Metamorphoses Read online

  In his time, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was centered in a web of cultural and political relations to which it was bound by allusions of various kinds. For Ovid’s first readers, his brief introduction—the first four lines of his poem—not only set out his own intentions for it, but referred to two of his own earlier works in a very different genre and illustrated in verse his turn from the elegiac couplets he had previously written to the hexameter lines proper to the Latin epic. Not only personal history but cultural: the reader of his time would have also noticed allusions not just to Ovid’s earlier work but also to the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica of Apollonius, and to the issue of whether the poet should write a traditional, chronologically arranged epic or the more refined variety preached and practiced by the Alexandrian Callimachus and his later Roman followers.

  What Ovid’s Pythagoras would call “the gnawing tooth of time” has left us the poem intact but has fragmented the web surrounding it: Ovid’s personal history and the larger cultural issues of his day have little resonance in our age; if a translator could bring across those allusions into modern English, a contemporary reader would still have little or no idea what was at issue; in that sense, they are lost to translation. Throughout the Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid is engaged in a complex and competitive relationship with the poet Virgil and with the other epic of the Augustan era, Virgil’s Aeneid. Many contemporary readers will have their first hint of this in Book XIII, when Aeneas himself makes his appearance; unlike Virgil’s Aeneas, however, Ovid’s hero bumbles along like a celebrity tourist on a guided tour, opening his mouth only to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing and otherwise avoiding memorable speech and action. Very odd indeed for an epic hero, and in the past, his behavior in the poem has often been seen as ineptitude on Ovid’s part rather than as a clever element of a deliberately parodic strategy.

  Other, more subtle allusions to Virgil’s poem may be misunderstood or lost entirely. In Book III of the Metamorphoses, the goddess Juno bitterly complains about her husband Jove’s affair with Semele and is about to launch into a great tirade when she stops to remind herself of her own importance and to threaten vengeance on her enemy:

  “profeci quid enim totiens per iurgia?” dixit,

  “ipsa petenda mihi est; ipsam, si maxima Iuno

  rite vocor, perdam, si me gemmantia dextra

  sceptra tenere decet, si sum regina Iovisque

  et soror et coniunx—”

  “But when have I won anything by shouting?”

  she asked. “No: I must attack and ruin her,

  if I am rightly styled as almighty Juno,

  if it is right for me to bear the scepter,

  if I am certainly the queen of Jove,

  his sister, his wife—”

  Part of the fun in this passage is that Ovid has taken a speech of Juno from Book I of the Aeneid, in which she laments her inability to prevent Aeneas from reaching Italy, an issue of cosmic importance, and applied it to the rather more comical situation of the latest infidelity of her perpetually straying husband, Jove, the omnipotent ruler of heaven; Ovid’s last phrase in this passage, “regina Iovisque et soror et coniunx,” “the queen of Jove, his sister and wife,” is taken directly from Virgil; to it Ovid adds one more phrase, deflating Juno’s epic dignity just as surely as Groucho Marx did Margaret Dumont’s: “certe soror,” “well, certainly his sister.”

  This is not to say that Ovid is completely without respect for Virgil; his borrowing and echoing of Virgilian phrases throughout the Metamorphoses indicate that he clearly realized the older poet’s genius; but to Virgil’s gravitas he opposed that “thoughtful lightness” that Italo Calvino finds in his work; to Virgil’s single story of how one man, Aeneas, refused to be sidetracked from coming to Italy and establishing a dynasty that led to the rule of Augustus, Ovid opposes so many stories told by so many voices that it is hard to be sure we have counted them accurately.

  Ovid’s relationship with Virgil, important as it may have been for him in staking out his poetic turf, is impossible to convey in translation, since the existence of Virgil himself largely depends on translations. Unless there were a translation of the Aeneid so distinctive in its diction or rhythm that the translator of the Metamorphoses could count on his readers recognizing an allusion to it—but even to suggest this is to recognize its unlikeliness.

  And what of Ovid’s relationship to Augustus himself, the “first citizen” of the Roman state and the official sponsor of Virgil and his literary vision? In Book I, Ovid describes a boisterous convocation of the Olympian gods in which an obstreperous Jove lords it over the other gods and decides to wipe out the human race altogether, for…its cruelty! Ovid explicitly compares Jove to Augustus in this scene, and then goes on to show Jove, in the remainder of Book I and subsequent books, as a successful rapist and clumsy seducer of essentially defenseless women. In Book XV, Ovid again compares Augustus to Jove and praises him so extravagantly, in a tone so different from anything else in the Metamorphoses, that it is hard to believe Ovid is being serious. “Praise undeserv’d is scandal in disguise,” said Alexander Pope, and this seems almost a formula for what Ovid is doing here. Between these episodes are others in which Ovid appears to raise serious questions about the character of Augustus and the legitimacy of his reign. If the Olympian gods often seem in Ovid’s treatment of them to be the spoiled members of a dysfunctional family, then Ovid’s comparison of Augustus to Jove becomes an act of political subversion, and the Metamorphoses may be read as a social and political commentary, an allegorical reflection of its times, and not—it never was intended to be—a timeless and canonical collection of myths.

