Lepo se dosetio Dejvid Maluf i fino realizovao svoju ideju.
Kad na sve dodamo posvećenost prevodioca Ivane Dutli, "Zamišljeni život" izlazi na prijatno čitanje, vredno pažnje i sa drugih razloga.
Zamisao počiva na činjenici da o Ovidijevoj smrti ne znamo ništa pouzdano, što je sasvim neočekivano, obzirom da je on i za života a i kroz potonju istoriju bio izuzetno popularan, i to toliko da mu na crtu čitanosti mogu izaći još možda Šekspir i Stari Zavet. Čak i kad imamo u vidu da je iz Rima bio prognan u neku rumunsku zabit, bogu (i božanskom caru) iza leđa - opet je gotovo neverovatno da se i dan danji, dve hiljade godina nakon njegove smrti (da, to je baš ove godine :)) nagađa da li mu je grob negde oko Konstance ili, pak, u Mađarskoj ili na nekom sasvim petom mestu. Ili ga uopšte i nema.
Maluf u "Zamišljenom životu" nudi svoju verziju, sasvim fiktivnu, ali isto toliko moguću: kako je, uopšte, to moglo da se desi da se jednoj takvoj osobi izgubi svaki trag.
Kad bih sad napisala kako je to rešio, teško bih vas razuverila da nije ispatetisao - a nije, verujte. Pametno je pretpostavio da je Ovidije, sve vreme se krijući iza laprdanja, lascivnosti i neverovatnosti, vapio za sopstvenim preobražajem, ali da, ušuškan u carsko bonvivanstvo s jedne i zablenut u fantastičnu realnost života obične raje s druge strane, to ni samome sebi nije smeo da prizna. No, tom skrivanju od sebe dolazi kraj kad se nađe među varvarskim Getima čiju jednu jedinu reč ne razume, a kamoli običaje, a kamoli, tek, kad se njima desi nešto sasvim neuobičajeno. Neka to, recimo, bude krupan plan, ali nikako jedino što se na ovih sto pedesetak strana može naći.

Ako izuzmemo onomadašnje Fon Trirovo persona-non-gratiranje iz Kana i slične politikanske igrarije koje se uglavnom ispostave većom koristi nego štetom za prognanika, današnji čovek zaista teško može da zamisli šta je Grku ili Rimljaninu izgnanstvo značilo. Štaviše, u poređenju sa sibirskim kazamatima, koncentracionim logorima, giljotinama i alkatrazima, ne liči nam da je neka greda živ i zdrav se preseliti koju hiljadu kilometara od kuće. A nije zezanje, i to Maluf sasvim dobro rasvetljava, iz prvog lica, kroz Ovidijeva usta. Neka to, eto, bude neki drugi sloj.

Najviše me je ipak obradovao stil i jezik: piščev ali i prevodiočev. Ne samo što je Ovidije Malufov narator, nego i priča onako kako je pisao - laganim stilom, više opažajno nego osećajno, precizno ali nesvakidašnjim rečima, gotovo razgovorno, a opet poetski, i nema nikakve sumnje da je pisac dobar poznavalac pesnikovog opusa. Ništa manje potkovana nije ni Ivana Dutli, koja je neretko uspevala da postigne ritmičnost heksametra i da me oduševi izborom reči (šestati, snatriti, njucati, lejka, šobot, ptilica).
Sve i da baš ništa ne znate o Ovidiju, ne mari. I ako nikad niste čitali antičke pesnike, ni to ne mari. Samo će vam isprva biti malo čudna interpunkcija, glagolska vremena, raspored reči u rečenici, namerno izbegavanje sinonima i slična poigravanja, ali ništa strašno i ni blizu fazona: "paljaše inoča zublje, hotijaše sprečit' predepsu" (izmislila sam da ilustrujem prevode kakve je sasvim normalno zafrljačiti, ne znači ništa... smisleno).

Koliko vidim, drugi naslovi Dejvida Malufa nisu prevođeni. Šteta - zanimljive su mu teme i fino piše.

He begins his trek from the lap of comfort and luxury. Ovid’s poetry is lurid and he uses his fame to be a man about town. Stepping over a drawn line he is sequestered by the Roman authorities and banished to the farthermost point of civilization; to live amongst barbarians in a place of desolation, denuded of anything to grasp onto including time, space, and language. He is an afterthought to the tribe who do not speak his language nor he there’s. Their life of superstition and grave alliance with survival remains foreign to him. He is becoming foreign to himself; a self built upon the refracted costumery of the images reflected back by the society which is no more.

