Metamorphoses

Ovid's Metamorphoses is a collection various Greek and Roman Myths in an epic poem format. These stories are used to tell the history of mankind in a way and explain events in our world. Ovid does not provide a direct re-telling of these myths but rather often twits them, highlighting details or aspects that are often odd while using humor at the same time. There is a mix of comedies and tragedies. I also noticed the way he would be telling one story and suddenly you are in another. He is able to transport you from one tale to the middle of another, it should be jarring but it works. This is one of my favourite classical works and a masterpieces of Latin literature.

I'm reviewing books I have read in the past but never had a chance to add reviews.

This book should be an absolute delight to anyone interested in European literature or art. Written in the first century AD it represents the first effort to anthologize Greek mythology and integrate the whole into the history of the Roman empire. I only regret that as undergraduate I never took a course with this work on the program.

Having read the Metamorphoses without the benefit a classics professor to guide me I am quite glad that it was not the first collection of Greek myths that I read. I had earlier read Thomas Bullfinch's and Edith Hamilton's anthologies both of which were written for individual reading without the benefit of academic supervision. My advice would be read either Bullfinch or Hamilton first and then at a later point in time when in the mood to return to Hellenistic culture read Ovid's work.

Perhaps the single greatest contribution feminist scholarship has made to human knowledge is accuracy. Before the mid-20th century, the vast majority of scholars and writers were men who viewed the past through a distinctly masculine lens, then articulated that lens as the absence of gender—a masculine universal. This profoundly distorted their understanding of the world. By taking gender and sexuality as both subject and tool of analysis, feminist scholarship has made possible a far more rigorous and accurate accounting of the past, of literature, of reality.

So it should come as no surprise that the foremost contribution Stephanie McCarter touts in the introduction and translator’s note to her explicitly feminist new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is its accuracy. Of course, being unversed in Latin, I sort of have to take her word for it. McCarter notes that her translation is 12,971 lines, compared to Ovid’s 11,995. Other English verse translations have tended to run far longer, topping off at Allen Mandelbaum’s 17,928. According to McCarter, in trying to capture the nuance and poetry of Ovid’s words in English, past translators added adjectives that sexualized and feminized Ovid’s women, goddesses, and nymphs—many of whom in fact explicitly eschew femininity and sex. A word McCarter translates simply as “lips” becomes, for one translator, “teasingly tempting lips,” for another a “darling little mouth” (xxxv)—and suddenly we’re starting to see where all those extra lines are coming from.

At the same time, male translators and scholars have euphemized rape. Metamorphoses, McCarter observes, contains around 50 incidents of rape or attempted rape. Translators have used words like “ravish” or “plunder,” when in fact “the specific language Ovid employs to designate rape is consistent with Roman legal terms denoting forced sexual penetration” (xxiv). For McCarter, closer attention to Ovid’s themes of sexual violence, women’s agency and disempowerment, and gender and the body, produces a more accurate translation, even as producing a more accurate translation brings forward those themes.

McCarter is a scholar first, a poet second. I happen to have that 17,928 line Mandelbaum translation on my shelf, and at first glance, Mandelbaum—a poet—looks like, well, the better poet. Mandelbaum’s line is more graceful, his choice of words more considered, his use of meter more artful. But I’ll tell you, when you’ve been racing through McCarter’s concise, forward-moving translation, trying to read one of Ovid’s stories in Mandelbaum just feels tiresome. Line by line, McCarter may not be much of a poet, but the overall effect her verse produces is extraordinarily powerful. If Mandelbaum’s iambic pentameter is aiming for Shakespeare—artful, nimble, sophisticated—McCarter’s verse is more Kit Marlowe—less virtuoso, perhaps, but incredibly powerful in the overall effect it produces.

