but unfortunately it turns out that the traffic was actually the other way. ZER arose in Egypt largely as a result of the demands of Westerners, brought up on Galland's elegant fairy-tale version of the Arabic tales, for a fuller and more comprehensively "Oriental" version of the whole collection. The 1835 Bulaq edition (printed in Cairo), and the 1839-42 Macnaghten edition (printed in Calcutta by the British East India Company) are the two essential versions of this text. Opinions differ greatly on which of the two is preferable - Macnaghten is fuller, but also contains a lot more editorial interference (though probably not by William Hay Macnaghten himself, who was killed in the British retreat from Kabul in 1841).

So which of all these competing Arabic versions should one translate? Which represents the genuine 1001 Nights? The answer is (unfortunately) that there is no "genuine" text of the Nights. The medieval Arabic encyclopedists who mention the collection say that it was originally translated from Persian into Arabic (and the names Sharazad and Shahryar only make sense in Persian, which tends to substantiate the claim). The Persians may (or may not) have derived the frame-story of the Nights from a lost Sanskrit version - opinions differ on that point. In any case, none of these earlier texts survive, but enough information about them remains to convince us that they can have contained only a very few (if any) even of the stories which have come down to us as the solid core of the collection: "The Merchant and the Jinni," "The Fisherman and the Jinni," "The three Ladies of Baghdad" and (of course) the immortal "Tale of the Hunchback."

The collection as we have it seems imbued with the spirit of Islam, and myriad everyday details of life in Baghdad and Cairo. The Persian Thousand Nights, however, certainly predated the Arabic conquest, and some critics have suggested that this pre-Islamic strand is still discernible in the independent wilfulness displayed by the various Jinnis and supernatural creatures in the first few stories of the Nights. Possibly. Who knows?

What is clear is that there has been a story-collection with a title something like The Thousand and One Nights, with a frame-story something like the Scheherazade-Shahryar one we're all familiar with, extant in the Arabic language since at least the ninth century. The earliest substantial manuscript of this collection is, however, the 14th-century Ms. Galland (it seems a pleasing coincidence that the first translation into a European language turns out to have been made from the oldest extant manuscript). But by far the fullest collection of stories available under the title of The 1001 Nights is represented by the various texts of Z.E.R.

So do you want the oldest and most elaborate version: the sadly truncated and incomplete Ms. Galland? Or would you prefer the hybrid, textually dubious, but incredibly capacious Z.E.R.? As Winnie the Pooh put it, when asked to choose between having jam and honey on his bread, "Both, please, but forget about the bread." Husain Haddawy gave us a beautiful and elegant translation of Muhsin Mahdi's critical edition of the Ms. Galland in 1990. Malcolm Lyons now supplies us with the missing part of the puzzle: a complete and accurate version of the Macnaghten edition into clear, current English.

By my count, then, Malcolm Lyons' new 3-volumed, 2,700-page chef-d'oeuvre is the seventh substantial translation into English - leaving aside for a moment all the innumerable abridgements and retellings. I thought I might list them below, along with any currently-available editions of them in print, in order to underline the significance and timeliness of Lyons' achievement.

[Antoine Galland, ed. Robert L. Mack (1998)]

1. Antoine Galland, 12 vols (1704-17)



Arabian Nights Entertainments: Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories, Told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the Execution of a bloody Vow he had made to marry a Lady every day, and have her cut off next Morning, to avenge himself for the Disloyalty of his first Sultaness, &c. Containing a better Account of the Customs, Manners, and Religion of the Eastern Nations, viz. Tartars, Persians, and Indians, than is to be met with in any Author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Mss. by M. Galland of the Royal Academy, and now done into English from the last Paris Edition. London: Andrew Bell, 1706-17. 16th ed. 4 vols. London & Edinburgh: C. Elliot, 1781.


We begin at the beginning, with the first introduction of the Nights into Europe, Galland's maddeningly elegant, terrifyingly eclectic French adaptation / translation / transformation, which came out in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717.

Galland was translated, anonymously, into English almost as soon as his volumes started to appear, and (variously supplemented) his translation provided the basis for all subsequent English versions until Lane's translation began to appear in 1838.

It's no exaggeration to call Galland a storytelling genius. The influence his work has had on European culture is incalculable (whether or not it's true that French guttersnipes used to gather under his bedroom window at night and yell out "Please, my sister, if the Sultan pleases, tell me another one of those tales of which you possess such a great store" until he gave in and cranked out another volume for them, I'll leave you to determine).

The liberties he took with the text were considerable - some would say unforgiveable - but the fact that the various textually-unwarranted additions he made to the "pure" Ms. Galland, have come to be seen as the core of what most characterizes the Nights as a whole (Aladdin, Ali Baba, even Sindbad himself), might lead us to call him more their creator than their translator.

The earliest English translation of Galland (by the so-called "Anonymous Grub-Street Hack": rather a strange name under which to achieve immortal fame) is now fortunately available in its entirety in the Oxford World's Classics series. I've provided a link to it below:


Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed. Robert L. Mack. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.




[Lane (1995)]


2. Edward William Lane, 3 vols (1838-41)



The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. A New Translation from the Arabic, with Copious Notes. 3 vols. London: Charles Knight, 1839-41.


Edward William Lane was a great Arabist, long resident in Cairo, and famous for his book The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). As a supplement to this work, he undertook a translation of the Bulaq edition of the Nights (or rather the Z.E.R., Cairene text of the Nights rather than Galland's earlier, Syrian text) soon after its publication in 1835.

The translation was wildly popular, partially because of the stunningly beautiful engravings and textual ornaments provided for it by William Knight, but also because it supplied a great many new stories to supplement those familiar from reprints of Galland and his followers.

Lane's extensive annotations about Muslim life were subsequently extracted and published as a separate volume, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, still in print today (as you can see from the illustration above). Burton, no great fan of the prudish reserve of Lane's translation, put their value more simply: "The traveller who adds Lane's notes to mine will know more about the Moslem East than many a man who has spent half his life there ..."

On the minus side of the exchequer, Lane's prose is rather Latinate and heavy, and he does leave out a vast amount of material - sometimes because he considered it too risque, but other tales were dropped simply because he regarded them as repetitive or tedious: subjective judgements at the best of times.

For this reason, his text is little read today, though it has had almost as great an influence as Galland's on subsequent bowdlerised retellings for children (Andrew Lang's included). Lane's is the last version of the Nights which could be called at all suitable for children.

The last substantial revision and reediting of it was by Lane's nephew Stanley Lane-Poole in the early twentieth century, once available in a beautiful little pocket edition from Bohn's Library:


Lane, Edward William, trans. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed. Stanley Lane-Poole. 4 vols. 1906. Bohn’s Popular Library. London: G. Bell, 1925.




[John Payne (2008)]


3. John Payne, 13 vols (1882-89)



The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; Now First Completely Done into English Prose and Verse, from the Original Arabic. 9 vols. London: Villon Society, 1882-84.

Tales from the Arabic of the Breslau and Calcutta (1814-’18) Editions of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Not Occurring in the Other Printed Texts of the Work; Now First Done into English. 3 vols. London: Villon Society, 1884.

Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp; Zein ul Asnam and the King of the Jinn: Two Stories Done into English from the Recently Discovered Arabic Text. London: Villon Society, 1889.


Nearly fifty years after Lane had completed his work, the scholar and linguist John Payne decided to translate a complete and faithful version of the Nights (conflated from the Bulaq and Macnaghten texts) for private circulation only.

It's alleged that he did most of his work whilst travelling around London on the roof of a horse-drawn bus, glancing up from time to time to make sure that the weather wasn't going to damage his precious dictionaries and manuscripts. It seems a little hard to believe, but so the story goes, at any rate.

Payne was a devotee of high-flown Wardour-Street English, and his prose is ornate and florid in the extreme, but the sheer magnitude of his achievement is difficult to exaggerate. He and he alone put into English the whole of the 1001 Nights, in their most complete form, and he did it with self-taught Arabic, having never travelled in the East.

He went on, in subsequent years, to translate four supplementary volumes of tales from the other manuscript traditions of the Nights: a magnificent example of scholarly acumen and dedication.

His fatal error was to issue his translation in 500 copies only, with a pledge (presumably for leagal reasons) never to reproduce it in any way. As a result, his work exerted very little influence over the reading public, and the field was left open for his great friend (= rival) Sir Richard Francis Burton, who thus was able to scoop the pool.

His translation has recently been reissued by Borders Classics (details below). Copies of the original edition are understandably somewhat rare, though it has been reissued complete in various clandestine forms over the past hundred years or so, as well as providing the text for Joseph Campbell's Portable Arabian nights.


Payne, John, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Publisher's Note by Steven Moore. 3 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Classics, 2007.




[Burton / Zipes (1991)]


4. Richard F. Burton, 16 vols (1885-88)



A Plain and Literal Translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: With Introduction, Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights. 10 vols. Benares [= Stoke-Newington]: Kamashastra Society, 1885.

Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory. 6 vols. Benares [= Stoke-Newington]: Kamashastra Society, 1886-88.


"Galland for the nursery; Lane for the library; Payne for the study; and Burton for the gutter," said one of the first reviewers of Burton's immense, frustrating, multifaceted masterpiece (according to Burton himself , anyway - he included a vituperative section entitled "The Reviewers Review'd" in one of the later volumes of this library masquerading as a single book).

What can one say about his translation? Well, Burton was indisputably a great linguist and traveller, and his knowledge of the East was unrivalled. All this erudition is on display in the copious notes to his many volumes.

He was also a cranky eccentric, obsessed with "unmentionable" subjects such as female circumcision, castration, bestiality and (above all) male homosexuality, and lavished information on these topics through his notes and the immense "Terminal Essay" which occupies most of the tenth volume of his immense work. These matters seemed far more shocking to the Victorians than they do to most of us, though, and it's increasingly difficult to see much distinction between the professional curiosity of the modern anthropologist and Burton's omnivorous zeal for collecting of information on all aspects of the societies he travelled through and studied.

The immense, ill-assorted detail displayed in his own books of travel and adventure tends to make them very difficult to read. Not so his Nights, where the genius of the original storyteller enables us to travel with far more ease and pleasure through the strange thickets of Burtonian erudition.

Racist, yes; Imperialist, undoubtedly (though in an unorthodox and complex way) - but, like Burton himself, his Nights are a mine of quaint and curious lore. This is probably the fullest version of the Nights which will ever appear, and (till the Lyons translation appeared) it still had to be regarded as the standard text in English.

Burton's honesty may be doubted, true. He undoubtedly plagiarised from Payne's preexisting translation (allegedly with the latter's permission, but actually - as Payne subsequently revealed - to his considerable irritation). The real problem with Burton's 16 volumes, though, is the bizarre pseudo-English in which his translation was composed.

If a word had ever appeared in English - in Elizabethan thieves' jargon, in translations of Cervantes or Rabelais, in the obscurer pages of his namesake's seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy - that was sufficient reason for Burton to revive it. He attempted to reproduce all aspects of the Arabic text: the passages in rhyming prose, the long poems in monorhyme (a single rhyme sufficing for up to forty verses). Nor did he hesitate to coin new words whenever he thought he needed them.

The result is fascinating, but harder syntactically than Milton, and every bit as linguistically florid as Spenser. One almost has to learn a new language in order to read it. To be sure, if you persevere, the variety and flexibility of Burton's vocabulary impresses you more and more, and the sheer energy of his diction comes to beguile and enchant as much as it initially frustrated you, but it's a hard row to hoe, and not everyone can be bothered.

A recent attempt to keep these virtues of Burton's translation whilst modernising his English can be found Jack Zipes' two paperback volumes of selected Arabian Nights. I'm not a great fan of abridgements and retellings, myself - better, I think, to spend your time grappling with the original, but I guess these toned-down versions will continue to appear:


Zipes, Jack, ed. Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, Adapted from Richard F. Burton’s Unexpurgated Translation. Signet Classic. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Zipes, Jack, ed. Arabian Nights, Volume II: More Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, Adapted from Sir Richard F. Burton’s Unexpurgated Translation. Signet Classic. New York: New American Library, 1999.




[Mardrus / Mathers (1986)]


5. Edward Powys Mathers, 8 vols (1923)



The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: Rendered from the Literal and Complete Version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus; and Collated with Other Sources. 1923. 8 vols. London: The Casanova Society, 1929.


Now this one really is a lot of fun. A purist would probably ignore it altogether, given that it's an English translation made directly from the French rather than from any Arabic text. What's more, it was made from possibly the least accurate "complete" translation ever to appear - that of Joseph Charles Mardrus, an Egyptian French Doctor whose adherence to the aesthetic of the fin-de-siecle is rather embarrassingly apparent in the liberties he took with the original text.

He had no real original text, in fact. He simply embroidered onto the 1835 Bulaq edition a series of ornamentations and expansions of tales he found too bald, not scrupling to invent entirely new stories at times. But he pretended that all of this was justified by a (mythical) "complete" manuscript whch no-one else was ever permitted to see.

Mardrus was writing in the ambience of Pierre Louys and Pierre Loti, and was encouraged by their example to add a great deal of naughty spice to the somewhat bald eroticism he encountered in Bulaq. His translation, then, as a translation, must be regarded as little better than a hoax.

And yet, he had a natural gift for narrative, and to fans of Loti and Louys (I must confess myself rather a fan of the latter, at any rate), his volumes maintain their charm.

Edward Powys Mathers, working at secondhand, and accordingly unburdened by such questions of authenticity, was thus paradoxically enabled to produce something of a minor masterpiece in English - an achievement which might be seen to parallel Scott Moncrieff's long-superseded (but still immensely influential) version of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - or Arthur Waley's Proustian expansion of The Tale of Genji, for that matter: another icon of early twentieth-century translation.

Mathers turned Mardrus' prose poetry into beautifully-turned English rhyming verses, wrote clean, crisp sentences where Mardrus had a tendency to drag,and generally created a Nights appropriate to the Ballets Russes generation.

