Metamorphoses

by Ovid

  HUGHES HAS NOW combined these four selections with twenty more to form a volume: Tales from Ovid.10It contains about one third of the text, including most of the well-known tales, though those of Orpheus, Jason and Medea, Cephalus and Procris, Baucis and Philemon, as well as the contents of Books XIII to XV, are missing. Hughes is of course an accomplished and powerful poet and the deep sympathy with and imaginative recreation of animal life and feeling that is such a marked feature of his work serves him well here. As, for example, in his version of the fate of Actaeon, who, returning from the hunt with his hounds, accidentally stumbles on the virgin goddess Diana as she bathes naked in a pool. Infuriated at being exposed to male gaze, she reaches behind her for an arrow, but she has left her weapons on the shore.

  No weapon was to hand—only water.

  So she scooped up a handful and dashed it

  Into his astonished eyes, as she shouted:

  “Now, if you can, tell how you saw me naked.”

  That was all she said, but as she said it

  Out of his forehead burst a rack of antlers.

  His neck lengthened, narrowed, and his ears

  Folded to whiskery points, his hands were hooves,

  His arms long slender legs. His hunter’s tunic

  Slid from his dappled hide. With all this

  The goddess

  Poured a shocking stream of panic terror

  Through his heart like blood. Actaeon

  Bounded out across the cave’s pool

  In plunging leaps, amazed at his own lightness.

  And there

  Clear in the bulging mirror of his bow-wave

  He glimpsed his antlered head,

  And cried: “What has happened to me?”

  No answer came. No sound came but a groan.

  This loose stanza form served Hughes, with varying line lengths throughout the book, for a collection of episodes that combine, as one English critic has put it, “his feeling for drama with a tough, brawny language.” Unfortunately the language is apt at times to become much too brawny, to the point in fact where it is utterly alien to the style and spirit of the original. Ovid’s description of the wickedness of mankind in the Iron Age concludes with the phrase Victa iacet pietas—Piety (which includes respect for duty to one’s fellows as well as to the state and the gods) lies conquered. In Hughes’s version these three words turn up as: “The inward ear, attuned to the Creator,/Is underfoot like a dog’s turd.” Even if one manages to accept the inward ear being underfoot, that dog’s turd is too much. Ovid is absolutely incapable of introducing such an object into his verse. He can be terrifying as well as beguiling, sexually suggestive as well as discreetly allusive, comic as well as tragic, but he is always elegant.

  Sometimes Hughes does more than add a discordant detail of his own. When Pentheus mocks the prophet Tiresias, “he jeered,” Hughes writes, “at this dreamer./‘Dreams,’ he explained,/‘Which this methane-mouth/Tells us are the dark manifesto/Of the corrector,/In fact are corpse-lights, the ignes fatui,/Miasma from the long-drop/and fermenting pit/Of what we don’t want, don’t need,/And have dumped./They rise from the lower bowel. And lower.’” If you look for the source of this brawny language in Ovid you will find no trace of it whatsoever. In fact in Ovid Pentheus is not even given direct speech; Ovid reports simply that “he laughed at the prophetic words of the old man and taunted him with his darkness, the loss of his sight.” Hughes’s versions, for all their merits, are to be read with caution; some of their most striking passages have no warrant in the text.

  TALES FROM OVID also suffers from the disadvantage that it is a selection of stories from a work in which the means employed to ensure continuity are often as intriguing as the stories themselves. Continuity is what Ovid prays for in his poem; he asks the gods to look kindly on his enterprise and “bring the poem uninterrupted down from the first beginnings of the world to the present day.” Since what he is about to launch into is a collection of hundreds of stories, some short, some long, selected from Greek and Roman mythology because they end in a metamorphosis, this sounds like a tall order, even for gods. But they comply. Though the poem is divided into fifteen books, these books, unlike those of Virgil’s Aeneid, are not artistic unities, each with its dramatic opening and significant closure. On the contrary, time after time, a story runs over from one book to the next. The poem is a seamless whole, an uninterrupted progress from start to finish, from the creation of the world to the final metamorphosis of the spirit of the murdered Julius Caesar into a star. And one of the many pleasures offered to the reader stems from the subtlety, variety, and often surprising wit of the transitions from one tale to another.

  Sometimes one tale is embedded in another, in the style of The Arabian Nights. Mercury, for example, sent by Jupiter to get rid of Argus, the hundred-eyed guardian Juno had set to watch Io, puts him to sleep with the story of Syrinx, the nymph changed into a reed, and then cuts off his head. When, after the Flood and the creation of the new human race, other forms of life emerged, one was an enormous serpent called Python, which Apollo killed. To commemorate his victory he established the Pythian Games, at which the prize for the winners was a crown of oak leaves. Every one of Ovid’s readers knew that it was a crown of laurel leaves, and he hastens to explain that the laurel tree had not yet come into existence. That was the result of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, who was the daughter of a river god. All the other river gods came to console her father for his loss, except Inachus, who had himself lost a daughter—Io, transformed into a cow.