So much for my (grossly underinformed) review of McCarter’s translation. What about Ovid’s poem? (Of course, I haven’t really read Ovid’s poem. It may make sense, with prose, to speak of an English translation and its foreign original as the same piece of writing. To translate a poem is to write a new poem. However accurate the meaning, poetry is meaning and form, and form doesn’t translate.) I read Metamorphoses because of my sense that it is a foundational text in just about any articulation of a queer literary canon. I was not in the least disappointed. This is a very queer poem—even (perhaps especially) when it is dealing with themes of sexual violence. It is also stunningly beautiful.

Iphis’s transformation from a boy into a girl so that she—he—could marry her—his—beloved Ianthe. How many years before literature gave us another such queer wedding?

Cyparissus’s love for the stag.

Pythagoras’s glorious exegesis of a universe defined by ceaseless change and transformation, embedded within a fierce defense of, of all things, vegetarianism!

And is it possible to imagine a more enigmatic and human expression of the pain of grief than Orpheus’s famous journey to the underworld?

They weren’t far from the surface of the earth
when, scared that she might falter and intent
on seeing her, the lover turned his eyes.
She slipped back instantly. The wretch reached out,
attempting both to catch and to be caught,
but only grabbed thin air. The wife, now dying
again, made no complaint about her husband,
for what could she complain about except
that she was loved?

The poem is filled with thousands of references to Greek and Roman history, mythology, and literature that I barely understood or didn’t catch at all. McCarter’s end notes are concise and useful, but even without the notes, I think it was ultimately a source of wonder, rather than frustration, that this poem comes to me from a world simultaneously so alien and unfamiliar, and so intimately known that it is almost remembered—all those told and retold myths I have read, heard, seen since I was a small child.

Nothing quite so strange, nor quite so near to home.

Este libro escrito por el romano Ovidio, en el año 8 AD, lo leí dos veces. La primera lectura casi termina en abandono. Era una versión sin notas, por lo que fue difícil saber cuál era el contexto relacional y temporal de muchos de los personajes y de sus míticas vivencias. Sin ese contexto, muchas de las casi 250 metamorfosis que se cuentan se volvían entre aburridas y sin sentido. Me paré antes de la mitad (200 páginas). En esa primera lectura un par de historias, incluso descontextualizadas, fueron muy significativas, por lo que me busqué una versión anotada (más de 1000 notas) que me permitió entender mucho mejor cada mito y su concatenación con la cosmovisión mítica Griega. No soy novato en mitología griega, pero incluso con esa base, fue fundamental contar con la versión anotada. Además, las deidades griegas se conocieron con otros nombres en Roma, lo que puede llevar a confusiones o directamente a perderse.

Esta obra es una especie de compendio mítico grecolatino. Recoge toda la sabiduría contenida en los mitos de estos dos pueblos. Inicia con una especie de génesis que plantea de entrada la integración de lo sagrado y espiritual con lo profano y material. Muchos Dioses, ninfas, y otros seres mitológicos entran en relación con los humanos. Son relaciones amorosas, venganzas, odios, repudios, etc. Nos deja claro el origen de las ideas monárquicas humanas. Muchos personajes reclaman orígenes divinos míticos, generalmente resultantes de hermosas humanas que seducen a bravos Dioses, para fundamentar hechos extraordinarios que llevaban a cabo los hijos reyes para hacerse así con el poder sobre otros humanos. Es de estas fusiones entre divinidades y humanos de donde sale el título del libro. Aunque hay también metamorfosis "específicas" pero menos creíbles. Todas las metamorfosis, hacen referencia a comportamientos humanos concretos.

A mi me encanta Shakespeare y cuando leí en las metamorfosis la historia de Píramo y Tisbe me dije, mira, Sheiks también leyó este libro, solo que él se fue a escribir después Romeo y Julieta. También van a encontrar el mito de Narciso, van a entender lo que significa caer en los brazos de Morfeo, verán caer a Ícaro, conocerán a Cupido y sus peligrosas flechas, presenciarán la tonta decisión del rey Midas, y conocerán en un inmenso final a la Filosofía de Pitágoras, entre muchos otros hechos conocidos en Occidente. Aparecen rápidamente personajes como Circe, Odiseo, Aquiles, Paris, Eneo, y por supuesto Zeus. Son 15 libros cada uno con unos 5 o 6 mitos. El mito más largo puede extenderse por unas 6 páginas. Los cortos una o dos y la mayoría se extienden por unas tres páginas. Con una versión anotada, no necesitan conocer previamente la mitología griega para disfrutar de las metamorfosis.

