Exploring the great swamp Book

 
The Poetry of Passion

The brief but brilliant introduction by former English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes to his Tales from Ovid says that the poems tell "what is feels like to live in the psychological gulf that opens at the end of an era." He might well have been talking about the end of his own century; the collection was published in 1997. But no, he was referring to the original date of Ovid's Metamorphoses themselves, 8 CE, when "the obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps, like old masks in the lumber room of a theatre, and the new ones had not yet arrived." And chief among the new ones would be Christianity, but there is no hint of that here. Instead, at least in the two dozen stories that Hughes selected, we have a prevalent spirit of violence, instability, old rules being broken, human beings changing into beasts. The hunter Actaeon, for example, who chances upon Diana bathing naked, is transformed into a stag and devoured by his own hounds. Callisto, seduced by Jupiter, is changed by the jealous Juno into a bear. Arachne, who dared to challenge Minerva in tapestry weaving, becomes a spider. King Tereus, for the crime of raping his sister-in-law Philomela and then cutting out her tongue, is served his own son chopped into a fricassée; Philomela, though, is given her voice back as the nightingale.


Titian: Diana and Actaeon

Tales from Ovid is right; this is far from a complete translation. Over two hundred stories are mentioned in the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses, about half that number treated at length, and Hughes gives only a quarter of those. Many of the tales I know best through art, opera, or other literature are left out. Hughes omits, for example, the love stories of Apollo and Daphne, Jupiter and Europa, Perseus and Andromeda, Orpheus and Eurydice, Acis and Galatea, or the old couple Philemon and Baucis. True, it is not all violence; there are a few more gentle tales such as Echo and Narcissus or Peleus and Thetis. The Rape of Prosperpina, though beginning in violence, at least ends in the compromise that brings us the annual blessing of Spring. And the story of Pygmalion, whose statue of the ideal woman at last comes to life as Galatea, even has a happy ending. But although Hughes is marvelous at depicting the more violent emotions, a dozen or more stories in this vein eventually take their toll; this is not the selection I would have advised had I been his editor.

Gérome: Pygmalion and Galatea ======

I am not sure that it is even right to call this a translation. Sometimes, Hughes follows the original pretty closely; sometimes he illuminates ancient ideas with the language of the nuclear age; often, he introduces passages that are entirely his own. As an example, let's look at a few lines from the opening account of the creation of the world and the early history of mankind. After describing the Ages of Gold, Silver, and Bronze, Ovid comes to the Age of Iron. Here is the beginning of the passage in the original Latin:
        de duro est ultima ferro.
protinus inrupit venae peioris in aevum
omne nefas: fugere pudor verumque fidesque;
in quorum subiere locum fraudesque dolusque
insidiaeque et vis et amor sceleratus habendi.
[vela dabant ventis nec adhuc bene noverat illos
navita, quaeque prius steterant in montibus altis…]And here it is in an early 18th-century translation by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, and others:
        Hard steel succeeded then:
And stubborn as the metal, were the men.
Truth, modesty, and shame, the world forsook:
Fraud, avarice, and force, their places took.
[Then sails were spread, to every wind that blew.
Raw were the sailors, and the depths were new…]Finally, here is the same passage from Hughes:
Last comes the Age of Iron
And the day of Evil dawns.
Modesty,
Loyalty,
Truth,
Go up like a mist'a morning sigh off a graveyard.

Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain'a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye teeth.

[Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots…]Three things to note: Hughes' layout, his language, and his invention. In place of Ovid's heroic hexameters or the regular meter of earlier translators, Hughes paints freely upon the page, sometimes continuing in quasi-regular stanzas for a page or more, sometimes with wide variations of line length. Note how effective is the separation of "Modesty, Loyalty, Truth" to give each word a single line. And his language: "out of their dens in the atom… into the orbit of a smile." He draws imagery from physics or microbiology, from late 20th-century life, that Ovid could never have known. But he does it often in lines that Ovid did not even write; there are ten lines here'ten brilliant lines'that have no equivalent in the original at all; note how he gets back to some sense of regularity when he returns to direct translation.

