Ovid's Metamorphoses

The only way this could be better is if Ovidius himself recited it while I reclined on a couch listening to him.





And while the other creatures on all fours
Look downwards, man was made to hold his head
Erect in majesty and see the sky,
And raise his eyes to the bright stars above.
----




And out on soaking wings the south wind flew,
His ghastly features veiled in deepest gloom.
His beard was sodden with rain, his white hair drenched;Mists wreathed his brow and streaming water fell
From wings and chest; and when in giant hands
He crushed the hanging clouds, the thunder crashed
And storms of blinding rain poured down from heaven
----




Seeing a man, all naked as they were,
The nymphs, beating their breasts, filled the whole grove
With sudden screams and clustered round Diana
To clothe her body with their own. But she
Stood taller, a head taller than them all;
And as the clouds are coloured when the sun
Glows late and low or like the crimson dawn,
So deeply blushed Diana, caught unclothed.
----




Distraught he turned towards the face again;
His tears rippled the pool, and darkly then
The troubled water veiled the fading form,
And, as it vanished, ‘Stay’, he shouted, ‘stay!
Oh, cruelty to leave your lover so!
Let me but gaze on what I may not touch
And feed the aching fever in my heart.’
Then in his grief he tore his robe and beat
His pale cold fists upon his naked breast,
And on his breast a blushing redness spread
Like apples, white in part and partly red,
Or summer grapes whose varying skins assume
Upon the ripening vine a blushing bloom.
And this he saw reflected in the pool,
Now still again, and could endure no more.
But as wax melts before a gentle fire,
Or morning frosts beneath the rising sun,
So, by love wasted, slowly he dissolves.
----




The crew, bewildered, rowed with dogged strokes
And spread the sails, twin means to make her move.
But ivy creeping, winding, clinging, bound
The oars and decked the sails in heavy clusters.
Bacchus himself, grape-bunches garlanding
His brow, brandished a spear that vine-leaves twined,And at his feet fierce spotted panthers lay,
Tigers and lynxes too, in phantom forms.
The men leapt overboard, all driven mad
Or panic-stricken. Medon’s body first
Began to blacken and his spine was arched
Into a curve. “What magic shape is this?”
Cried Lycabas, but, even as he spoke,
His mouth widened, his nose curved out, his skin
Turned hard and scaly. Libys, trying to pull
The thwarting oars, saw his hands suddenly
Shrink—hands no longer—fins they might be called.Another, when he meant to clasp his arms
Around a hawser, had no arms and jumped
Limbless and bending backwards into the waves.His tail forked to a sickle-shape and curved
Like a half moon. All round the ship they leapt
In showers of splashing spray. Time after time
They surfaced and fell back into the sea,
Playing like dancers, frolicking about
In fun, wide nostrils taking in the sea
To blow it out again. Of the whole twenty
(That was the crew she carried) I alone
Remained. As I stood trembling, cold with fear,
Almost out of my wits, the god spoke words
Of comfort: “Cast your fear aside. Sail onTo Naxos.” Landing there, I joined his cult
And now am Bacchus’ faithful follower.’
----




Losing no time, malign Tisiphone
Seized a torch steeped in blood, put on a robe
All red with dripping gore and wound a snake
About her waist, and started from her home;
And with her as she went were Grief and Dread,
Terror, and Madness too with frantic face.
She stood upon the threshold of the palace;
The door-posts shook, it’s said; the maple doors
Turned pale, the sunlight fled.
----




The dragons and set out in search of Hunger,
And found her in a stubborn stony field,
Grubbing with nails and teeth the scanty weeds.
Her hair was coarse, her face sallow, her eyes
Sunken; her lips crusted and white; her throat
Scaly with scurf. Her parchment skin revealed
The bowels within; beneath her hollow loins
Jutted her withered hips; her sagging breasts
Seemed hardly fastened to her ribs; her stomach
Only a void; her joints wasted and huge,
Her knees like balls, her ankles grossly swollen.
----