This book is phenomenal.

I had read parts of the Metamorphoses in high school, and my focus then was on the language and structure of the text, not so much on the stories. That's just what happens when you're trying to learn how to translate texts from Latin.

When I picked up the book again earlier this year, I had no such restrictions (and no deadline) and I was looking forward to reading Ovid's history of the world - from its creation to Julius Caesar.

What I was looking forward to even more, was to read about the myths and legends that have informed so many other works from Dante to our own contemporaries like Ali Smith, and find out more about Ovid's view of the world in 8 AD.

Yes, Ovid's view. The Metamorphoses may be a collection of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but there is a slant to them that is influenced by Ovid's view. Some of the myths differ from the earlier versions found in the works of Hesiod and Homer, and then there are stories about Julius Caesar and Pythagoras that are not based on ancient myths but are informed by Ovid's time. The book, or rather the last book of the 15 books of poems that make of the Metamorphoses, ends with Ovid praising Augustus. Incidentally, it was Augustus who banished Ovid from Rome at about the same time that the book was finished - the reason for this remains one of the unsolved mysteries of history.

Anyway, more about the book: The book starts with the creation of the world and tells of how the world was transformed by the elements and by man, going through different ages, and finally focusing on the stories of gods and men and the many transformations that take place when they interacts.

Transformation, as the title says, is the theme of the book: some are literal when people are transformed into plants or animals, some are less tangible, for example when Medea loses herself to witchcraft, and finally the philosophical theories that Ovid describes in the story about Pythagoras, who believes in a continuous and fluid world in which everything is temporary, and in which everything is in a state that changes into something else, and in which existence is thus infinite.

It's very zen for a 2000 year old book (that is not a major religious text) right?

This probably is what surprised me most about the book: how many times I caught myself being astounded to read about concepts that seem a lot more modern.

Medea and mental illness, for example. Ovid does not tell the full story (and yes I will dig out Euripides' work to find out what drove her over the edge!) but by his leaving out such detail, I can't but marvel about what Ovid's audience would have made of it. Would they also have wondered about what caused her breakdown?

Or, the stories of individuals struggling against higher powers, fate, or society.

Ancient gods were assholes. Not many of the stories have happy endings, and in some, even happy-ish endings are pretty sad. However, all of them have a message, which is why Ovid selected them, and which is why so many of the stories have permeated Western culture. Even if they now only exist by reference to a name and most people won't know the story behind the reference.

My favourite of those, probably is the story of Arachne. I'm not a fan of spiders, and I had imagined all sorts of variations of a horrible monster to be the origin of all spider-related words. But no. Arachne was a master waver who dared to enter into a weaving contest with Athena. Long story short, in Ovid's version, Arachne dared to show how unfair the gods and goddesses are and she dared to defeat Athena. Athena throws a fit of rage and destroys Arachne's tapestry. Arachne hangs herself in a fit of rage. (Yeah, I don't get this part - revenge suicide???) Athena, again, out of rage over Arachne's suicide turns her and her into a spider.

Now, this is not the most logical of stories, granted, but I love that the story's metaphorical content is still applicable. I won't be able to look at spiders with quite the same level of aversion again. Well, some of them at least. Most will still freak me out.

So, yes, this book took me a few months to finish, but it was a lot to digest. A lot of stories that required some thought, a lot that just needed a break before getting to the next one. It was an amazing book. After 2000 years, this is still entertaining, thought provoking, and beautiful.