But an imagined feral friend, a container of his Self, through early years of childhood, now returns and is seen and brought back to the primitive village by Ovid. The others also see him thus bounding him in reality-an agreed upon reality? Ovid cares for and nurtures him, teaching him their ways. The Child is feral. He is born into his bones, the marrow of his existence. It is him who eventually needs to lead the poet beyond the farthest most point of the known world. A place explored through instinct and a oneness with nature. Borders and boundaries are smudged and erased. The Child imagines himself into the creatures of the soil, birds lofting overhead, the stalks and reeds.Therefore he becomes them, is them. They walk without an aim or goal, Ovid struggling the further they go. The Child now cares for him.

Malouf speaks this tale to us through Ovid’s haunting and mystical voice. A voice spare which permeates the reader’s mind lifting them through the traverses of Ovid’s trek always leading him beyond the refractions of the civilized world to where he may become the inevitability of himself.

A lyrical metaphorical work about the emptying of the self and the quest for the completion of a life. The feted frivolous Roman poet Ovid displeases his Emperor Augustus and is revealed to us in exil, a man without language or kin. Without words or society he gradually finds a simpler more visceral meaning to life through the tongue of his captors. He chooses to tame a Child produced by the cruel landscape, and is so distrusted by the superstitious villagers who believe that this young boy embodies the spirits of the wild. Ovid's flight into the vast empty landscape brings him to a new connection with all elements of nature, to which he prepares his return.

An Imaginary Life is brief but it is profound, sad and wise.
Civilization and wild nature - are they in collision? May they be reconciled? Wise old poet Ovid and a wild child of nature in the end understand each other better than all the Roman nobles could understand the poet.

I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.

And the final metamorphosis is death.

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

“I speak to you, reader, as one who lives in another century, since this is the letter I will never send. It is addressed neither to my wife nor to my lawyer at Rome, nor even to the emperor; but to you, unknown friend, who do not exist at this time of my writing and whose face, whose form even, I cannot imagine.”


Confieso que aunque he leído libros geniales este año, pocos han podido emocionarme como esta “Una vida imaginaria”, de David Malouf, que se va a quedar ya grabada en mi memoria por la belleza de la prosa poética de Malouf, aunque no menos hermoso es el tema de fondo que toca y la forma en que lo aborda. Pero he leído que Una vida imaginaria fue su segunda novela (1978) después de que Malouf se hubiera dedicado en general a la poesía, y de verdad que se nota esta vena poética en este texto de los más exquisitos que han podido llegarme. Una vida imaginaria es uno de estos textos atemporales que hay que ir leyendo lentamente regodeándose en lo que consigue evocar Malouf, hechiza casi desde la primera linea “When I first saw the child I cannot say I see myself…” hasta la última en la que se aborda toda una vida desde la mente de un personaje, el poeta Ovidio, enfrentado al exilio en una tierra extraña, helada, agreste, una vida imaginaria en el sentido de que está inventada por Malouf con los pocos datos que se conservan de un poeta esquivo. Un destierro al que es condenado por el emperador Augusto en un castigo por sus poemas irreverentes, así que Ovidio, exiliado, y desterrado de su entorno, se ve de repente en una tierra extraña y de alguna forma tiene que aprender a vivir de cero.


“All lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings.
But I am describing a state of mind, no place.
I am in exile here.”


Lo que viene a relatar aquí Malouf sobre el poeta Ovidio no deja de ser un relato ficticio, porque poco se sabe de la vida de Ovidio independientemente de sus cartas, ni siquiera cómo murió ni dónde puede estar su tumba. Pero Ovidio es sobradamente conocido por su irreverencia en su época y por sus poemas escandalosos. “In the open I go about shouting, talking to myself simply to keep the words in my head, or to drive them out of it. My days in this place, my nights, are terrible beyond description. All day I wander in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species”. Malouf imagina esta vida de exilio de un poeta hedonista y urbano que se vio obligado a vivir fuera de su zona de confort, en una aldea llamada Tomis, de inviernos helados y salvajes que duraban hasta nueve meses. Lo que resulta aquí fascinante, independientemente de la historia de Ovidio con el niño, que es la base de la construcción del relato, es el cambio que se produce en el poeta una vez alejado de su vida sofisticada y cómoda en Roma. En varios momentos, durante el largo monólogo interior, Ovidio reconoce que en la cima de su éxito sentía ansiedad y no era totalmente feliz, porque tenía la impresión de una identidad perdida hasta llegar al exilio: un exilio que parece más una metáfora hacia la conciencia de uno mismo, hacia una vida interior.