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Poussin: The Triumph of Bacchus

Some of Hughes' flights of fantasy are truly marvelous. Near the beginning of the story of Bacchus and Pentheus, there is a short passage'three lines of Latin, four in the Garth/Dryden translation'describing the frenzy when the young god comes to town:
For now through prostrate Greece young Bacchus rode,
Whilst howling matrons celebrate the God:
All ranks and sexes to his Orgies ran,
To mingle in the pomps, and fill the train. Hughes, however, expands Ovid's three lines to eighteen, a headlong tumble of invention that surely channels the Browning of The Pied Piper of Hamelin:
The god has come. The claustrophobic landscape
Bumps like a drum
With the stamping dance of the revellers.
The city pours
Its entire population into the frenzy.
Children and their teachers, labourers, bankers.
Mothers and grandmothers, merchants, agents,
Prostitutes, politicians, police,
Scavengers and accountants, lawyers and burglars,
Builders, laybouts, tradesmen, con-men,
Scoundrels, tax-collectors, academicians,
Physicians, morticians, musicians, magicians,
The idle rich and the laughing mob,
Stretched mouths in glazed faces,
All as if naked, anonymous, freed
Into the ecstasy,
The dementia and the delirium
Of the new god. "Physicians, morticians, musicians, magicians"'Hughes is worth reading for such language alone.

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Kevin McLean: Cinyras and Myrrha

I mentioned that many of my favorite stories were absent. But there were some that were real discoveries. None less than the tale of Myrrha, who, in an inversion of the usual incest stories, is consumed by the carnal desire to have sex with her father. Eventually, she gets her nurse to sneak her into his bed every night for a week, while her mother is away. On the last night, her father Cinyras takes a light to see who is this mysterious girl who has been offered to him. Myrrha flees from his wrath and wanders for nine months, at the end of which she is turned into a tree, the myrrh bush, in the very act of giving birth to Adonis.


Luigi Garza: The Birth of Adonis

A horrible subject, and Ovid makes the most of it. It is masterly how he handles the suspense, first of all warning the reader not to go any further, then building up the psychological anguish in Myrrha's mind. It combines the technique of a horror movie with the sexual pathology of the Salome of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. Hughes has no need to add or embellish; he merely has to translate. Here is a short section: first a few lines in the Garth/Dryden translation:
'Twas now the mid of night, when slumbers close
Our eyes, and sooth our cares with soft repose;
But no repose cou'd wretched Myrrha find,
Her body rouling, as she roul'd her mind:
Mad with desire, she ruminates her sin,
And wishes all her wishes o'er again… And then the Hughes:
Midnight. Mankind sprawled
In sleep without a care.
But Myrrha writhed in her sheets.
To cool the fiery gnawings throughout her body
She drew great gasping breaths.
They made the flames worse.
Half of her prayed wildly'
In despair under the crushing
Impossibility'and half of her coolly
Plotted how to put it to the test.
She was both aghast at her own passion
And reckless to satisfy it.

Like a great tree that sways,
All but cut through by the axe,
Uncertain which way to fall,
Waiting for the axe's deciding blow,
Myrrha,
Bewildered by the opposite onslaughts
Of her lust and her conscience,
Swayed, and waited to fall.
Either way, she saw only death.
Her lust, consummated, had to be death;
Denied, had to be death. She tries to resolve it by hanging herself, but is rescued by her nurse, who winkles the secret out of her and realizes that the only way to save her is to help her bring her wish about. This is perhaps an extreme example, but it bears out another point that Hughes makes in his Introduction: "All Ovid wants is the story of hopelessly besotted and doomed love in the most intense form imaginable." And on that, Hughes delivers. Read it indeed'but I would suggest small doses!