In his epilogue, Ovid proclaims that his work will make him immortal.
Ovid does still live in his fame, and for all the right reasons.

Lastly, a word on the Penguin 2004 edition with David Raeburn's translation: It rocks. There are plenty of free or cheap translations avaialble on the internet. I tried a few of them, but none really worked. I found those translations to be either too literal or too liberal. Raeburn's work combines a great balance of keeping close to the original text while still creating a work of poetry, and even keeping the original rhyme scheme.

My thoughts on this book can be summed up in one simple GIF:



But let's get deeper into this phenomenal book, shall we? Metamorphoses is an 8 AD Latin narrative poem by the Roman poet Ovid. Comprising 11,995 lines, 15 books and over 250 myths, the poem chronicles the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. It is probably the book with the largest scope that I've ever read:
beginning with the creation of the world from Chaos, and ending with Rome in Ovid's own lifetime, Metamorphoses is one rollercoaster of a read.

There's many things you can say about good ole Ovid but not that he wasn't ambitious! He drags his readers through time and space, from beginnings to endings, from life to death, from moments of delicious joy to episodes of depravity and abjection.

Metamorphosis or transformation is a unifying theme amongst the episodes of the the epic. Ovid raises its significance explicitly in the opening lines of the poem: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; ("I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities;”).

Accompanying this theme is often violence, inflicted upon a victim whose transformation becomes part of the natural landscape. There is a great variety among the types of transformations that take place: from human to inanimate object (Nileus), constellation (Ariadne's Crown), animal (Perdix); from animal (ants) and fungus (mushrooms) to human; of sex (hyenas); and of colour (pebbles). The metamorphoses themselves are often located metatextually within the poem, through grammatical or narratorial transformations. At other times, transformations are developed into humour or absurdity, such that, slowly, the reader realizes that Ovid plays his audience for a good laugh.

n  All is subject to change and nothing to death. // All is in flux.n

Metamorphoses is more than a collection of stories of mythical adventures, it is a mediation on the theme of transformation in all its myriad forms. Ovid uses this motif as the unifying thread of his tales, emphasising it as a universal principle which explains the ever-changing nature of the world. Moreover, across the fifteen books that form Metamorphoses, Ovid examines a large number of themes such as poetry, politics, identity, immortality, love and lust, violence, morality, and even art.

Ovid’s graphic tales of metamorphosis begin with the story of Primal Chaos; a messy lump of discordant atoms, and shapeless prototypes of land, sea and air. This unruly form floated about in nothingness until some unnamed being disentangled it. Voilà! The earth is fashioned in the form of a perfectly round ball. Oceans take shape and rise in waves spurred on by winds. Springs, pools and lakes appear and above the valleys and plains and mountains is the sky. Lastly, humankind is made and so begins the mythical Ages of Man. And, as each Age progresses – from Gold, to Silver, to Bronze and finally to Iron – humankind becomes increasingly corrupt.

Drawing on the Greek mythology inherited by the Romans, Ovid directs his dramas one after another, relentlessly bombarding his readers with beautiful metrics and awe-inspiring imagery as that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, Arachne, Daphne and Apollo, Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan. Hundreds of hapless mortals, heroes, heroines, gods and goddesses rise victorious, experience defeat, endure rape, and inevitably metamorphose into something other than their original forms. Chaos begins the world, and so into Chaos we are born, live and die. As the offspring of the Age of Iron, we must endure and struggle against corruption, brutality and injustice.

n  If wishes were horses, though, beggars would ride.n

In many ways, Ovid’s gods are like the gods in other classical epic poems – anthropomorphic, omnipotent, and meddling in human affairs. However, Ovid’s gods differ from the usual epic gods in their behavior. In Metamorphoses, the gods lack moral authority in regard to their interactions with humans and among themselves. The gods are a ‘divine machine’ of metamorphosis. Even though on a few occasions this change inflicted upon humans is the result of a just reward or punishment, on most occasions, it is caused by anger, jealousy, lust, or simple cruelty.

