Reviews for Exploring mountains

The average rating for Exploring mountains based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-26 00:00:00 Randy Reeves Ovid's Metamorphoses can be a delight for anyone who loves classical mythology, a good complement to the versions of tales you learned from Bulfinch, Hamilton, the D'Aulaires, etc. Besides, Ovid gives you the sex and violence too, which those nice children's illustrated versions leave out. There are many translations of Metamorphoses available, but one I definitely would recommend is Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes. As the title suggests, this is not a literal translation and does not contain every one of Ovid's stories. On the other hand, Hughes is a real poet, with a special gift for dark, mythic language, and'although he does not tell all of the tales'the tales he tells come to life. I love poetry as well as mythology, and I think poetry should be translated by poets. Although they may sometimes betray the literal sense of a passage, they are more faithful to its sound and spirit. Because of this, if you wish to possess a complete version, I would recommend the elegant Gregory or the arch, ironic Slavitt, or'if you have in interest in something older, say from the Renaissance or Neo-Classical periods--you might give the vigorous Golding or the stately Garth a try. But if all you want is a vivid collection of mythological tales which catalogs the changes wrought by the gods, written in memorable, laconic verse, I would go with Hughes. Hughes is particular good at conveying both the marvelousness and the callousness of such transformations'two important qualities (they tell me) of the originals. From time to time, I do miss Horace Gregory's elegance, but Ted Hughes' force and concentration is enough to make up for it. (He also has a gift for surprisingly contemporary diction. Witness the use of the phrase "vapour trail" below.) Here follow four versions of the the fall of Phaeton, blasted by Jove's thunderbolt from the runaway chariot of Phoebus his father, god of the sun: Ted Hughes: Phaethon, hair ablaze, A fiery speck, lengthening a vapour trail, Plunged toward the earth Like a star Falling and burning out on a clear night. In a remote landscape Far from his home The hot current Of the broad Eridanus Quenched his ember-- And washed him ashore. The Italian nymphs Buried his remains, that were glowing again And flickering little flames Of the three-forked fire from God. Over his grave, on a rock they wrote this: "Here lies Phoebus' boy who died In the sun's chariot, His strength too human, and too hot His courage and his pride." Horace Gregory: But Phaethon, fire pouring through fiery hair, Sailed earthward through clear skies as though he were A star that does not fall, yet seems to fall Through long horizons of the quiet air. Far from his home he fell, across the globe Where River Eridanus cooled his face. There Naiads of the West took his charred body Still hot with smoking flames of the forked bolt To rest, with these carved words upon his tomb: HERE PHAETHON LIES WHO DROVE HIS FATHER'S CAR; THOUGH HE FAILED GREATLY, YET HE VENTURED MORE. Joseph Addison (Garth, editor): The breathless Pheeton, with flaming hair, Shot from the chariot, like a falling star, That in a summer's ev'ning from the top Of Heav'n drops down, or seems at least to drop; 'Till on the Po his blasted corps was hurl'd, Far from his country, in the western world. The Latian nymphs came round him, and, amaz'd, On the dead youth, transfix'd with thunder, gaz'd, And, whilst yet smoaking from the bolt he lay, His shatter'd body to a tomb convey, And o'er the tomb an epitaph devise: "Here he, who drove the sun's bright chariot, lies; His father's fiery steeds he cou'd not guide, But in the glorious enterprize he dy'd." Arthur Golding ("Shakespeare's Ovid") But Phaeton (fire yet blasing stil among his yellow haire) Shot headlong downe, and glid along the Region of the Ayre Like to a Starre in Winter nightes (the wether cleare and fayre) Which though it doe not fall indeede, yet falleth to our sight. Whome almost in another world and from his countrie quite The River Padus did receyve, and quencht his burning head. The water Nymphes of Italie did take his carkasse dead And buried it yet smoking still, with Joves three forked flame, And wrate this Epitaph in the stone that lay upon the same. "Here lies the lusty Phaeton which tooke in hand to guide His fathers Chariot: from the which although he chaunst to slide, Yet that he gave a proud attempt it cannot be denide.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-22 00:00:00 Joseph Miegoc   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. ====== 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. ====== 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!