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.

Let's read Ovid's Metamorphoses! And perhaps more.

Who would like to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) with me?  We have had some discussion of this good idea, and I feel I am up to it now.  Up to writing about it.

Metamorphoses is a compendium of Greek myths that feature transformation, which turns out to be hundreds of pages worth of stories.  Ovid’s poem is not a catalog of any kind, but rather an original weaving of the myths into a new form.  Ovid enacts the title of the poem.  A translation should flow.

The translations.  The appeal of the 1567 Arthur Golding translation is it is the Ovid that Shakespeare read.  I believe Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid (1994) is the place to go for the details.

The George Sandys translation (1621-6), in heroic couplets, is superb but sadly Shakespeare did not read it, so it loses the celebrity boost.  It is likely – a bit of trivia – the first English book written in the Americas (Sandys was for a time treasurer of the Virginia Company).

A 1717 version by many hands, including Dryden, Pope and other great poets of the time, as well as some of the duds, sounds interesting and was the default Ovid translation for a century but in my experience the translations of this period, like Pope’s Homer, wander pretty far from the original, and I would at least like to pretend I am reading Ovid.

Skipping way ahead, I have no opinion about the many modern translations.  Twenty years ago I read some samples of Charles Martin’s flexible 2004 version which I liked a lot, so I’m going to read that one.  But I am sure several of the other options are good.

I would advise against the many 19th and early 20th century Ovid translations written as trots for Latin students.  There are likely better and worse, but they seem like dull stuff.  Ovid should be translated by a poet.

What should the schedule be?  Metamorphoses has fifteen chapters that typically fill thirty to forty pages.  Normally I would read one a day with some breaks, but three weeks seems too fast.  Let’s say I read a couple cantos a week.  Perhaps I will read Martin and Golding, which will slow me down.  Eight weeks, with some slippage – December, January, maybe into February.  Or is that too long?  Please advise.

I’ll try to write something once a week. 

I also hope to fit in more – much of the rest of – Ovid, who I suppose is my favorite Roman poet. 

The Heroides are a collection of monologues or letters sent by Greek heroines (and Sappho) to their lovers.  They were written by a young, even teenage, Ovid, circa 20 BCE.  They, too, were a significant influence on Shakespeare, on his great heroines, and on the European novel generally.  Daryl Hine’s Ovid’s Heroines (1991) is the obvious recommendation.

I have Peter Green’s thorough Penguin Classics book The Erotic Poems (dated after Heroides and before Metamorphoses), containing his great love elegies the Amores, as well as The Art of Love – how to seduce – and The Cure for Love – how to break up, as well as a fragment about how to apply makeup.  180 pages of Ovid in a 450 page book.  I said Green was thorough.  And I remember the translations as good, but I plan to revisit Amores in Christopher Marlowe’s remarkable translation.  Marlowe was also likely a teenager when he did Ovid’s elegies.  Teenagers and their love poems.

I have not read Ovid’s calendar poem, Fasti, or the poems in exile, Tristia and the Letters from Pontus.  Christoph Ransmayr’s enjoyable fantasy novel The Last World (1988) explores this part of Ovid’s life.  We’ll see if I get this far.   Why wouldn’t I, Ovid is my favorite Roman poet.  Except maybe for Horace.

Please advise about anything I mentioned, or missed.  Good translations, a better schedule, supplemental books, favorite essays on Ovid, tips for learning Latin fast, anything.  It is all appreciated.

Books I read in November 2023

Recovery from surgery leads to a long list of books. (Everything is going well, by the way, thanks).  My idea of a “comfort read” is a book on a subject about which I do not know much – start me over at the beginning – thus my enthusiastic Indian literature project, which is ongoing, more slowly.

I need to write up an invitation to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and perhaps more Ovid.  Any minute now I will write that.  Please join me on Metamorphoses.

 

INDIAN LITERATURE OF VARIOUS TYPES

Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (1-3 CE) &

Speaking of Shiva (10-12 CE),  both tr. R. K. Amanujan – the pleasure is in the variations in the formula; the latter is especially strange.

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (1965),  U. R. Ananthamurthy – an esoteric dispute about the burial of a corrupt holy man leads to a number of outstanding novelistic ironies.

Malgudi Days (1982),  R. K. Narayan – stories from the 1930s through the 1970s about Narayan’s famous town.  More Narayan, easy to enjoy, in my future.

Classical Indian Philosophy (2020),  Peter Adamson & Jonardon Ganeri – written at my level, the crucial thing, although I beg you not to test me.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2020),  Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – an Indian beatnik gets more interesting.

