Metamorphoses VI (1994): Marsyas

from "The Flaying of Marsyas"

by Robin Robertson

nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat
vi, 388

1

A bright clearing. Sun among the leaves,
sifting down to dapple the soft ground, and rest
a gilded bar against the muted flanks of trees.
In the flittering green light the glade
listens in and breathes.

A wooden pail; some pegs, a coil of wire;
a bundle of steel flensing knives.

Spreadeagled between two pines,
hooked at each hoof to the higher branches,
tied to the root by the hands, flagged
as his own white cross,
the satyr Marsyas hangs.

Three stand as honour guard:
two apprentices, one butcher.


2
Let’s have a look at you, then.
Bit scrawny for a satyr,
all skin and whipcord, is it?
Soon find out.
So, think you can turn up with your stag-bones
and outplay Lord Apollo?

This’ll learn you. Fleece the fucker.
Sternum to groin.Tickle, does it? Fucking bastard,
coming down here with your dirty ways ...
Armpit to wrist, both sides.Chasing our women ...
Fine cuts round hoof and hand and neck.Can’t even speak the language proper.
Transverse from umbilicus to iliac crest,
half-circling the waist.Jesus. You fucking stink, you do.
Hock to groin, groin to hock.That’s your inside leg done:
no more rutting for you, cunt.

Now. One of you on each side.
Blade along the bone, find the tendon,
nick it and peel, nice and slow.
A bit of shirt-lifting, now, to purge him,
pull his wool over his eyes
and show him Lord Apollo’s rapture;
pelt on one tree, him on another:
The inner man revealed.


3 ...

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. Edited by Michael Hofmann & James Lasdun. London: Faber, 1994. 154-55.

from "Down Under"

by Ciaran Carson


... 2

I flipped the tissue-paper and took in the Christian
iconography.
Its daguerreotype-like, braille feel. The spiky instruments.
The pincers.
The man who’d invented the saw had studied the anatomy
of a
Fish’s spine. From bronze he cut the teeth and tried them
out on a boxwood tree.

That ancient boxwood flute of Greece will haunt him yet.
Through olive groves
Its purple aura bleats through dark and sheep. The dozing
shepherd
With his flute abandoned. Wrapped up in his mantle,
independent, fast asleep.

... 4

Fletcher cut the nib of a quill with a Stanley knife
and sliced the palp
Of his finger off. It quivered with its hinge of skin,
then rivuleted
On the parchment. He didn’t know where it was going.
It obscured
The nice calligraphy that looked definitive: like a
Proclamation or a Treaty.

In fact, he’d been trying to copy the Inquit page off
the Book
Of Kells, as if it were a series of ‘unquotes’. The way
you’d disengage
The lashes of a feather, then try and put them back together.

5

The place was packed with expectant academics, but my
marking slips
Had flittered away from the text. They’d been Rizla papers
in another
Incarnation, when I’d rolled a smoke between my thumbs
and fingers, teasing
Out the strands. I waffled on about the stet-detectors
in the library

Basement, security requirements, conduits, wiring,
laminates and ducts.
Up above, the floors and stacks and filing systems, the
elaborate
Machinery of books, where I materialized. I strummed
their rigid spiny gamut.

6

There’s a shelf of Metamorphoses. Commentaries. Lives.
The Mystery of Ovid’s
Exile. This is where the Phrygian mode returns, by way
of an Australian stamp
That’s slipped out from the covers, bearing the unlikely-
looking lyre-shaped
Tail of the lyre-bird. Printed in intaglio, it’s playing
a barcarole.

I think of it as clinker-built, Aeolian, floating down
the limpid river which –
Said Ovid’s people – sprang from all the tears the
country fauns and nymphs
And shepherds wept in Phrygia, as they mourned their
friend the fettered satyr.

7 ...

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses. Pp.157-60.

That's why I like this compilation so much. It's hit-and-miss, admittedly. There are some tiresome adaptations which whinge on and on for pages, but mostly they're distinct hits, I'd have to say.

It's great to have these two versions of the story of Marsyas to put side by side. The Robin Robertson piece is terrifyingly brutal: a couple of executioners joking like Shakespearean bullies as they divide up the carcase of this untermensch:

A man dismantled, a tatterdemalion
torn to steak and rind,
a disappointing pentimento
or the toy that can’t be reassembled
by the boy Apollo, raptor, vivisector.

Robertson is alert to the possibilties of medieval idealisation of the innocent songster Marsyas as a kind of proto-Christ, too:

Marsyas the martyr, a god’s fetish,
hangs from the tree like bad fruit.

I particularly like that last echo of the Billie Holiday classic "Strange Fruit," about lynch law in the Deep South:

Strange fruit hanging
from the poplar trees ...

Yet when we turn to Ciaran Carson, the poet of modern Belfast, we immediately become aware of a world of possibilites scarcely hinted at in the Scot Robertson's vicious little poem.

Carson makes a series of exploratory incisions into the body of the Marsyas story, seeing it in the fish-spine of a ringbound academic monograph, in an Irish postage stamp, in the tail of an Australian lyre-bird (hence, presumably, his title: "Down Under").

LIke a classical composer, he begins by stating the theme:

Then they told the story of the satyr who played the flute
so brilliantly
In Phrygia, he tried to beat Apollo. Apollo won, of course;
for extra measure, thought
He’d bring the satyr down another peg or two: stripped
off his pelt, ungloving it from

Scalpwards down. And could he play then? With his fingertips
all raw,
His everything all peeled and skinless? You saw the score
of veins
Externalized, the palpitating circuits. The polythene-like
arteries. The pulsing bag
Of guts you’d think might play a tune, if you could bring
yourself to blow and squeeze it.

Carson's ending is more vicious, even, than Robertson's. The cruelty of the gods is an immutable principle in the world of this poem, the world (one is tempted to say) of the Troubles:

So they tell their stories, of the cruelty of gods and
words and music.
The fledglings of the lyre-bird’s song. Its arrows.
They stare into
The water – ‘clearest in that Realme’ – and see the
fishes shingled,

Shivered, scalloped on the pebbles. The arrows of the
wind upon the water,
Written on the water; rolled like smoke, the fluted
breath that strolls
At midnight. They gaze into the stream’s cold pastoral,
seeing
Fossil ribs and saws embedded there, the flute player’s
outstretched fingers.

Stephen Dobyns retells the story of the flaying of Marsyas too, in his terrifyingly deadpan collection Cemetery Nights (1987). His Marsyas is a kind of hapless hippie goof, unable to resist the flattery of the crowd, even though he knows where it'll lead him in the end.

Perhaps that's the point of the story, in fact: bad things happen to nice people. Beware the radiance of the god Apollo, too: there's no room for clumsy emotions like mercy or forgiveness in the searchlight of his dispassionate intellect. He'll rationalise you as soon as look at you.

A little like the god Augustus with that nosey little gadfly Ovidius, in fact.

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.