  She eventually regained human shape and bore Jupiter a son, Epaphus, who became a great friend of Phaethon, the son of Helios, the sun god. Phaethon persuaded his father to let him drive the chariot but lost control of the horses and came too near the earth. Jupiter put a stop to his ride with a thunderbolt and then came down to survey the damage. He ran into Callisto, a nymph companion of the goddess Diana, seduced her, and made her pregnant; when Diana saw her condition she changed the girl into a bear. The skill with which these transitions are managed, providing surprise time after time in the long series, is one of the most delightful features of the poem; anything short of a full version gives the reader short weight.

  THIS POINT IS emphasized in the preface to David Slavitt’s translation of the whole texta11“As a translator,” he writes, “I take all kinds of liberties, but I am strict in my observance of length and scale, which I take to be significant artistic decisions that any new poem ought to respect and re-create. The sweep of this work, the change in its moods and rhythms, the way in which the heart of the poem turns out to be in the transitions, some of them quite arbitrary and fortuitous, are what have impressed me and what I have tried to convey.”

  Convey the sweep of the work he does, as the poem rolls on in the polished “English hexameters” modeled on but lighter than those developed by Richmond Lattimore for his translation of the Illiad. They are impressive, as the following excerpt will demonstrate. It is a passage in which the youth goddess Hebe has just rejuvenated her husband Iolaus. As she starts to swear that she will never do the same thing for anybody else, Themis prevents her, with a prophecy packed with mythical examples of future rejuvenations that may puzzle modern readers by its cryptic allusiveness. The excerpt also makes clear what Slavitt meant by the phrase “all kinds of liberties.”

  …Themis, the Hours’ mother and Mistress

  of Seasons and Years, prevented this ill-considered gesture.

  And now we get Themis’ list of myths in which time stands still,

  moves around, plays tricks…not stories but only allusions,

  some of them clear, and others oblique or coy. Our attention

  wanes, as the voice—of Themis? Ovid?—falters and drones.

  Tired perhaps? We strain to follow its murmur and feel

  frustration, even annoyance. Why has he thus betrayed us?

  Is this a place he’d have fixed had the gods not sent him away

  (or, to keep
to the pattern, turned him from darling to exile,

  the victim of Caesar Augustus’ whim)? But there is a way

  to read this passage and turn time back. We are children again,

  hide in the hall at the top of the stairs and strain to hear

  the phrases that float up from our parents’ conversations.

  Greedy for what we can catch, we hold our breath to listen

  and to comprehend their words and the world’s unpleasant secrets

  from which they have tried to protect us as long and as well as they could.

  The question is one of trust, which Ovid invites or tests.

  Have we learned in these pages to yield to his moods and moves, to read

  with that mixture of love and awe we felt many years ago

  in the upstairs hall? The subject, at any rate, is the business

  of youth and age, how the gods can turn back the clocks—not often,

  but every now and again. We get Amphiarius’ story….

  At this point Slavitt gives us a highly selective version of what Themis said (omitting Amphiarius, to whom Ovid devotes ten lines) and proceeds with the words “We are back on track now….” But we are not. He regales us with seven more lines of editorial comment—“This story, a somewhat mannered performance,/is one of those nice rhetorical set pieces Ovid loved…”—before settling down to the lurid story of Byblis’ passion for her brother Caunus. Slavitt speaks eloquently in his introduction of the reader’s (and the translator’s) reaction to the poem as a “leap of sympathy, intuition, understanding, and, finally, collaboration.” But this seems to go beyond collaboration; it is in fact editorial intervention, or perhaps intrusion would be a more accurate description.

  Fortunately such passages are rare. No one can deny the merits of Slavitt’s version. His English hexameter is a great success—a supple, fluid, and versatile medium that does Ovid’s loosening of the Virgilian line full justice. And at his best he is very good indeed. Here, for example (and for comparison with Hughes), is his version of the metamorphosis of Actaeon.

  Without her quiver of arrows, she makes do with splashing his head

  with water she kicks in his direction in playful anger—

  or is it real? He has no idea! His wits have left him.

  Utterly dumb, he can barely comprehend her words

  as she speaks to him: “Now, that you’ve seen a naked goddess, go

  and tell whomever you will, or whomever you can….” On his head,

  where the water drops landed, his horns are already sprouting out

  in a rack of impressive antlers that spread out from the crowns

  of mature stags. His ears are sharpening into pointed

  excrescences, while his hands are pointing, becoming hoofs,

  and his arms are turning to forelegs. His skin

  is a hide, and his heart is cold with terror. He looks down into the water’s surface

  sees what he has become, then turns in panic and runs

  faster than he has ever been able to run. He attempts

  to vent his rage at what’s happened, give voice to his woe, but words

  fail, have fled….

  OVID, AS THE editors of After Ovid remarked, is once again enjoying a boom. There is at least one more translation of the Metamorphoses under way; excerpts from it have appeared in literary magazines12and the finished version is to be published by Norton. It is by Charles Martin, a well-known poet13and also the author of a brilliant translation of Catullus, which was reviewed in these columns some years ago.14Like Slavitt, he avoids breaks in the narrative and stanza form, using one line throughout, an elegantly varied version of the standard English pentameter. Here is the fate of Actaeon:

  …[Diana] managed to turn sideways and look back

  as if she wished she had her arrows handy—

  but making do with what she had, scooped up

  water and flung it in Actaeon’s face,

  sprinkling his hair with the avenging droplets,

  and adding words that prophesied his doom:

  “Now you may tell of how you saw me naked,

  tell it if you can, you may.”

