Ovid's Metamorphoses, Canto I, "Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge"

Some notes on Canto I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 CE).  Just some of the things I am looking for or enjoying while reading Ovid’s epic of “forms changed / into new bodies.”  (tr. Charles Martin, 2004, p. 15).  Or, per Arthur Golding (1567, p. 3 of the Paul Dry paperback) “Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge.”

I’ve been reading Charles Martin first, then Arthur Golding, who is difficult due to archaic words and twisty syntax but also his long fourteen syllable rhyming couplets, which perhaps contribute to the twistiness.  Golding is occasionally magnificent.  Martin, in modern blank verse, is much clearer.  As I write about Ovid, I’ll hop from one to the other.

Canto I begins, after Ovid’s brief statement of purpose, with the creation of the world, an imitation of Hesiod, a metamorphosis on the grandest scale, not the usual mode of the poem.  “No kinde of thing had proper shape” (AG, 3), a violation of Ovidian principles.  The way Ovid describes Chaos – “a huge rude heape” and so on (3) – will look familiar to anyone who read the pre-Socratic philosophers with me long, long ago.  Chaos resembles the featureless, motionless sphere of Parmenides and Zeno, while its transformation by a surprisingly vague and unnamed God seems borrowed from Empedocles and perhaps Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things.  Later, after the great flood, Ovid describes the generation and evolution of animals in a way that also sounds something like the weird eyeball monsters ofEmpedocles.  As in Heraclitus, in Ovid “everything flows.”

Next up is the Golden Age, where Martin has the pre-agricultural people living off of

                                          fruit from the arbutus tree,

wild strawberries on mountainsides, small cherries,

and acorns fallen from Jove’s spreading oak.  (19)

Martin is staying close to Ovid’s text.  Golding has

Did live by Raspis, heppes and hawes, by cornelles, plummes and cherries,

By sloes and apples, nuttes and peares, and lothsome bramble berries,

And by the acorns dropt on ground, from Joves brode tree in fielde.  (6)

Raspberries, rosehips, cornelian cherries.  This is a great example of Golding’s tendency to expand, but also, charmingly how on occasion he becomes very English, blending Ovid’s Roman landscape with his own green and pleasant land.

Let’s see.  Here’s the monstrous Lycaon turning into a wolf, the first of so many human to animal metamorphoses.  Ovid loves the details of the transformation, a good part of his tendency to expand the old story, adding “foam… at the corners of his mouth” (24) and so on.  Note that the Lycaon story is narrated by a character, by Jove.  Ovid uses every narrative device he knows, direct narration, speech, songs, stories within stories (although not to the depths of A Thousand and One Nights), anything.  The transformation of poor Syrinx into reeds is told within the story of how poor Io turned into a cow.  We met her on stage long, long ago in Prometheus Bound. 

The transitions, the metamorphoses of one story into another, are central to Ovid’s art.  He is not writing a catalogue but rather a single continuous story built from many seamlessly linked stories.  Well, the move from Io to Phaethon, where Phaethon is friends with Io’s son, seems thin to me.  But some of Ovid’s transitions are themselves beautiful, marvels of storytelling.  Related is how he ends cantos in the idle of a story, the interruption just another way for the narrative to flow.  The story has just begun, so I have to come back to it.

I feel I have skipped a thousand interesting things, just in the first Canto.

With the holiday near, I will likely not write anything for a couple of weeks at least.  I have read all the way through Canto II, so there is no need to worry about catching up.  Daryl Hine’s Ovid’s Heroines and Christopher Marlowe’s youthful Ovid’s Elegies also kept me entertained; I should write note about each of them in January.  Ovid is my kind of fun.

Have a good holiday.