The gods agreed. His royal consort too
Seemed not to mind his words, until the last,
Aimed at herself, received an angry frown.
Meanwhile whatever parts the flames could ravage
Mulciber had removed; of Hercules
No shape remained that might be recognized,
Nothing his mother gave him, traces now
Only of Jove. And as a snake will slough
Age with its skin and revel in fresh life,
Shining resplendent in its sleek new scales,
So Hercules, his mortal frame removed,
Through all his finer parts* gained force and vigour,
In stature magnified, transformed into
A presence clothed in majesty and awe.
The Almighty Father carried him away,
Swept in his four-horsed chariot through the clouds,
And stationed him among the shining stars.
Atlas could feel his weight.
----




Exhausted by her quest, and lay face down,
With tumbled hair, among the fallen leaves.
Often the wood-nymphs tried to cradle her
In their soft arms and often sought to salve
The fever of her love, and comforted
With soothing words her heart that heard no more.
She lay in silence, clutching the small sedge,
And watering the greensward with her tears.
And these, men say, the Naiads made a rill,
For ever flowing—what could they give more?
At once, as resin drips from damaged bark,
Or asphalt oozes from the earth’s dark womb,
Or, when the west wind breathes its balm, the sunUnlocks the water that the frost has bound,
So, wasting by her weeping all away,
Byblis became a spring.
----




Venus’ day came, the holiest festival
All Cyprus celebrates; incense rose high
And heifers, with their wide horns gilded, fell
Beneath the blade that struck their snowy necks.Pygmalion, his offering given, prayed
Before the altar, half afraid, “Vouchsafe
,O Gods, if all things you can grant, my bride
Shall be”—he dared not say my ivory girl—
“The living likeness of my ivory girl.”
And golden Venus (for her presence graced
Her feast) knew well the purpose of his prayer;
And, as an omen of her favouring power,
Thrice did the flame burn bright and leap up high.
And he went home, home to his heart’s delight,
And kissed her as she lay, and she seemed warm;
Again he kissed her and with marvelling touch
Caressed her breast; beneath his touch the flesh
Grew soft, its ivory hardness vanishing,
And yielded to his hands, as in the sun
Wax of Hymettus softens and is shaped
By practised fingers into many forms,
And usefulness acquires by being used.
His heart was torn with wonder and misgiving,
Delight and terror that it was not true!
Again and yet again he tried his hopes—
She was alive! The pulse beat in her veins!
And then indeed in words that overflowed
He poured his thanks to Venus, and at last
His lips pressed real lips, and she, his girl,
Felt every kiss, and blushed, and shyly raised
Her eyes to his and saw the world and him.
----




He drove his chariot against his foe
And cried, his strong arm brandishing his spear,
‘Whoever you are, take comfort when you die,
That great Achilles killed you!’ Those high words
His huge spear followed fast. Yet, though no fault
Deflected the sure shaft, that steely point
Achieved no good: it only bruised his breast
As if the blow were blunt. ‘You goddess’ son’,
Cried Cycnus,’—Yes, I know you by repute—
Why are you so surprised that I’ve no wound?’
(Surprised he was) ‘This helmet that you see
With chestnut horse-hair crest, this convex shield,
My left arm’s load, they’re not for my defence,
They’re for adornment. That’s why Mars too wears
His armour. Strip their guardian services
Away—I’ll leave the field without a scratch.
It’s something surely to be born the son,
Not of a Nereid, but him who rules
Nereus and Nereids and the whole wide sea.’

(Oh snap!)
----




And now that terror of the ranks of Troy,
The grace and guardian of the name of Greece,
Achilles, prince unconquerable in war
Had burned upon the pyre. The selfsame god
Had armed him and consumed him in the end.
Now he is ashes; of that prince so great
Some little thing is left, hardly enough
To fill an urn. Yet still his glory lives
To fill the whole wide world.
----




Our bodies too are always, endlessly
Changing; what we have been, or are today,
We shall not be tomorrow. Years ago
We hid, mere seeds and promise, in the womb;
Nature applied her artist’s hands to free
Us from our swollen mother’s narrow home,
And sent us forth into the open air.
Born to the shining day, the infant lies
Strengthless, but soon on all fours like the beasts
Begins to crawl, and then by slow degrees,
Weak-kneed and wobbling, clutching for support
Some helping upright, learns at last to stand.
Then swift and strong he traverses the span
Of youth, and when the years of middle life
Have given their service too, he glides away
Down the last sunset slope of sad old age—
Old age that saps and mines and overthrows
The strength of earlier years. Milo, grown old,
Sheds tears to see how shrunk and flabby hang
Those arms on which the muscles used to swell,
Massive like Hercules; and, when her glass
Shows every time-worn wrinkle, Helen weeps
And wonders why she twice* was stolen for love.
Time, the devourer, and the jealous years
With long corruption ruin all the world
And waste all things in slow mortality.
----