  THE TRANSLATOR MAY suggest such things, but they must be left for the critic to develop: they belong to what has already been lost, that world of context in which Ovid’s poem once moved. What the translator can hope for is to bring over as best he may those elements of Ovid’s style that can be translated. Chief among these would be that “thoughtful lightness” that Italo Calvino has spoken of in his Six Memos for the New Millennium. One can see it in the irony that so often undercuts the noble and the heroic, either by an inappropriate admission (as in Juno’s monologue cited above) or by a simile that brings us from tragedy to comedy with no stops in between, as when Pyramus (in Book IV) nobly decides to take his own life in emulation of his beloved Thisbe:

  “‘Drink my blood now,’ he says, drawing his sword,

  and thrusting it at once in his own guts:

  a fatal blow; dying, he draws the blade

  out of his burning wound, and his lifeblood

  follows it, jetting high into the air,

  as he lies on his back upon the ground.

  “It was as when a water pipe is ruptured

  where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak…

  The reader is torn from the world of undying love and thrown into one in which we are trying to find a twenty-four-hour plumbing service.

  So then, there is the speed of the narration, the casualness of tone, the rapid changes in point of view, the alternation between apparent sympathy for his characters and apparent indifference to their fates; there is the wordplay, the elaborate rhetorical and prosodic figures, the whimsical erudition, and the coining of new words: more than enough to keep a translator busy. If the translator cannot reproduce one of Ovid’s jokes, he may perhaps substitute one of his own in a different place to give a sense of Ovid’s playfulness.

  Other effects are impossible to reproduce. Latin allows the poet the liberty to create lines, such as the so-called Golden Line, which Virgil and Ovid both employed, in which a pair of adjectives and their respective nouns at either end enclose a verb in the middle. English will rarely stand still for this sort of thing, but occasionally something like it may occur to the translator, as in the passage in Book I where Io’s poor father laments her having been discovered in her current condition as a heifer:

  “Lost, you were less a grief than you are, found!”<
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  Though this is not a reflection of the metrical arrangement of the original lines, I used it anyway, since the artificiality of the arrangement tells us something about the way in which we are to understand Io’s (temporary) metamorphosis.

  When I began my own process of translation, I set out in medias res, with the opening of Book III, to see what doing Ovid would be like:

  Iamque deus posita fallacies imagine tauri

  se confessus erat dictaeque rura tenebat,

  cum pater ignarus Cadmo perquirere raptam

  imperat et poenam, si non invenerit, addit

  exilium, facto pius et sceleratus eodem.

  My first question was, what kind of meter will work for this? My earliest version used a line whose length and irregularly placed stresses would seem, I hoped, analogous to Ovid’s dactylic hexameter:

  And now, no longer misrepresenting himself as a bull,

  Jove in his own form arrived at Crete, while the captivegirl’s baffled father orders her brother Cadmus

  to search for her, and—perverse but paternal—threatens

  to banish the son if he doesn’t come up with the daughter.

  This lumbered along genially enough, with some lines sagging toward the middle, but I kept thinking of it as a blunt club, battering Ovid into submission. With those few lines, I realized that Ovid does not stop or slow down to take prisoners: he moves swiftly, from one detail to another, one story to another. A second version tried for a shorter line and greater speed:

  And now, no longer impersonating a bull,

  Jove was on Crete, exposed as himself, while the captive

  girl’s baffled father (in an action both

  paternal and perverse) orders her brother

  Cadmus to go out and find her or face banishment.

  In subsequent versions, my line moved closer and closer to blank verse—the iambic pentameter line—until I realized that blank verse was what I was looking for:

  And now, his taurine imitation ended,

  the god exposed himself for what he was

  to cowed Europa on the isle of Crete.

  In an action both paternal and perverse,

  the capturedmaiden’s baffled father bids

  her brother Cadmus to locate the girl

  or face an endless term of banishment.

  In blank verse I found both an analogue to Ovid’s dactylic hexameter and a willing and patient warhorse, infinitely adaptable and responsible to the demands placed upon it. Since contemporary poetry has for the most part yielded storytelling to prose, I have organized my verse into paragraphs, as both an acceptance of that fact and a challenge to it.