Metamorphoses is an epic about the act of silencing. Jealousy, spite, lust and punishment are consistently present in Ovid’s chaotic world. So is rape. Rape is undoubtedly the most controversial and confronting theme of the Metamorphoses. It is the ultimate manifestation of male power in the poem and the hundreds of transformations that occur are often the means of escaping it.

An early tale of attempted rape is narrated in Book I, involving the nymph, Daphne and the god, Apollo. Intent on raping Daphne, Apollo chases her through the forest until, utterly exhausted, she calls out to her father, the river god Peneus to rescue her:

n  “Help, father!” she called. “If your streams have divine powers! Destroy the shape, which pleases too well, with transformation!”n

Peneus answers his daughter’s entreaty, and Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. Where does a modern audience begin with a story such as Daphne and Apollo? How do we begin to unravel the hundreds of other such tales that follow it?

When Daphne begs her father to alter her body to avoid the advances of the god Apollo, she ends up removing herself from human society. Once her transformation is complete she will no longer be able to possess her human body again. Her active rejection of the god's sexual advances, therefore, directly condemns her to an eternity of Otherness and utter lack of agency.

Because Daphne’s transformation was in an attempt to defend herself from Apollo, her figure was kept as close to living human beings as possible, while being removed from the sensible experience that could render them vulnerable to pain or undesired sex. Although Apollo could not rape her, as she was in the form of a tree, she was still vulnerable to his touch and caress.

In Ovid's tales physical metamorphosis becomes an example of "proper" female behavior. This is why when a woman in transformed within an Ovidian tale the transformation is permanent. In cases when the girl herself is transformed because of her attempt to resist the sexual advance, she faces exclusion from society. Metamorphoses presents a bleak, possibly authentic, analysis of the role of women in society, and what happens when they have no agency.

Nonetheless, for modern readers, and I'd assume especially women, the constant rape scenes in Metamorphoses can be challenging to read. They don't take away from the book's brilliance, but they are something that should be kept in mind before jumping into Ovid's world!

When reading Metamorphoses you will recall many names and myths. I was happy to see how much Homer influenced Ovid. It was good to see the gang was all here, the gang being Odysseus and his crew, Circe, Achilles, Ajax, the Trojan War ("We gave our youth to our loved ones, the rest of our lives to Greece."). It's incredible how effortlessly Ovid manages to pack Homer's massive poems into the last books of his own epic. We love successful fanfiction!

One of my favorite mythical couples that I'd love seeing in Ovid's book were Orpheus and Eurydice. Ever since we did a gymnastics show about this particular myth back in 2011, these two have never left me. When I fell in love with the musical Hadestown last year, I couldn't help but think about them and the fate they shared. Theirs is just such a tragic tale. And I kept asking myself: why did he turn around? The answer Ovid gives isn't all that satisfying: "But Orpheus was frightened his love was falling behind; he was desperate to see her. He turned, and at once she sank back into the dark." But it's a possibility. What I loved most about their tale in Metamorphoses is what follows after:

n  She stretched out her arms to him, struggled to feel his hands on her own, but all she was able to catch, poor soul, was the yielding air. / And now, as she died for the second time, she never complained that her husband had failed her – what could she complain of, except that he’d loved her?n

I know, it's not the most feminist, but I could actually tear up about that part. How beautifully tragic is that? I also loved that Ovid then proceeded on telling the story how Orpheus turned from all womankind after that ordeal and became gay – what an icon!

The ending these two get in the end, in the tale about Orpheus' death, is also beautiful: "Orpheus’ shade passed under the earth. He recognised all the places he’d seen before. As he searched the Elysian Fields, he found the wife he had lost and held her close in his arms. / At last the lovers could stroll together, side by side – or she went ahead and he followed, then Orpheus ventured in front and knew he could now look back on his own Eurydice safely."