EPILOGUE

Now stands my task accomplished, such a work
As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword
Nor the devouring ages can destroy.
Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim
But to my mortal body, end the span
Of my uncertain years. Yet I’ll be borne,
The finer part of me, above the stars,
Immortal, and my name shall never die.
Wherever through the lands beneath her sway
The might of Rome extends, my words shall be
Upon the lips of men. If truth at all
Is stablished by poetic prophecy,
My fame shall live to all eternity.


(Bravo!)

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.

The Romans have a reputation as the great copycats of antiquity. After all, these were a people who borrowed a large amount of their culture, including most of their gods, from their neighbors. This reputation for imitation certainly holds true when looking at Roman literature. Plautus and Terence borrowed wholesale from Menander and other Greek playwrights. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, for all of its merits, is basically restating the views of Epicurus. Catullus and Propertius imitated Callimachus. Horace imitated the Greek lyric poets (the Odes) and Archilochus (the Epodes). Virgil was inspired by Theocritus (the Eclogues), Hesiod (the Georgics), and Homer (the Aeneid).



“In all this world, no thing can keep its form. For all things flow; all things are born to change their shapes. And time itself is like a river, flowing on an endless course.” Ovid, Metamorphoses

And then there’s Ovid. By 8 BC, Virgil, Horace, and Propertius were all dead, leaving Ovid as the foremost living poet in Rome. By the time of Ovid’s death around 17/18 AD, Ovid’s poetic output was more than that of Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, and Horace combined. Ovid wrote in a variety of poetic genres, and while some of his early love poetry was imitative he also showed an originality that was unique among his peers. First in the Heroides, and later with his masterpiece the Metamorphoses Ovid showed an originality of thought that causes him to stand out amongst his contemporaries to this day.



The Metamorphoses is a long poem divided into 15 books. The poem recites a history of Greco-Roman mythology, from the creation of the universe to the deification of Julius Caesar, and mostly moves in chronological order. However, the poem is not simply a catalogue of familiar myths and legends. Although the poem touches almost all of Greek mythology’s high points (Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Jason, Achilles, and all the rest appear at some point), the Metamorphoses is not interested in telling the full story for all of its characters. The poem assumes that its readers have some background knowledge of these stories anyway, and instead weaves a long mythological history using the concepts of metamorphosis and change as a unifying theme. It’s an incredibly ambitious idea, but Ovid pulls it off beautifully. I mentioned in my review of the Heroides that I think Ovid has a real gift for getting inside the heads of these mythological characters and treating them as real people with genuine emotions and depth. Those skills are on full display here. This book may not be the best introduction to Greek mythology (although you could do far worse), as it does assume a certain level of familiarity and skips over some things. But the Metamorphoses is on par with Homer’s epics as the most impressive retelling of Greek mythology I’ve ever read.

I’m not the only person to gush so shamelessly over this poem, which was wildly popular in Roman times. There were a few dicey years towards the end of the Roman Empire, when Christian leaders condemned the poem as shamelessly pagan, but the brilliance of Ovid won out and the poem survived to influence thinkers in the Middle Ages and beyond. The poem continued to be extremely popular throughout this time, and the Metamorphoses was one of the most popular books in the Western world for over a thousand years (over 400 manuscripts survive from the Middle Ages alone, which is a lot). It has inspired countless artists, poets, and writers throughout this time. W.R. Johnson pretty much summed it up in stating that “no other poem from antiquity has so influenced the literature and art of Western Europe as has the Metamorphoses.” That’s a pretty good legacy, and one that Ovid predicted in the final lines of his poem:

“And now my work is done: no wrath of Jove nor fire nor sword nor time, which would erode all things, has power to blot out this poem…my name and fame are sure: I shall have life.”