It's no accident that his four thick volumes are still in print after eighty years, despite the number of exposes of Mardrus's deficiencies. From the point of view of pure entertainment, Mather's remains perhaps the best "complete" version to read.


Mathers, E. Powys, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: Rendered into English from the Literal and Complete French Translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus. 4 vols. 1949. 2nd ed. 1964. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.




[Husain Haddawy (1990)]


6. Husain Haddawy, 2 vols (1990-95)



The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990.

The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995.


Fun thought it is, though, the Mardrus / Mathers edition could not be left to reign unchallenged (beside unassailable, multi-volumed Burton) forever.

The next major development in Nights scholarship came, serendipitously, from the Arabic scholar Muhsin Mahdi. His re-editing of the Ms. Galland revolutionized ideas of what the Nights were or could be said to be. This, to him, was the true original of the Nights, and all subsequent texts had simply been produced by greater or lesser degrees of prompting by European savants.

Husain Haddawy's timely translation of the text established by Mahdi went a long way towards substantiating this claim. The fullness and elaboration of the versions of the core nights stories made it clear how much had been lost by simply following Galland's lead for almost three centuries.

This is a version which should remain in print as a permanently valuable witness to the character of the earliest (and, in many ways, richest) text of the Nights we are ever likely to possess.

Haddawy slightly weakened the effect of his elegant translation by supplementing it a few years later with some versions of Galland's other, spurious additions to the canon, but it's hard to see this as a serious diminution of the value of his work as a whole. The two together make up a very attractive package.


[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]


7. Malcolm & Ursula Lyons, 3 vols (2008)

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Introduction by Robert Irwin. 3 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.

Which brings us full circle back to Malcolm Lyons. After Hadawy had completed his task of presenting Muhsin Mahdi's "purified" text of the Nights, the only job left was to provide a full and faithful picture of the true nature and contents of the Egyptian ms. tradition, Z.E.R.

I suppose my initial impression of his translation is just how bald Lyons' prose sounds beside the florid zaniness of Burton. What struck me most, though, was how beautifully simple the verses now appeared. There's a great deal of poetry in the Nights, most of it of a rather banal nature, but Lyons has done a splendid job of decoding it for the reader. Payne was certainly a better versifier than Burton, but both felt compelled to try and reproduce the strict forms of Arabic versification. Lyons has dispensed with all that, and the result is charming as well as being far easier to read.

The translation is so far only available in a deluxe hardback edition, limited to 3,000 copies, but it will be coming out in full next year as a Penguin Classic. For the moment, though, the only readily available text is the following sampler, available (at a very reasonable price) from Amazon.uk:

Lyons, Malcolm & Ursula, trans. Three Tales from The Arabian Nights. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2008.

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

To sum up, then, if you want to understand the true nature of the Nights themselves, Lyons and Haddawy together give as complete a picture as most of us would ever need of the two major textual traditions.

If your interest is more in the influence of the Nights on European literature, Galland and Burton are the crucial versions, each more of an addition to the literature of their own country than a faithful mirror of the text they were purporting to translate.

The Lane and Mardrus-Mathers translations are each, in their way, very beautiful books - Lane more for his illustrations than his text, Mathers for the crisp conciseness of his prose, and the elegance of his verses.

We're left with Payne, still unjustly overshadowed by Burton. In a way, though, since he did a good deal of the translation work with which the latter is unjustly credited, I guess he could be said to be as much the architect of those 16 eccentric volumes as Burton himself. His translation remains a curiosity of literature, but his status as the first European scholar to provide a full and unvarnished picture of the whole of Z.E.R. cannot be taken away.

There are (of course) other translations and versions, each with their charms. The earlier Penguin translation of selections from Bulaq by N. J. Dawood is still very readable (it's perhaps best sampled as a talking book, beautifully read by Souad Faress and Raad Rawi). Henry Torrens (1839) and A. J. Arberry (1955) each began complete translations which were abandoned after a single volume. Both remain magnificent fragments.

The story will no doubt continue. For the moment, though, my Christmas plans include a good deal of lying around exploring the intricacies and arabesques of Lyons' Nights.

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

[NB: If you're curious to know more about the history of the 1001 Nights and their influence in general, I try to maintain an up-to-date series of links on the sidebar of my website Scheherazade's Web, which also includes a number of my own essays on the subject.]

The Kindness of Reviewers

The latest brief (#36 - The NZ Music Issue (2008): 111-13) includes what seems to me a fantastically generous review of my poetry chapbook Papyri from renowned poet, classical scholar and verse translator Ted Jenner. I guess I was a little afraid what he might say, since he knows Greek and I don't. Also because John Denny's Puriri Press published some of Ted's own Sappho versions in a beautiful little book called Sappho Triptych late last year.

Certainly he finds some things to criticise. Who wouldn't? But the overwhelming impression is of someone who's really taken the trouble to think through the various choices and decisions that go into making a book of poems, however slight the end result may seem. It's clearly a process Ted's familiar with, and he's interested in debating the pros and cons for interested readers.

You can check out some of the main points of his review here. It got me to thinking, though, about my various experiences with reviews and reviewers in the past.

Basically, while I've had a few stinging notices in my time, the really important point is that virtually every time I've put out a book, I've received at least one fascinating, complex, and thorough review from someone who's really devoted a good deal of time and energy to trying to understand what I'm up to.

And I really appreciate it. It's far more than one dares to expect - even once - and to have been so lucky repeatedly argues for a lot more generosity and selflessness out there in the literary world than we're accustomed to expect. Once before on this blog I had occasion to remonstrate with a reviewer (of an anthology which I'd appeared in, not edited), and that gave rise to quite an interesting conversation between the two of us. Generally speaking, though, I tend to think that it's a mistake to react too publicly to notices: good, bad or indifferent. It tends to amuse onlookers far more than it benefits oneself.

I feel I should make an exception for those thorough, generous and scholarly reviewers I've mentioned above, though - so here's (unfortunately very truncated) honour roll of particularly shining examples:

• City of Strange Brunettes (Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998):

John O’Connor, “Pound’s Fascist Cantos, by Jack Ross, Perdrix Press & City of Strange Brunettes, by Jack Ross, Pohutukawa Press.” JAAM 12 (1999): 126-28:

… Ross’s versions are alive with Pound’s energy and convictions; they spark and jar ...

• Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000):

Richard Taylor, “Review of Nights with Giordano Bruno.” brief 19 (2001): 14-17:

… transpierced throughout with sex, suffering, and a burning joy and queerness.

• Chantal’s Book (Wellington: HeadworX, 2002):

Olivia Macassey, “Jack’s Book.” brief 27 (2003): 101-2:

He skilfully – and with almost an appearance of accident – lays bare the twitching nerves of the genre.

Tracey Slaughter, “Points on a graph of Chantal.” Poetry NZ 26 (2003): 100-07:

… diagrams of dead sciences encrust the page with the algebraic mystery of cells …

• Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004):

Scott Hamilton, “After the Golden Weather: Jack Ross and the New New Zealand.” brief 32 (2005) 115-19:

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.