Another fan-favorite I loved to encounter is Lucifer Morningstar. In Metamorphoses, Ovid describes him as "the last to leave the heavens": "Aurora, watchful in the reddening dawn, threw wide her crimson doors and rose-filled halls; the Stellae took flight, in marshaled order set by Lucifer who left his station last." I'm pretty sure that Lucifer=Satan was not a thing yet when Ovid was writing his tales but I'd be curious to see how his texts (and others of the period) influenced Christian beliefs.

Another thing I'd like to research is how Ovid influenced artists of subsequent centuries and millennia to come. In some cases his legacy is more than clear: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet wouldn't exist without Ovid's tale about Pyramus and Thisbe (two young lovers forbidden to wed because of a long-standing rivalry between their families), same with Ted Hughes' 1997 Tales from Ovid. No Dante without Ovid. Furthermore, there are countless paintings and sculptures immortalising Ovid's Metamorphoses, like the 17th-century sculpture Apollo and Daphne by Gianlorenzo Bernini, or Bacchus and Ariadne, an oil painting by Titian produced in 1523. But I'm sure that there are hundreds of instances where I missed a reference or am not aware of how that particular tale has influenced the writers I came to admire and love.

n  As yellow wax melts in a gentle flame, or the frost on a winter morning thaws in the rays of the sunshine, so Narcissus faded away and melted, slowly consumed by the fire inside him.n

Another example would be Echo and Narcissus. Theirs is an immensely popular story nowadays, but it's one we probably wouldn't know had Ovid not written it down in his Metamorphoses. The introduction of the myth of the mountain nymph Echo into the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who rejected Echo and fell in love with his own reflection, appears to have been his invention. And so, Ovid's version influenced the presentation of the myth in later Western art and literature.

As I can't go over all of my favorite myths, I though I'd leave you with a list of them:

Book I: The Creation; The Four Ages; The Giants; The Flood; Daphne; Io
Book II: Europa
Book III: Narcissus and Echo
Book IV: Mars and Venus; Perseus
Book V: Minerva and the Muses; The Rape of Proserpina
Book VI: Arachne; Niobe; Tereus, Procne and Philomela
Book VII: Medea and Jason; Theseus and Aegeus; Minos and Aeacus
Book VIII: Scylla and Minos; The Minotaur and Ariadne; Daedalus and Icarus; Erysichthon
Book IX: Acheloüs and Hercules; The Death of Hercules
Book X: Orpheus and Eurydice; Ganymede; Myrrha; Venus and Adonis
Book XI: Midas; Ceyx and Alcyone
Book XII: The Greeks at Aulis; Rumour; The Death of Achilles
Book XIII: The Judgment of Arms; The Sufferings of Hecuba; Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus; Glaucus and Syclla
Book XIV: Ulysses’ Men and Polyphemus’ Cave; Ulysses and Circe; Picus, Canens and Circe; The Apotheosis of Aeneas
Book XV: Pythagoras; The Apotheosis of Julius Caesar; Epilogue

Ovid's Metamorphoses has had a long and fascinating history. Its presence among the Western literary canon has functioned as a strange but valuable mirror that has, for over two millennia, reflected social, moral and artistic customs. As David Raeburn so brilliantly recalls in his introduction to the text in this Penguin Classics edition: if you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you will return intoxicated after discovering that "It's all Ovid!"

YouTube kanalımda İtalyan Edebiyatı'na başlangıç yapabileceğiniz kitap önerilerimden bahsettim: https://youtu.be/nTxrw0TosEg

Henüz bu kitabı tam olarak anlamaya kapasitem yetmediği için 5 yıldız verip faydalanabildiğim kadar faydalanmakla yetindim. Yunan mitolojisi okumalarınızdan sonraki durağınız Ovidius'un Dönüşümler adlı kitabı olmalı. Yanınızda bir mitoloji sözlüğü bulunsa iyi olur, zira bu kitap bugüne kadar okuduğum en ağır kitaplardan biri.