After (2022),  Vivek Naryanan – “after” the Ramayana, an ambitious 600 page poetic response to the great epic, like Christopher Logue’s War Music, say, if not as focused or as strong.

Four of these books are from NYRB Classics or NYRB Poets.  Good for them.

 

FICTION

Macunaíma (1928),  Mário de  Andrade – a surrealist picaresque looted from German anthropologists’ collections of Amazonian folklore, mixed with Afro-Brazilian traditions and modern Sao Paulo, the most purely Brazilian book I will ever hope to read, and also the most foreignizing translation I have ever read, even more than Leg Over Leg.  So many birds, insects, plants, and whatever else - so many non-English words - all explained in the notes.

The Man without Qualities  (1938),  Robert Musil – the 200 pages Musil almost published in 1938, making it the last coherent narrative piece of his monster.  The Burton Pike translation has 400 pages more of notes and fragments, containing some of Musil’s best writing, he says, but I will never know.  I think the action is in the satirical 800-page 1930 first volume, but some smart people prefer the more mystical unraveling of late Musil.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),  Ernest Hemingway – this book was so famous, the epitome of the serious novel.  Now?  I wonder.  It is a mix of enjoyable kitsch, godawful kitsch (the love affair, the “Spanish”), and quite good action scenes.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941),  John P. Marquand – another big best-seller, easy to read, with lots of Boston and Maine detail, and a good narrator of the perfectly reliable but utterly clueless type.

The Bridge over the Drina (1945),  Ivo Andrić – centuries of history flowing around a bridge that I could still visit today, often reading more like history than fiction.

Delta Wedding (1946),  Eudora Welty – rich, gorgeous, subtle.

The Common Chord (1947),  Frank O'Connor – doing his thing, writing about his people.

The Daughter of Time (1951),  Josephine Tey – the recovery classic, detection directly from the hospital bed, which is not where I read it.  Soon after, though.  Today the detective would have been sent home after a few days, destroying the conceit.

Collected Stories (1908-53),  Colette – I have been reading through Colette’s short writings for years, in French, but I finally gave up on finding the last few books, so I switched to English for about 60 pages.  The early work on the Cherí character is worth reading.  If you have a taste for Colette, it’s all worth reading, easily.

Andrienne Kennedy in One Act (1954-80),  Adrienne Kennedy – a new Library of America collection of a writer about whom I knew nothing inspired me to learn something.  A series of one-act avant-gardisms concludes with two stark adaptations of Euripides; how enjoyable.

Mort (1987),  Terry Pratchett – about a tenth as many good lines as Douglas Adams, but that many good lines justifies the project, the life.  Plus he's good with endings.

The Adventures of China Iron (2017),  Gabriela Cabezón Cámara – the gaucho epic as pan-sexual Utopia.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019),  Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – perhaps the worst blurbage I have ever seen. The short novel about time traveling enemies who fall in love is neither “seditious” nor “dangerous” nor does it “ha[ve] it all.”  If I were not giving the book away (as a gift, not because it is bad) I would tear off the covers.

 

POETRY

Body Rags (1968) &

Selected Poems (1946-80),  Galway Kinnell

Glass, Irony and God (1995),  Anne Carson

Things on Which I've Stumbled (2008),  Peter Cole

Zeno's Eternity (2023),  Mark Jarman

 

CRITICISM

The Burning Oracle (1939),  G. Wilson Knight

Ear Training (2023),  William H. Pritchard – perhaps my favorite living critic, with a new collection of pieces going back to the 1970s, and not too many pieces that I had already read in The Hudson Review.

 

MEMOIR

The Diary of a Young Girl (1947),  Anne Frank – I thought this was the most famous book I had never read, but that is not true anymore, is it?  Harry Potter is likely more famous.  I hate to think what else.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Les inconnus dans la maison (1940),  Georges Simenon – The Strangers in the House, a character study of an lonely alcoholic lawyer.  A stranger is murdered in his house.  And the lawyer is also a stranger in his own house!

Caligula (1944) &

Les Justes (1949),  Albert Camus – laughable as a portrait of 1905 Russian anarchists but likely an exact portrait of people Camus met in the French resistance.

L'Équarrissage pour tous (1950),  Boris Vian – in which Vian fails to “read the room,” as we might say now, setting his anti-war satire in Normandy on D-Day, just where and when the French are at their most anti-anti-war.  But it all works out.  Less outrageous than Catch-22, really.

Tête de Méduse (1951),  Boris Vian

A real sign of recovery, I have resumed my Portuguese study, starting over with an outstanding textbook written by and for high school teachers in southeastern Massachusetts.