• [editor] Kendrick Smithyman. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian (Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004):

Paula Green, “Review of Kendrick Smithyman, Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian.” brief 32 (2005) 108-12:

Smithyman’s versions represent a tender conversation with the Italian poems …

• Trouble in Mind (Auckland: Titus Books, 2005):

Katherine Liddy, “Something Strange: Reviews of Coma by William Direen, Trouble in Mind by Jack Ross & Curriculum Vitae by Olwyn Stewart.” Landfall 212 (November 2006):

Underneath the eye of the sun, in the murky territory between Life and Death, the story unfolds like a papyrus emitting the spores of an ancient curse.

• The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006):

Gabriel White, “Planet Atlantis – The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis: A Novel by Jack Ross.” [24/11/06]:

The Da Vinci Code gets geometric cum stain on it.

• [editor, with Jan Kemp] Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2006):

Peter Wells, “In Praise of the Poetic Voice.” Weekend Herald: Canvas (July 15, 2006) 31:

The book, and the CDs, are taonga. The result of a mission by poets Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, they reproduce the poetic voices of our past. …
But what is the bigger story of this collection? It is a treasure of voice and poem. I am hoping it is the beginning of a longer series. Every school should have one. There is much to ponder on, to celebrate here. And people searching for poems for significant occasions could do well to buy this book. It is of our people.

• [co-editor, with Jan Kemp] Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2007):

Graham Brazier, “Ferries at the bottom of my garden.” Weekend Herald: Canvas (11 August 2007) 29:

I will, in my twilight years, press the leaves of the puka puka tree (book) until dried to a parchment and write what I hope may be a slight but heartfelt tribute to what appears in this collection.

• [editor, with Jan Kemp] New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland: AUP, 2008):

Pat White, “A Delight for Poetry Lovers: Review of New New Zealand Poets in Performance.” Wairarapa Times (20/8/08): 15:

Without a doubt the monumental task Kemp and Ross set themselves must have grown to something more than they imagined possible. Now however, the results speak for themselves ... As editors Kemp and Ross deserve the nation's thanks for a task completed well.

• To Terezín (Auckland: Massey, 2007):

Scott Hamilton. “To Terezin and Back.” Reading the Maps (June 14, 2007):

"I think you may look back on it in twenty years and not feel dissatisfied with it."

Jennifer Little, “Visit to Czech Nazi Camp inspires Massey Author.” Massey News 9 (16 Hongongoi, July 2007) 9:

To Terezín is an entrancing model of how travel writing can encompass a range of genres – essay, verse, images – as well as wider themes of ethics, philosophy, literature, art and history ...

• E M O (Auckland: Titus, 2008):

Jen Crawford, “Launch Speech: E M O, by Jack Ross.” Titus Books launch, Alleluya Café, St. Kevin’s Arcade, K Rd, Auckland (19/6/08):

EMO reminds us – shocks us – into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

So is this long list designed purely as a device for skiting about how many good reviews I've got from my friends? Partly, I suppose. I mean, wouldn't you feel a bit proud - both of the reviews and the friends?

But that's not entirely it. Some of these writers I've never even met. Mainly it's meant as a heartfelt thank-you to a group of people who took the - not inconsiderable at times - trouble to try and work out what an almost wilfully obscure-looking text was trying to tell them. Above all, to encourage them to keep up the good work.

They certainly serve as an inspiration to me to go the extra mile when I'm given someone's work to review. I only hope that I sometimes live up to their example.

Montale's Eel

[Begging eel (Motueka)]

I'm reliably informed (by Marco Sonzogni of Victoria University) that there are now more than fifty English-language versions of Eugenio Montale's famous lyric "L'anguilla" [The Eel], from his late collection La bufera ed altro [The Storm and Other Things] (1956).

So what's wrong with one more? (Mine's a little on the free side, as you'll observe from the version I've included underneath):

Eel


frigid ice-queen
of the Baltic
who quits her haunts

to plumb our river
mouths
branch to branch

capillary to capillary
deeper deeper
into the rock

writhing through ditches
till one day
a flash of light

glancing off chestnuts
ignites her
in the stagnant pond

eel
lightstick birchwand
Love’s arrow on earth

led downhill through
Apennine gullies
to green fields

still waters
through dust & drought
the spark that says

Just do it
when everything’s
burnt toast

your spitting
image
iris recognition

would suggest
mired in this life
can you not call her

sister?

Here's a more literal translation for anyone else who'd care to try their hand:

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981):
L’anguilla / The Eel



L’anguilla, la sirena
The eel, siren
dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico
of the cold seas that quits the Baltic
per giungere ai nostri mari,
to come to our seas,
ai nostri estuari, ai fiumi
to our estuaries, to the rivers
che risale in profondo, sotto la piena avversa,
rising from the deep, under the downstream surge,
di ramo in ramo e poi
from branch to branch and then
di capello in capello, assottigliati,
from capillary to capillary, slimming itself down,
sempre più addentro, sempre più nel cuore
increasingly more inside, increasingly into the heart
del macigno, filtrando
of rock, infiltrating
tra gorielli di melma finché un giorno
between rills of mud until one day
una luce scoccata dai castagni
a light glancing off the chestnuts
ne accende il guizzo in pozze d’acquamorta,
lights her fuse in stagnant puddles,
nei fossi che declinano
in ravines cascading down
dai balzi d’Appennino alla Romagna;
from the flanks of the Apennines to Romagna;
l’anguilla, torcia, frusta,
eel, flashlight, birch,
freccia d’Amore in terra
arrow of Love on earth
che solo i nostri botri o i disseccati
that only our gullies or dried
ruscelli pirenaici riconducono
Pyrenean streams lead back
a paradisi di fecondazione;
to a paradise of insemination;
l’anima verde che cerca
the soul that seeks green
vita là dove solo
life there where only
morde l’arsura e la desolazione,
drought and desolation bite,
la scintilla che dice
the spark that says
tutto comincia quando tutto pare
everything begins when everything seems
incarbonirsi, bronco seppellito;
burnt to charcoal, a buried stump;
l’iride breve, gemella
brief iris, twin
di quella che incastonano i tuoi cigli
to the one your lashes frame
e fai brillare intatta in mezzo ai figli
which makes you shine intact in the midst of the sons
dell’uomo, immersi nel tuo fango, puoi tu
of man, immersed in your mud, can you
non crederla sorella?
not believe her sister?

So what's all that about? To find out, let's turn to the notes in Jonathan Galassi's magisterial translation of Montale's Collected Poems 1920-1954 (2000), p.594 et seq:

Arrowsmith [in his dual-text version of La Bufera ed altra, 1985] emphasizes that the eel should not be read as essentially phallic, but that it incorporates both sexes, incarnating an "undifferentiated 'life force' akin to Bergson's elan vital" ... 'The Eel,' then, should be viewed as a cosmic love-poem, an account of the phylogeny of the human spirit as well as a dithyramb to the woman who inspired it, or as [Gilberto] Lonardi ... puts it, "the anabasis of the Anima, in the Jungian sense, of its author".