To sum up, this was an incredible book and, in my humble opinion, the only truly original piece of literature surviving from the Roman Republic/early Roman Empire*. If somebody wanted to read just one book from this period, I’d still probably recommend The Aeneid, which is the “most Roman” book in a lot of ways and a little more representative of the period. But I think the Metamorphoses was the best work of its era. 6 stars, a must read for anyone with an interest in classical literature (both for the poem's own merits and for the influence it has had throughout the centuries).

I read the Mandelbaum translation, which was stellar.

*Certainly the stories within the Metamorphoses are not original. They had been told countless times for hundreds of years before Ovid’s birth. And you could point to the Theogony of Hesiod as an example of an earlier catalogue of mythology. But this goes far beyond the Theogony in size and scope, and the idea of linking all of these stories with the theme of metamorphosis and change is so novel that I don’t think you can really compare the Metamorphoses to anything that had come before.

Me tomó un rato leer esta maravilla, leía un poco cada día, por las mañanas, con la cabeza fresca. Menciono esto porque así recomiendo leerlo, es para tener la cabeza fresca y sin pensamientos, que así te la llenas de imágenes tan increíbles como las que viven los dioses y humanos según Ovidio. Así encuentras los odios, celos, pasiones, peleas, amores, que cuenta sin tener otra cosa presente. Es bello, durísimo, mágico, y certero. Me mató, me encantó, es un libro inolvidable. Cómo pude vivir tanto tiempo sin Ovidio?

Siempre es vital, en todo lector de clásicos que se precie de tal, recorrer las páginas de los pioneros, los creadores, los que antecedieron a toda la literatura moderna, tal es el caso de Ovidio como también lo son Virgilio, Homero, Sófocles, Esquilo, Eurípides y tantos otros. He leído con interés la mayoría de las transformaciones narradas en Las Metamorfosis y por supuesto, algunas me gustaron más que otras; por eso enumero la galería de mitos que desfilan por sus gloriosas páginas.

Todos ellos me han maravillado con sus variadas transformaciones, a saber:
Apolo, Europa, Júpiter, Dafne, Narciso, Perseo, Medusa, Teseo, Proserpina, Palas, Jasón, Medea, Minotauro, Dédalo, Ícaro, Aquiles, Ulises, Orfeo, Eurídice, Ganímedes, Pigmalión, Ifigenia y sobre todo mi admiradísimo Eneas.

Para finalizar, debo remarcar cómo Ovidio aseguró su nombre en letras de oro para la posteridad a través del Epílogo. Es como si él mismo hubiera sido Tiresias, el sabio ciego que podía adivinar el futuro (algo que Edipo no logró entender):

“Y ya he dado fin a una obra a la que no podrán destruir ni la cólera de Júpiter, ni el fuego, ni el hierro, ni el tiempo voraz. Que aquel día que no tiene ningún derecho más que sobre mi cuerpo, cuando quiera, ponga término a curso incierto de mi vida; sin embargo, inmortal en la parte más noble de mi persona, seré llevado sobre la alta región de los astros y mi nombre será indeleble; y por cualquier parte por donde aparezca el dominio de Roma sobre la tierra seré leído por los pueblos y por todos los siglos; viviré, si algo de verdad existe en el presentimiento de los poetas, gloriosamente.”

“Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses



Ovid -- the David Bowie of Latin literature. I chewed on this book of myth-poems the entire time I was tramping around Rome. I was looking for the right words to describe my feelings about it. It isn't that I didn't like it. It is an unequivocal masterpiece. I'm amazed by it. I see Ovid's genes in everything (paintings, sculptures, poems and prose). He is both modern and classic, reverent and wicked, lovely and obscene all at once. It is just hard to wrestle him down. To pin my thoughts about 'the Metamorphoses' into words. Structure really fails me.

That I guess is the sign for me of a book's depth or success with me. It makes me wish I could read it in the original form. I'm not satisfied with Dante in English. I want him in Italian. I'm not satisfied with Ovid in English. I want to experience his poetry, his playfulness, his wit in Latin.

I still prefer the poetry of Homer and Dante, but Ovid isn't embarrassed by the company of the greats; so not Zeus or Neptune, but maybe Apollo.

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

Not for me, but I can appreciate it for what it is.