  And so, blank verse it has been, for the most part. There are a few passages where I have departed from its rule; in Book IV, for instance, I have the demonic Tisiphone speak in rhymed couplets because I did not know how else to convey the sheer strangeness of that scene; couplets occasionally managed to slip in elsewhere, either alone or in small groups, where I had not expected them: a number of them found their way into Book X at a place where I was perhaps thinking of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard.” The hymn to Bacchus at the beginning of Book IV is rendered in a meter associated with hymns in English; and the awkward, boxy quatrains of the Athenians’ song of praise to Theseus in Book VII are meant to resemble an old-fashioned kind of amateur verse.

  In Book V, Ovid tells how the goddess Minerva visits the immortal Muses, the nine daughters of Memory, and learns that they had recently been challenged in song by the nine human daughters of Pierus, who were defeated in the ensuing contest and changed into birds. I do not know what Ovid really thought of the daughters of Pierus, but he does give them a much more interesting song than he gives the Muses. It occurred to me that the contest might be represented as one between the voices of Poesy and those of the Downtown Scene. Thus, the Pierides became the P-Airides, and their song is presented in the diction and meter of contemporary rap. Because Ovid was imitating song here and not speech, I now needed a meter different from the blank verse I had been using and one that would reflect the formality of the Muses’ opposing song. Since it seemed fitting that the Muse Calliope would speak in poetry, I settled on a loose five-beat line, relatively irregular as to placement of stresses, but to my ear a lot like Latin dactylic hexameter.

  At this point I noticed that in addition to the fifth book, Ovid also turns from the imitation of conversation 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 philosopher Pythagoras, whose teachings—written out in Greek hexameter lines—were known in a collection called The Golden Sayings. All three figures are related: Calliope and Orpheus are mother and son, and Pythagoras is bound to both of them by his habit of writing in verse and by the emphasis that Pythagorean thought placed on the mystical 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 cannot 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.

  THOUGH I HAVE generally resisted the urge to add anything to an already abundant original, there are three areas in which I have supplied some information that Ovid left out.

  By allowing his stories to jump from one book to the next, and by abrupt, often fortuitous-seeming transitions between stories, Ovid deliberately gives most of the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses the appearance of mutability; though they are permeable, they also have a certain underlying coherence, and so I have supplied titles that indicate what I take to be the major theme of each book. I have also supplied running titles for each of the stories, at about the place—and opinions will differ on this—where one story changes to another.

  Finally, there are some places, usually near the end of a story, where Ovid withholds information necessary to complete the reader’s understanding of what he has just read; often Ovid will leave out entirely the names of some of his more significant characters: Aesculapius, for instance, or Europa, or Callisto, all unnamed in the tales told of them. These omissions may simply be Ovid’s way of assuring his readers that he knows they are already familiar with the story, a mild form of flattery, and a means of inviting their participation in the poem: if they aren’t familiar with it, how long will it take them to discover the identity of the protagonist?

  Since Ovid’s contemporary readers are not as familiar with the figures of myth and legend as his first readers were, I have taken the liberty of slipping the names into the tales, either in the running titles or occasionally in a bracketed line or two in the text itself. I apologize in advance to those who find this obtrusive; the alternative, sending the reader back to the notes at a crucial moment in the story, seemed to me even more so.

  TRANSLATORS HOPE TO be stalking-horses for those readers who will discover the work in their own language for the first time and make something new out of it. Shakespeare found in Golding’s version of Ovid a source for the cruelties of Titus Andronicus and the refined magic of The Tempest. After a long period in which Ovid seemed to have little to say to Western readers, his text is once again coming to be seen as a source.

  It is perhaps too early to say what it will be a source of, but in his Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino describes what he calls “the manifold text, which replaces the oneness of the thinking ‘I’ with a multiplicity of subjects, voices and views of the world.” Calvino goes on to describe the possibilities it opens: “Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and th
e tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.” One ancient source of the manifold text in Western literature is of course Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as Calvino clearly recognizes when he asks, “Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote about the continuity of forms?”*

  BOOK I

  THE SHAPING OF CHANGES

  Proem The creation The four ages War with the Giants Lycaon’s feast The great flood Deucalion and Pyrrha The second creation Apollo and the Python Apollo and Daphne Jove and Io (1) Pan and Syrinx Jove and Io (2) Phaëthon

  Proem

  My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed

  into new bodies: O gods above, inspire

  this undertaking (which you’ve changed as well)

  and guide my poem in its epic sweep

  from the world’s beginning to the present day.

  The creation

  Before the seas and lands had been created,

  before the sky that covers everything,

  Nature displayed a single aspect only

  throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,

  a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk

  10

  and nothing more, with the discordant seeds

  of disconnected elements all heaped

  together in anarchic disarray.

  The sun as yet did not light up the earth,

  nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,

  nor was the earth suspended in midair,

  balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean

  extend her arms to the margins of the land.

  Although the land and sea and air were present,

  land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,