Just so. Couldn't have put it better myself.

I'd also recommend the fascinating discussion of Robert Lowell's strange translation / adaptation of the poem (included in Imitations, 1961) in Paul Muldoon's recent collection of his Oxford lectures on poetry, The End of the Poem (2006). Lowell ended up running this poem into the one which happened to be printed next to it in the Penguin Book of Italian Verse, as he didn't realise that the page divide was also the end of the poem ...

Metamorphoses XV (1632): Hippolytus

Perhaps y' haue heard of one Hippolytus;
By Step-dames fraud, and fathers credulous
Beliefe bequeath'd to death. Admire you may
That I am he, if credit, what I say.
Whom Phoedra formerly solicited,
But vainely, to defile my fathers bed.
Fearing detection, or in that refus'd;
She turnes the crime, and me of her's accus'd.
My father, banishing the innocent,
Along with me his winged curses sent.
Toward Pitthean Troezen (1) me my charriot bore:
And driuing now by the Corinthian shore,
The smooth seas swell; a monstrous billow rose,
Which, rouling like a mountaine, greater growes;
Then, bellowing, at the top asunder rends:
When from the breach, brest high, a Bull ascends;
Who at his dreadfull mouth and nosthrills spouts
Part of the sea. Feare all my followers routs:
But my afflicted mind was all this while
Vnterrifi'd; intending my exile.
When the hot horses start, erect their eares:
With horror rapt, and chaced by their feares,
O'r ragged rocks the totterd charriot drew:
In vaine I striue their fury to subdew,
The bits all frotht with fome: with all my strength
Pull the stretcht raiynes, I lying at full length,
Nor had their heady fright my strength o'r-gon;
Had not the feruent wheele, which roules vpon
The bearing Axel-tree, rusht on a stump:
Which brake, and fell asunder with that iump.
Throwne from my charriot, in the raignes fast-bound,
My guts drag'd out aliue, my sinewes wound
About the stump, my limbs in peeces hal'd;
Some stuck behind, some at the charriot traild;
My bones then breaking crackt, not any whole,
While I exhal'd my faint and weary soule.
No part of all my parts you could haue found
That might be knowne: for all was but one wound.
Now say, selfe-tortred Nymph, (2) or can, or dare
You your calamities with ours compare?
I also saw those realmes, to Day vnknowne:
And bath'd my wounds in smoking Phlegeton. (3)
Had not Apollos Son (4) imploid the aid
Of his great Art; I with the dead had staid.
But when by potent hearbs, and Paeons skill, (5)
I was restor'd, against sterne Plutos will:
Least I, if seene, might enuie haue procur'd:
Me, friendly Cynthia (6) with a cloud immur'd:
And that, though seene, I might be hurt by none;
She added age, and left my face vnknowne.
Whether in Delos, doubting, or in Creet;
Reiecting Creet and Delos as vnmeet,
Shee plac't me here. Nor would I should retaine
The memory of One by horses slaine:
But said; hence forward Virbius (7) be thy name
That wer't Hippolytus; though thou the same.
One of the Lesser Gods, here, in this Groue,
I Cynthia serue; preserued by her loue.

(1) A city of Peloponesus, where Pittheus the Grandfather of Theseus by his mother Aethra once raigned.
(2) Aegeria.
(3) A burning river in Hell.
(4) Aesculapius.
(5) Physick; of Paeon an excellent Physitian.
(6) Diana, of Cynthus a mountaine in Delos.
(7) Twice a man.

George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures. Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632.

Sandys' Marginal Note:

Virbius once Hypolitus, now a God of those groues, goes about to comfort Aegeria; and extenuate her sorrow with the relation of his former calamityes; torne in peices by his horses through his stepmothers fraud and fathers imprecations. The Curses of Parents fall heauy on their Children, allthough vndeserued, as this of credulous Theseus. Rash beleife is the author of much mischiefe, and vnsuspended rage of too late repentance. The chast youth suffers for anothers vnchastety. But virtue, though afflicted for a time, can neuer be finally suppressed: Eminent in the example of Bellerophon; but especially of Ioseph and his miraculous aduancement. Miserably disioynted Hypolitus is set together and restored to life by Aesculapius, Diana, his patronesse (changing his youth into age, and his former ominous name into Virbius, which signifies twice a man, the better to conceale him,) conueyed him hether and made him one of the Inferior Deities. But what saith Lactantius? Diana when she had allmost lost her louer, much bruised and torne by his vnruly horses, called Aesculapius, an excellent Phisitian (and therefore feigned to restore life vnto the Dead) to his timely helpe, whom she as soone as he was recouered, conueyed to those sequestred aboads. What showed this diligence in his concealed cure? these priuate retreates? his long conversation with a woman, and that in a place vnfrequented? the change of his name? and lastly her detestation of horses? but the guilt of her incontinency, and of such a loue as agreed not with a virgin. This Virbius, who boasted to haue beene Hipolytus was according to some authors a cunning Imposter, suborned by the Preists of Diana Aricina, to draw a greater concourse to that Groue, that their gaine might increase by more frequent deuotion. Nor haue others in latter ages serued their turnes with lesse incredible forgeries.

I've already discussed in my comments on the story of Aegeus and Medea in Metamorphoses Book VII how much an early reading of Mary Renault's The King Must Die affected me:

Horses go blindly to the sacrifice; but the gods give knowledge to men. When the King was dedicated, he knew his moira. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whatever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or he was no king ... When they came to choose among the Royal Kin, this was his sign; that he chose short life with glory, and to walk with the god, rather than live long unknown like the stall-fed oxen. (Renault, 24)

And what was Moira? "The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn around it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these." (23)

I looked eagerly for its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962), but when I finally read it, I found it disappointing. Renault seemed to have trouble with the figure of Hippolytos. He became a pious prig in her version. Nor did she seem particularly sympathetic towards Theseus's Cretan bride Phaedra. The impulsive child, sister to Ariadne, we meet in the first book has become a "little Cretan lady, just like the portrait I had been sent." The real loves of Theseus' life are the Amazon woman Hippolyta, mother of his son, and his buccaneering friend Pirithoos.

The main problem with the book, I guess, si the need to run through all the salient events of Theseus' life: the meeting with Oedipus at Colonus, the attempted abduction of Helen, and (of course) the death-curse put on his son.

Parents, as Sandys reminds us, should be more trusting of their offspring. Is that the whole meaning of the story, though. It's in the mould of other stories where ageing heroes destroy their own sons. Sohrab and Rustum, from Firdausi's Shah-Nameh, the epic of the Kings; Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and his son Connla; Zeus and his father Saturn ...

It's another denial, I suppose, of the cyclical nature of the things. Sons should grow to full strength to succeed their fathers, but it's not in the nature of the masculine ego to retire into the shadows gracefully - there's always that midlife temptation to reinvent oneself totally, try to recover one's own youth (perhaps with a new young partner) rather than moving on to the latter maturing stages of life.

And, as so often in Ovid, this attempt to arrest time leads to disaster. What Theseus sees as an attempt by his son to usurp him prematurely by raping the queen, is in fact his own inability to understand his son's more reflective nature.