“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred of false roles, a hundred of false indentities fior yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.“


En Tomis, Ovidio vive totalmente aislado de su propia cultura a excepción de su relación con un niño salvaje que encuentra en el bosque y que la superstición de los aldeanos creen que porta el demonio. Durante los primeros años de su exilio verá al niño aparecer y desaparecer en el bosque y se le aparecerá en sueños, hasta que llegado un punto el niño es apresado por los aldeanos y Ovidio lo acoge, estableciendo un vínculo. Ovidio que vivía totalmente perdido en si mismo, parece empezar a encontrarse y a tomar conciencia de lo que le rodea una vez que el niño llega a su vida. Ovidio se ha visto obligado a abandonar el latin y aprender un idioma nuevo que le abre una ventana al mundo: “Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation”. Y este es otro de los temas fundamentales que aborda aquí Malouf, porque no solo ha tenido que aprender la lengua de su nueva tierra, sino además aprende a establecer un nuevo lenguaje con un niño que apenas sabía hablar, un lenguaje que le reconcilia con esa vida de la que venía el niño, la naturaleza: “But he, in fact, he is the more patient teacher. He shows me the bird whose cry I am trying to imitate. He makes me hold it, trembling in my hands. I know what he intends. I am to imagine myself into its life”. Malouf hace a Ovidio proyectarse en este niño salvaje que poco a poco le irá evocando su infancia y una identidad que se perdió en el camino con su angustia y su infelicidad. Ya digo que es un relato ficticio pero es fácil involucrarse en la vida que ha conseguido crear aquí Malouf, y con la que podemos sentirnos fácilmente identificados. En este exilio iniciático, Malouf sienta las bases de ciertos cambios que acaban moldeando a un ser humano: un nuevo lenguaje, que no tiene que ser el de las palabras sino el de las nuevas sensaciones, y la percepción de uno mismo a través de la naturaleza a la que nunca habrá que perder de vista porque es a través de ella gracias a la que construirá Malouf su relato esencial. Con la llegada a Tomis, a Ovidio no le queda otra que ser muy consciente del paso de las estaciones y del entorno que marcarán la conciencia de sí mismo: “The season begins to change. Already when we go out these days, to our island in the swamp, I have to wrap up against the wind…”


“So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clerarer form, as it really was, which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. If it as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.”


Con este exilio, Ovidio se da cuenta de que Roma no es el centro del universo y que para más inri él tampoco lo es. David Malouf es australiano y aunque aquí en ningún momento nombre la palabra Australia, puede que haya algo de ella en este texto en el sentido de que Malouf esté usando Tomis como una metáfora del aislamiento físico de su tierra y por supuesto pueda estar evocando esa vida aborigen que la colonización defenestró y arrasó. En este aspecto, Una vida imaginaria ha podido recordarme a esa novela italiana “El desierto de los tártaros”, en la evocación casi sonámbula de una tierra atemporal suspendida entre el especio y el tiempo pero que lo está diciendo todo sobre la naturaleza humana pero también me ha recordado muchísimo a "El derviche y la muerte" de Selimovic en la reflexión que Malouf hace del exilio, de la tierra y de las raíces.


“We move about it in a dream, as if our wits had turned to sharp little crystals in our head. As if, like bears and other such creatures, we had crawled deep into some cave in ourselves and fallen asleep, moving about only as dream figures, stiff, unseeing, as we pass in and out of each other's lives.”


Una vida imaginaria es un relato hermosísimo sobre el viaje íntimo y personal de una persona que vive aislada mental y fisicamente de lo que le rodeaba, de su entorno, para encontrar una liberación. Y Malouf ha usado a un poeta cosmopolita y muy centrado en sí mismo, egocéntrico y consciente la importancia de su estatus como ejemplo de que la liberación de estas ataduras artificiales pueden ser posibles con la vuelta a los orígenes. Esta es la vida de Ovidio imaginada por Malouf, y sin embargo, extrapolada a la vida que tenemos ahora, no parece que hayan pasado siglos porque el fondo del relato sigue vigente, seguimos más esclavos que nunca de la civilización en la que vivimos. Uno de los textos más hermoso que he tenido la suerte leer. Maravilla.


“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved It, or commited It to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth. Have I survived?"

♫♫♫ Händel Suite No. 7 in G Minor: No. 6, Passacaglia ♫♫♫

5★
“The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.”

This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known.