  No further warning:

  the brow which she has sprinkled jets the horns

  of a lively stag; she elongates his neck.

  narrows the tips of his ears to tiny points,

  converts his hands to hooves, his arms to legs,

  and clothes his body in a spotted pelt.

  Lastly the goddess endows him with trembling fear:

  that heroic son of Autonoe flees,

  astonished to find himself so swift a runner.

  But when he stopped and looked into a pool

  at the reflection of his horns and muzzle—

  “Poor me!” he tried to say, but no words came….

  This is not only more faithful to Ovid than either of the other two versions (Slavitt’s “in playful anger—or is it real?” and Hughes’s “hunter’s tunic slid from his dappled hide” are both additions) but also captures an important feature of the original which the others have missed. They attribute the original action, the sprinkling of the water, to Diana, but after that the transformation is described as a process, a sort of organic growth. Martin uses active verbs; each detail of the transformation is a separate action on the part of the goddess. And this is true to Ovid’s text, where a remarkable repetition, the -at ending of the verbs—dat, dat, cacuminat, mutat, velat—she gives him the horns, gives length to his neck, points his ears, changes his forearms to legs, and covers his body with a pelt—presents the stages of Actaeon’s transformation as the whiplash blows inflicted by divine fury. Martin’s complete text is clearly something to look forward to with high expectations.

  I WROTE THOSE words in 1998, and now at last we have the whole of Ovid’s masterpiece in Charles Martin’s translation, which surpasses in its brilliance and accuracy even my high expectations. From the very first lines the general reader recognizes the expertise of a translator who is also a widely admired poet, and the scholar admires the skill of a poet who is also a scholar and literary critic. But the translation’s prime virtue is its irresistible readability; its flowing, melodious lines sweep you on from the end of one story into the beginning of the next, from the creation of the world to Ovid’s final claim: that after his death he will be “immortal as the name I leave behind /…my words will be upon the people’s lips…then I will live forever in my fame.” It is a claim that over the centuries proved true, and Martin’s splendid version of Ovid’s masterpiece will give it a fresh lease of life for a long time to come.

  —Bernard Knox

  May 2003

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the editors of the following publications, in which portions of this work have previously appeared:

  Arion: “The Wrath of Juno,” “Deucalion and Pyrrha,” “Medea,” “The Plague at Aegina,” and “Cephalus and Procris”

  Barrow Street: “The House of Rumor”

  Cumberland Poetry Review: “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela”

  Eclectic Literary Forum: “The Sun and Leucothoë”

  The Formalist: “The Mortal Child of an Immortal’s Lust”

  Parnassus: “Polyphemus, Galatea, and Acis”

  Pivot: “The Daughters of Pierus”

  The Tennessee Quarterly: “Echo and Narcissus”

  TriQuarterly: “Of Praise and Punishment: Arachne”

  I am grateful for the frequent PSC-CUNY Research Awards that have given me time to work on this project.

  I have benefited greatly from the very close attention that two advisory editors gave to earlier versions of this translation. Bernard Knox’s enthusiastic encouragement for this undertaking has been a source of inspiration to me from the beginning, and his comments on that earlier text were invaluable to me. I am similarly indebted to John Hollander, whose superb ear helped me find my way into Ovid’s verse; his conversations on Ovid and on translation
are warmly recalled.

  William S. Anderson’s two-volume commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been my constant companion in this venture, a treasure for any reader of the poem.

  Over the years, friends have offered advice, suggestions, solutions, partial solutions, and venues wherein I have had the chance to talk (formally or informally) about my work and read from it: my thanks to John Gery, Dana Gioia and Michael Peich, Rachel Hadas, Emily Martin, David Mason, Wyatt Prunty, Mark Rudman, Nigel Thompson, Rosanna Warren, and the late Katharine Washburn.

  John Mardirosian first welcomed me to Norton; my manuscript and I both have learned much from Ann R. Tappert’s thoughtful copyediting, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge Brian Baker’s continuing helpfulness. I am most grateful to Carol Bemis, whose enthusiasm, dedication, and patience have done much to make these remarks both possible and necessary.

  METAMORPHOSES

  A NOTE ON THIS TRANSLATION

  Ovid ends the Metamorphoses with the word vivam, which I have unremarkably translated as “I will live.” A poet survives only if his poem does, and if his poem survives, it does so either in its own language or in translation; there are no other possibilities. In our time, the Metamorphoses has many more readers in English and in other living languages than it has in the Latin in which Ovid composed it: this does not mean that it is less alive in Latin than in translation, only that it is less frequently alive in Latin. The loss of Latin as a living language makes translation essential if most of us are to enjoy Ovid’s work at all, but it also means that an entire world of connotation and association has been lost with it.