Of course Phaedra, in this reading, comes out as the villain, but again it's not difficult to see how she might prefer Hippolytus, much closer to her in age, to the grizzled ferocious husband who killed her father Minos and abandoned her sister Ariadne despite all the help she'd given him.

Metamorphoses XIV (1567): Pomona

In this Kings reigne Pomona (1) livd. There was not to bee found
Among the woodnymphes any one in all the Latian ground
That was so conning for to keepe an Ortyard as was shee,
Nor none so paynefull to preserve the frute of every tree.
And theruppon shee had her name. Shee past not for the woodes
Nor rivers, but the villages and boughes that bare bothe buddes
And plentuous frute. In sted of dart a shredding hooke shee bare,
With which the overlusty boughes shee eft away did pare
That spreaded out too farre, and eft did make therwith a rift
To greffe another imp uppon the stocke within the clift.
And lest her trees should die through drought, with water of the springs
Shee moysteth of theyr sucking roots the little crumpled strings.
This was her love and whole delyght. And as for Venus deedes,
Shee had no mynd at all of them. And forbycause shee dreedes
Enforcement by the countrye folke, shee walld her yards about,
Not suffring any man at all to enter in or out.
What have not those same nimble laddes so apt to frisk and daunce
The Satyrs doone? Or what the Pannes that wantonly doo praunce
With horned forheads? And the old Silenus whoo is ay
More youthfull than his yeeres? And eeke the feend that scares away
The theeves and robbers with his hooke, or with his privy part
To winne her love? But yit than theis a farre more constant hart
Had sly Vertumnus (2), though he sped no better than the rest.
O Lord, how often being in a moawers garment drest,
Bare he in bundells sheaves of corne? And when he was so dyght,
He was the very patterne of a harvest moawer ryght.
Oft bynding newmade hay about his temples he myght seeme
A haymaker. Oft tymes in hand made hard with woork extreeme
He bare a goade, that men would sweere he had but newly then
Unyoakt his weerye Oxen. Had he tane in hand agen
A shredding hooke, yee would have thought he had a gardener beene,
Or proyner of sum vyne. Or had you him with ladder seene
Uppon his necke, a gatherer of frute yee would him deeme.
With swoord a souldier, with his rod an Angler he did seeme.
And finally in many shapes he sought to fynd accesse
To joy the beawty but by syght, that did his hart oppresse.
Moreover, putting on his head a womans wimple gay,
And staying by a staffe, graye heares he foorth to syght did lay
Uppon his forehead, and did feyne a beldame for to bee,
By meanes wherof he came within her goodly ortyards free.
And woondring at the frute, sayd: Much more skill hast thou I see
Than all the Nymphes of Albula. Hayle, Lady myne, the flowre
Unspotted of pure maydenhod in all the world this howre.
And with that woord he kissed her a little: but his kisse
Was such as trew old women would have never given ywis,
Then sitting downe uppon a bank, he looked upward at
The braunches bent with harvests weyght. Ageinst him where he sat
A goodly Elme with glistring grapes did growe: which after hee
Had praysed, and the vyne likewyse that ran uppon the tree:
But if (quoth hee) this Elme without the vyne did single stand,
It should have nothing (saving leaves) to bee desyred: and
Ageine if that the vyne which ronnes uppon the Elme had nat
The tree to leane unto, it should uppon the ground ly flat.
Yit art not thou admonisht by example of this tree
To take a husband, neyther doost thou passe to maryed bee.
But would to God thou wouldest. Sure Queene Helen never had
Mo suters, nor the Lady that did cause the battell mad
Betweene the halfbrute Centawres and the Lapythes, nor the wyfe
Of bold Ulysses whoo was eeke ay fearefull of his lyfe,
Than thou shouldst have. For thousands now (even now most cheefly when
Thou seemest suters to abhorre) desyre thee, both of men,
And Goddes and halfgoddes, yea and all the fayryes that doo dwell
In Albane hilles. But if thou wilt bee wyse, and myndest well
To match thyself, and wilt give eare to this old woman heere,
(To whom thou more than to them all art (trust mee) leef and deere,
And more than thou thyself beleevst) the common matches flee,
And choose Vertumnus to thy make. And take thou mee to bee
His pledge. For more he to himself not knowen is, than to mee.
He roves not like a ronneagate through all the world abrode.
This countrye heerabout (the which is large) is his abode.
He dooth not (like a number of theis common wooers) cast
His love to every one he sees. Thou art the first and last
That ever he set mynd uppon. Alonly unto thee
Hee vowes himself as long as lyfe dooth last. Moreover hee
Is youthfull, and with beawtye sheene endewd by natures gift,
And aptly into any shape his persone he can shift.
Thou canst not bid him bee the thing, (though al things thou shouldst name)
But that he fitly and with ease will streyght becomme the same.
Besydes all this, in all one thing bothe twayne of you delyght,
And of the frutes that you love best the firstlings are his ryght:
And gladly he receyves thy gifts. But neyther covets hee
Thy Apples, Plommes, nor other frutes new gathered from the tree,
Nor yit the herbes of pleasant sent that in thy gardynes bee:
Nor any other kynd of thing in all the world, but thee.
Have mercy on his fervent love, and think himself to crave
Heere present by the mouth of mee, the thing that he would have.
And feare the God that may revenge: as Venus whoo dooth hate
Hard harted folkes, and Rhammuse whoo dooth eyther soone or late
Expresse her wrath with myndfull wreake. And to th'entent thou may
The more beware, of many things which tyme by long delay
Hathe taught mee, I will shewe thee one which over all the land
Of Cyprus blazed is abroade, which being ryghtly skand
May easly bow thy hardned hart and make it for to yild.

... The God that can uppon him take what kynd of shape he list
Now having sayd thus much in vayne, omitted to persist
In beldames shape, and shewde himself a lusty gentleman,
Appeering to her cheerefully, even like as Phebus whan
Hee having overcomme the clowdes that did withstand his myght,
Dooth blaze his brightsum beames agein with fuller heate and lyght.
He offred force, but now no force was needfull in the cace.
For why shee beeing caught in love with beawty of his face,
Was wounded then as well as hee, and gan to yeeld apace.

(1) It may be interpreted Appleby
(2) Turner

Arthur Golding, trans. Ovid's Metamorphoses. 1565-67. Ed. Madeleine Forey. Harmondsworth: Penguin English Poets, 2002. 425-28.

So Pomona (or "Appleby"), the goddess of fruit trees, gardens and orchards, married Vertumnus ("Turner") because he fooled her into listening to him by disguising himself as an old woman.

This, we're informed, is the only purely Latin story in the whole of the Metamorphoses, and is perhaps included to make a contrast to the Rape of the Sabine Women and all the other bloody episodes from Roman history which fill the last couple of books.

Are they, in fact, meant as a pair of rustic rivals to Virgil's tragic protagonists Dido and Aeneas?