“I am describing a state of mind, no place. I am in exile here. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”

For man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody.

“But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”

As a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation.

“When I first saw the child I cannot say. I see myself — I might be three or four years old — playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.”

When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. His memories and his dreams and his very different life change him. He waits anxiously for the next hunting season so he can search for the elusive boy.

Ovid writes this as if it were a letter. Whether anyone ever reads it or not doesn’t matter. He must write. It’s what he does.

“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man's poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?”

Yes. For a couple of thousand years, in fact.

Gradually, Ovid comes to appreciate and respect the old people who keep the customs and traditions alive and who are kind to him while being very suspicious of his strangeness.

This is wonderful storytelling, like a poetic saga you might hear told at night by a fire. There are herbs and potions, fevers, a shaman, and the stuff of dreams or nightmares. Not a long book, but certainly a memorable one.

A Quadruple Allegory

An Imaginary Life (1978) is nominally the story of Ovid's exile and death. Ovid wrote two sets of poems from his exile in Tomis (in Pontus, a region of present-day Turkey on the Black Sea, and in Constanta, a Romanian city, also on the Black Sea), called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Malouf used Tristia for his picture of the nearly barbarian outpost Pontus, but other than that he invented his "imaginary life." It strikes me as a quadruple allegory:

1. It's an allegory of poetry, because Ovid is described as redicovering poetry in Pontus. First he finds it in the people there and their shaman, whose language is not as inflected as Latin (the narrator says this several times), but is more intimately attuned to nature. Then he finds it again in the "Child," a feral child the narrator takes in. The Child can mimic animal sounds, and the narrator realizes that is a deeper form of poetry, one that depends on empathy. (This is contrasted with the narrator's satiric and hypereloquent poetry.)

2. It's also an allegory of Australia. There are three worlds in the book: Ovid's scintillating life in Rome; his simple, superstitious life in Tomis; and "the last reality," his life in Asia, beyond the Ister (i.e., north of the Danube), with the feral child. I imagine I'm hardly the first one to say this, but Rome is like England, a distant dream of soft overfed, overindulgent people devoid of belief but rich in "dazzling lierary display"; Tomis is like Australia, a wholly new world, surrounded by nature, with only the faintest echoes of culture; and the child (and the Asian grasslands) is like an Aborigine, intimately at home in nature, naturally happy, fundamentally Other. The narrator has to cross painfully from Rome to Tomis, but he accepts it and learns its language. Later he crosses joyfully from Tomis to Asia. (If this seems unlikely, consider Malouf's Remembering Babylon, about a white boy taken in by Aborigines. The England/Australia/Aboriginal triad recurs there.)

In a brief note Malouf says he was interesed in how Ovid might have escaped "skepticisim" and found belief. So the book is an allegory of religion as well. And it's also a Bildungsroman, with a mystical circle of life built into it. That's four allegories, and the architecture is sturdy enough to accommodate more. It's a succinctly imagined, sincere, romantic book.

Tristia and Metamorphosis

In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life—a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his Tristia (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the Metamorphoses. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.

"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."

Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's transformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of Death in Venice.

I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by n  The Great Worldn and Fly Away Peter, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls—a colonial experience reflected in books like n  Waiting for the Barbariansn by J. M. Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in The Lieutenant. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's Voss, the greatest of all Australian novels?

I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room—even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, n  Ransomn—but An Imaginary Life will certainly be on it.

The imaginary life Malouf writes is that of Ovid, the Roman poet who wrote during the beginnings of the empire. Malouf explains in his "Afterword: A Note on Sources": "We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event."

Though we don't know why, Ovid the poet was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to live out his days in Tomis on the northern shore of the Black Sea, the margins of the empire and imagination. Just before his exile he'd written the work for which he's best known, Metamorphoses, in which he'd imagined humans subsumed into the natural world of animals and plants. Such transformations continue to be a focus for Ovid as he struggles to come to terms with losing a life in comfortable, cultured Rome and taking up a new one among a rustic people he barely understands. He recognizes this as a metamorphosis itself but becomes caught up in one more explicit, that of a young boy in the area who's been raised in the wild, seemingly by wolves. Ovid's attempts to civilize this Child while he himself is being immersed into a natural order of the world unknowable to him before is the story, one of 2 polarities moving toward each other to forge some unity at which the natural world and the human can be whole. Some of that is captured in a passage reflecting Ovid's imagined possibilities but also triggering the reader's appreciation of the transformations taking place in the novel. "Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back--not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole."