The whole talky episode certainly contrasts strongly with all the rape scenes earlier in the poem. The turning seasons require fertility - it's appropriate that the goddess should give in, rather than being frozen in place as yet another virgin Laurel tree or fountain ...



Golding is, of course, the first and most influential translator of Ovid into English. His rhyming fourteeners sound very clumsy now, but even if they had no particular distinction in themselves, they would still be worth reading for their influence on Shakespeare.

Popund famously declared Golding's translation to be the "most beautiful book in the language." And it never does seem to go out of print, so there must be something in it. See what you think, anyway ...

Metamorphoses XIII (1955): Glaucus

... So ended
The story, and the Nereids went their ways
Swimming the peaceful waters. Scylla only,
Fearing the far-off deeps, came wandering back
To the shore, and there she strolled along, all naked
Over the thirsty sands, or, growing weary,
Found some safe pool to swim in. But here came Glaucus,
Sounding his shell across the sea, a dweller
New-come to ocean: change had come upon him,
NOt so long since, near Anthedon, in Euboea.
He saw her, and he loved her, and he said
Whatever words might make her pause to listen,
But she was frightened, and fled, and swift in her fear
Raced to the top of a mountain that hung over
The shore, one sharp high peak, whose shadow fell
Far over the water. Here she was safe, and watched him,
Monster or god, wondering at his color,
The hair that fell across his back and shoulders,
The fish-form fig-leaf at his groin. He saw her,
Leaned on a nearby mass of rock, called to her: “Maiden,
I am no freak, no savage beast, I am
A sea-god; neither Proteus nor Triton
Nor Athamas’ son Palaemon, none of these
Has greater power than I. I once was mortal,
But even then devoted to deep waters
From which I earned my living. Thence I drew
My nets, or by the ocean side I dangled
My rod and line. I can recall a shore
That bordered on green meadows, which no cattle,
No sheep, no goats, had ever grazed, no bees
Came there for honey, and no garlands ever
Were gathered there, nor sickle plied. I first
Came there and dried my nets and lines and spread them
Along that bank, counting the fish I caught
By luck or management or their own folly.
It will sound to you, no doubt, like a fishy story,
But why should I tell you lies? – My catch, on touching
The grass, began to stir, to turn, to swim,
To jump on the land the way they did in the water.
And as I stood in wonder, they slipped down
Into their native element, and left me.
I was a long time wondering: had some god
Done this, or was there magic in the grasses?
I plucked a blade and chewed it, and its flavour
Had hardly touched my tongue, when suddenly
My heart within me trembled, and I felt
An overwhelming longing: I must change
My way of life. I could not stand against it,
‘Farewell, O Earth!’ I cried, ‘Farewell forever!’
And plunged into the sea, whose gods received me
With every honor, and called on Oceanus
And Tethys, to dissolve my mortal nature.
They purged me of it, first with magic singing,
Nine times repeated, then with river water
Come from a hundred streams, and I remember
No more, but when my sense returned I knew I was
A different kind of creature, body and spirit.
I saw, for the first time, this beard, dark-green,
These locks that flow behind me over long waves,
These shoulders and blue arms, these legs that trail
Into a fish-like end, and all of this
Of little good to me. Where is the profit
In being a sea-gods’ sea-god, if my Scylla
Cares not at all?’’ There was more he would have spoken,
But Scylla fled once more, and he, in anger,
Went to the marvellous palace-halls of Circe,
The daughter of the Sun.

Rolfe Humphries, trans. Ovid: Metamorphoses. 1955. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. 335-37.

Why, why, oh why, another one of these stories where a nymph or goddess is surprised naked by a god or lustful monster, and pursued until she's transformed into soemthing else? Persephone and Hades, Arethusa and Alpheus, Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and ... well, name your candidate: Semele, Io, Europa etc. etc.

What was it Ovid meant to say by relating so many of them? Glaucus gets an unusually long time to put his case, this time. His lovesickness seems to be treated more sympathetically than, say, Apollo's. And yet there's a basic monotony to the situation which makes it difficult to save - in narrative terms. The mythological equivalent of a Soap Opera cliche.

The story goes on to tell us, after the piece quoted above, how Glaucus went to ask Circe for a love potion. Circe promptly fell for him herself and, when he scorned her in favour of Scylla, poisoned the pool her rival was bathing in and transformed her into a monster.

Circe, in the Odyssey, is adept at showing sailors their true, animal selves. Is that the point of her transformation of Scylla? That one who rejects so faithful a suitor simply because he looks a bit fishy, is a monster of ingratitude? Certainly Glaucus was generally seen as a fairly benevolent water deity, coming to the aid of drowning sailors in storms, having once been one himself.

As usual in Ovid, in the Metamorphoses as a whole, there's a curious fusion between human psychology and the impersonal processes of Nature. The stories constantly veer from one level to the other, as in his earlier set of Love Letters from Abandoned Heroines.

It's a curious kind of sentimentality, like Sterne's in The Sentimental Journey, feeling for birds in cages, but getting his real entertainment from indulging in feeling, rather than plotting any concrete remedies for injustice. Perhaps it's typical of a hierarchical slave society, where the concept that some human beings are inferior to others is an inescapable reality.

Metamorphoses XII (2004): Rumour

Lucie Plato, "Justice" (2003)

Picture a space at the heart of the world, between the
earth,
the sea and the sky, on the frontiers of all three parts of
the universe.
Here there are eyes for whatever goes on, no matter
how distant;
and here there are ears whose hollows no voice can fail
to penetrate.
This is the kingdom of Rumour, who chose to live on a
mountain,
with numberless entrances into her house and a
thousand additional
holes, though none of her thresholds are barred with a
gate or a door.
Open by night and by day, constructed entirely of
sounding
brass, the whole place hums and echoes, repeating
whatever
it hears. Not one of the rooms is silent or quiet, but
none
is disturbed by shouting. The noise is merely a
murmuring babble,
low like the waves of the sea which you hear from afar,
or the last faint
rumble of thunder, when storm-black clouds have
clashed in the sky.
The hall is filled by a crowd which is constantly coming
and going,
a flimsy throng of a thousand rumours, true and
fictitious,
wandering far and wide in a turbulent tangle of
language.
They chatter in empty ears or pass on stories to others;
the fiction grows and detail is added by each new teller.
This is the haunt of credulity, irresponsible error,
groundless joy, unreasoning panic, impulsive sedition
and whispering gossip. Rumour herself spies every
occurrence
on earth, at sea, in the sky; and her scrutiny ranges the
universe.

David Raeburn, trans. Ovid: Metamorphoses. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2004. 466-67.

Tischbein, "The Mocking of Anacreon" (1754)

Unpleasant irony, again, that has Ovid writing about the unpleasant, ubiquitous powers of rumour, when it must have been rumours about his scurrilous verses and lifestyle which landed him in trouble in the first place.

This is, of course, a very influential passage. It directly inspired Chaucer's description in The House of Rumour in his early poem The Hous of Fame - and the vein of allegory, rather than mythology, it introduced into European literature (along with a few key passages in Virgil's Aeneid) would have a long and complex prgency -- not least the appearance of Rumour "painted full of tongues" at the beginning of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part Two:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace, while covert enmity
Under the smile of safety wounds the world:
And who but Rumour, who but only I,
Make fearful musters and prepared defence,
Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief,
Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war,
And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it. ...

Zazie, "HumourRumour" (2006)

David Raeburn’s Penguin Classics translation is certainly a worthy rival to Charles Martin’s for best contemporary verse translation. Personally, I prefer it. I like his attempt at hexameters, and if one can get over the awkward layout his publishers have given him, the stories flow very well through his intricate lines.

I fear he may have been scooped by Martin's more widely publicised version, but I think it's nice to have both of them side by side -- rather like the Rolfe Humphries / Horace Gregory double-act in the 50s, or the Melville / Boer scrap in the 80s ...

Metamorphoses X (2004): Pygmalion

“Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid
indecency, and, dismayed by the numerous defects
of character Nature had given the feminine spirit,
stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion.

“During that time he created an ivory statue,
a work of most marvellous art, and gave it a figure
better than any living woman could boast of,
and promptly conceived a passion for his own creation.
You would have thought it alive, so like a real maiden
that only its natural modesty kept it from moving:
art concealed artfulness. Pygmalion gazed in amazement,
burning with love for what was in likeness a body.

“Often he stretched forth a hand to touch his creation,
attempting to settle the issue: was it a body,
or was it – this he would not yet concede – a mere statue?
He gives it kisses, and they are returned, he imagines;
now he addresses and now he caresses it, feeling
his fingers sink into its warm, pliant flesh, and
fears he will leave blue bruises all over its body;
he seeks to win its affections with words and with presents
pleasing to girls, such as seashells and pebbles, tame birds,
armloads of flowers in thousands of different colors,
lilies, bright painted balls, curious insects in amber;
he dresses it up and puts diamond rings on its fingers,
gives it a necklace, a lacy brassiere and pearl earrings,
and even though all such adornments truly become her,
she does not seem to be any less beautiful naked.
He lays her down on a bed with a bright purple cover
and calls her his bedmate and slips a few soft, downy pillows
under her head as though she were able to feel them.

“The holiday honoring Venus has come, and all Cyprus
turns out to celebrate; heifers with gilded horns buckle
under the deathblow and incense soars up in thick clouds;
having already brought his own gift to the altar,
Pygmalion stood by and offered this fainthearted prayer:
'If you in heaven are able to give us whatever
we ask for, then I would like as my wife –' and not daring
to say, '– my ivory maiden,' said, '– one like my statue!'
Since golden Venus was present there at her altar,
she knew what he wanted to ask for, and as a good omen,
three times the flames soared and leapt right up to the heavens.

“Once home, he went straight to the replica of his sweetheart,
threw himself down on the couch and repeatedly kissed her;
she seemed to grow warm and so he repeated the action,
kissing her lips and exciting her breasts with both hands.
Aroused, the ivory softened and, losing its stiffness,
yielded, submitting to his caress as wax softens
when it is warmed by the sun, and handled by fingers,
takes on many forms, and by being used, becomes useful.
Amazed, he rejoices, then doubts, then fears he's mistaken,
while again and again he touches on what he has prayed for.
She is alive! And her veins leap under his fingers!

“You can believe that Pygmalion offered the goddess
his thanks in a torrent of speech, once again kissing
those lips that were not untrue; that she felt his kisses,
and timidly blushing, she opened her eyes to the sunlight,
and at the same time, first looked on her lover and heaven!
The goddess attended the wedding since she had arranged it,
and before the ninth moon had come to its crescent, a daughter
was born to them – Paphos, who gave her own name to the island.

Ovid: Metamorphoses. Translated and with notes by Charles Martin. Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. 350-52.

... blank verse it has been, for the most part. There are a few passages where I have departed from its rule ... Ovid ... turns from the imitation of conversation [in Book V] to the imitation of poetry in the tenth and fifteenth books of his poem. In Book V, it is the song of the Muse Calliope; in Book X, it is the songs of her son, Orpheus; and in Book XV, it is the long, inspired (so he says) monologue of the philosoopher Pythagoras ... All three figures are related: Calliope and Orpheus are mother and son, and Pythagoras is bound to them by his habit of writing in verse and by the emphasis that Pythagorean thought placed on the importance of music. Whether Ovid is using these figures to signal that his epic of fifteen books can be structurally divided into three equal parts, I cannnot say: Ovid is very skillful at playing with our structural expectations. However, because of the relationship between these speakers, and because they are all speaking poetry, as it were, I have used the same meter for all three of them

So Charles Martin in pp. 9-10 of his "Note on this Translation."

Indeed, some might think that Martin's translation is somewhat over-introduced. It begins with a long piece by Bernard Knox (reprinted from the New York Review of Books) explaining why Martin is so much more satisfactory as a translator than either Ted Hughes or David R. Slavitt. Martin then contributes his own nine-page "Note," and concludes with 40 pages of notes and glossaries at the back.

I guess the reason for reprinting Knox's piece, though, was because he'd also written introductions for Robert Fagle's phenomenally-successful translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, and Martin's publishers wanted to imply that this was to be regarded as a similarly standard work. Who knows? In any case, Martin's choices seem, by and large, sensible and well thought-through, and while there's no particular distinction in his blank verse to set it apart from A. D. Melville or Rolfe Humphries or Horace Gregory or any of the other toilers in the vineyard who've employed that metre, I fell that there's an extra zest to these rough five-beat lines in a kind of modified version of G. M. Hopkins' sprung rhythm. They look like hexameters, but they're not - not really. They seem to accommodate more elaboration than a lot of the rest of his version, though.



And what of the story itself? Martin brings out, I think, just how sensual an awakening Pygamlion's ivory lover undergoes: "... he went straight to the replica of his sweetheart,/ threw himself down on the couch and repeatedly kissed her; / she seemed to grow warm and so he repeated the action, / kissing her lips and exciting her breasts with both hands ..."

Ovid is obviously playing here with the idea of the sun bringing forth life, like crocodiles being formed from the Nile's mud - a belief which persisted in Europe until the eighteenth century. And yet he also succeeds in sounding faintly ironic:

Aroused, the ivory softened and, losing its stiffness,
yielded, submitting to his caress as wax softens
when it is warmed by the sun, and handled by fingers,
takes on many forms, and by being used, becomes useful.

Is that Martin's choice of tone, or Ovid's, I wonder? It comes down to yet another example of that intense modernity we feel in Golden Age Latin poets such as Catullus and Ovid. And yet, in attributing to them a kind of hip, street-wise consciousness, are we eliding over a hundred more significant points of difference?

Never mind. I guess it's better to feel a kinship with poets from the distant past than to hear them as pompous reminders of the mutabliity of any advanced culture ...

Charles Martin gets a definite thumbs-up, I feel - alert to the subtleties of his poet's changes of mood and style - and a good serviceable poetic voice of his own. Perhaps it's no accident that Pygmalion is so foregrounded by him. Isn't every translator's desire to breathe life into his own hand-carved replica of an otherwise unattainable original?