I've read this is considered a novel that's very Australian in its address of the ways civilization connects with the natural world, and in particular with the ways in which the Child can be thought to correlate with Australia's indigenous people. I feel like these things must've been on Malouf's mind, but they're ways of thinking I can relate to only in the most general way. Knowing this as I began the book, I was reminded at times of a couple of books of the pseudonymous James Vance Marshall and the wonderful film made of the 1st of them, Walkabout.

What I know for sure is that this novel has let me taste some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a while. Particularly as the novel's winding down and Ovid marvels at the steppe landscape he's come to feel a part of. Malouf imagines the sensitive poet interiorly charged by what his senses take in just as he also portrays him panoramically trudging the vast grasslands under the high blue dome of sky in his new country. Ovid's transformation into new ways of being in and seeing the world, his mental and physical journey far from Rome, are passages of great beauty.

More novella than novel, and it definitely requires some quiet, uninterrupted, focused reading (or at least I did) this is a classic, literary award winning tale by Australian author David Malouf, it is also one of the more challenging reads I’ve had in a long time.
Based on the life of Roman poet Ovid, this esoteric read will not be for many. At times sheer concentration is required (and I admit Google as I had forgotten some of the Ovid references).
If you’re not a buff of historical/classic poetry, the value of the references and allusions may not work work or you may not want to bother.
It lost one star for some of the vulgarity, which of course is the author’s license, but certainly not what you’d expect from the time period 8AD or Ovid (1AD).

Imagined life (duh!) of Ovid after he was exiled to a remote region on the fringes of the Roman Empire, in which he takes in an 11 year old feral child - this sounds like a terrible idea for a book, right? like a writer's exercise that would be clunky and fall flat on its face? WRONG! Malouf's writing is SO good, as lyrical/thoughtful style explores existential themes as MC adjusts to simpler/slower life/people/landscape. 4.5 Stars as v.slightly insubstantial, but rounding up to 5 as just so perfectly well done.

Malouf's language is that of a poet, fitting for a book whose narrator is exiled Roman poet and writer, Ovid.

The obvious themes are exile and the isolation that comes from effectively losing your own language, surrounded by people whose language and culture are vastly different from your own. He finds their customs and speech barbarous.

'I am in exile here.
I have …been cast out into what is yet another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human, who have not yet entered society and become Roman under the law.
But they are, even so, of our species’.

Although Ovid doesn’t understand thewords, he understands the ‘tunes’ – regret, anger, soothing a child, the patterns of a story he heard as a child, in another language.
He faces having to learn the world again, like a child, through the sense, with ‘all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue’.

Language and the nature of existence are also themes of the book. Malouf's language is often mystical, with meaning slightly out of reach, needing to be sought; the nature of existence unfixed and increasingly permeable .

Malouf is deeply interested in myth, here partly represented by the wild Child, partly in the narrator's dream sequences, and in the translations from one life form to another (metamorphoses) that occur throughout. Dreams take Ovid into mystical places, visited by gods in whom he doesn’t believe, greeted in an unknown language in which he speaks as he wakes.

Ovid slowly adapts to life in the village, learns to make nets, accompanies the men on hunting expeditions. On one of these he sees the wild Child, and is not content until he has persuaded the village men, perhaps three years later, to capture the boy, and bring him inside the village walls.
The Child lives in Ovid’s room, trussed at first, then gradually the physical restraints are released as the narrator believes that the strings of curiosity alone will hold him.

Always accompanying the narrative thread is what I think of as the metaphysics of metamorphosis. We are invited into deeply mysterious processes – through dreams and meditations such as this:

‘we are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet catured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, amongleaveswater, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.
‘I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail.’

Then Ovid realises that he must drive out his old self and let the universe in. The spirits of animals, plants, the earth, will migrate back into us, to make us whole. ‘Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men’ (pp 95-96)

Death is part of that process, and in turn will lead to further transformation.

Malouf says that he has attributed to Ovid ‘a capacity for belief that is nowhere to be found in his own writings. But that is exactly the point. My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of “the changes” live out in reality what has been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display’.

Some of the reviews from Australia that I've read have concentrated on the shift to accepting the people and environment of a place of exile/settlement, placing Australia at the centre of their interest.

To me, focusing on this aspect alone detracts from the book, renders it potentially prosaic, which it absolutely is not.

See, for instance
https://theconversation.com/the-case-... Dallas Baker
concentrates on the exile, and transition to acceptance of the people and environment of th new place. Comparison with Australia, at the edge of things, not quite belonging with the old world or the new.