Ovid, Our Contemporary (Mark Jarman)

Metamorphoses: A New Translation, by Ovid, translated by Charles Martin (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)

Either it was the story of Arachne, the weaver turned into a spider, or Midas' golden touch that I heard first, not from Ovid himself, of course, but retold by someone, like my grandmother Nora or perhaps a grade school teacher. My parents owned a copy of Bullfinch's Golden Age of Fable, and there I read about the gift the dying centaur Nessus gave to the bride of Hercules, Deianira — a tunic soaked in the blood of his wounds, wounds given him by Hercules as Nessus attempted to make off with said bride. It was horrible to imagine how later Hercules innocently donned the garment, given him when his wife suspected him of infidelity, only to have it stick to his flesh and burn like napalm. Yet it was fascinating and changed the way the natural world appeared to discover that the laurel tree (we had them in California) had been a girl, fleeing before the lustful pursuit of a god, and that the four seasons (in Los Angeles we only had two) reflected the sorrow and joy of a mother — Mother Nature herself — whose daughter must spend half the year in the underworld. When I think of my first encounters with most Greek and Roman myths, they were almost always versions of a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses. As I made my way through English literature, I discovered the poem again and again, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Waste Land. One of the recognitions any literate Christian must experience is how much the Annunciation looks like any number of Jovian seductions as recounted by Ovid. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, Ovid's book of changes has long been part of the air we breathe. Now Charles Martin with his new translation reminds us that in these tales Ovid remains our contemporary.

In the preface to his own excellent translation of Ovid's poem, David Slavitt argues that Ovid, faced with the intimidating example of Virgil's monumental Aeneid, transformed the epic to suit his own lambent and ironic sensibility. Slavitt calls the Metamorphoses "a dream poem in which one story blossoms into further stories." This seems exactly right, and that provisional sense of narrative, as we find it in our dreams, has been reproduced in Martin's translation. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ovid anticipates our post-modern irony with respect to narrative. Today his pseudo-epic speaks to us with a resonance Virgil's may lack. But we also have to remember that Ovid had collected most of the important stories of his religion, the faith of the Greco-Roman world. Claiming to "speak now of forms changed / into new bodies," he began with creation as the first of these changes and ended with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Story after story in the Metamorphoses manifests a divine connection with and involvement in the mortal world. For all the rapes and assaults and catastrophes the gods visit on the hapless humanity they love and hate, their interest in that humanity is never questioned. Ovid's poem appears ready for publication around A.D. 8, just before Augustus for reasons that remain mysterious exiles him to Tomis, on the Black Sea. Can we see Ovid's Metamorphoses as the final record of a worn-out religion? Yes, we can, for new deities were about to supplant those whose exploits he records. And yet looking back over two millennia, it is more helpful, perhaps, to see continuity. The names of gods and their stories have changed, but the human desire for gods, and for divine interest in human affairs, has remained the same.

Charles Martin has conveyed something of Ovid's famous wit by giving free rein to his own, especially by translating wherever possible into contemporary colloquialism and slang. Thus, Actaeon when he stumbles upon Diana bathing is "wandering clueless." Juno, learning of Semele's involvement with her husband, opines, "She's just a one-night stand, / a momentary insult to my conjugal rights." Semele, given her wish to behold her lover Jove in all his glory, is "[t]ickled to death by her appalling fate." "Often she wanted to come on to him" is how Echo is described, pining for Narcissus. Perseus, preparing to free Andromeda, informs her desperate parents, "the deal is that she's mine if I can save her." In the incredible send-up of Homeric slaughter, when Perseus confronts Phineus and his allies over rights to Andromeda, the first act of violence makes the crowd go "totally ballistic." As Apollo flays him, poor Marsyas protests, "Why do you deconstruct me?" The rapist Tereus, lusting for Philomela, "looks at her and sees himself / with her already, doing it to her." Nor is Martin above adding lines, usually in brackets, that suggest an irresistible urge to make a punning comment. After recounting the transformation of the Heliades into poplar trees, weeping drops of golden sap for their brother Phaëthon, following his unfortunate outing with his dad's chariot, Martin quips: "[And so, in myth, morning becomes electrum; / the sisters' tears are, now and forever, amber.]"

One of Martin's numerous tours de force, as he transforms Ovid into contemporary American English that dogs, cats, and the hip can understand, is to depict the daughters of Pierus challenging the Muses to a poetry slam, as follows:

"'We'll show you girls just what real class is
Give up tryin' to deceive the masses
Your rhymes are fake: accept our wager
Learn which of us is minor and which is major
There's nine of us here and there's nine of you
And you'll be nowhere long before we're through
Nothin's gonna save you 'cuz your songs are lame
And the way you sing 'em is really a shame
So stop with, "Well I never!" and "This can't be real"
We're the newest New Thing and here is our deal
If we beat you, obsolete you, then you just get gone
From these classy haunts on Mount Helicon
We give you Macedonia — if we lose
An' that's an offer you just can't refuse
So take the wings off, sisters, get down and jam
And let the nymphs be the judges of our poetry slam!'"

When the proud and foolish Pierus girls lose, they are changed into magpies. It would be interesting to see the effect on poetry slams generally if the consequences for losers were as dire.

For the most part, however, Martin writes a lucid and skillful blank verse without linguistic showing-off. His poetry provides a transparent and accurate revelation of the stories themselves. Consider the single most moving scene in Ovid's poem, the reunion of Orpheus and Eurydice after Orpheus' death at the hands of the Maenads. Here is how Arthur Golding rendered the scene, in iambic heptameter couplets, the basis of common measure, about the time Shakespeare was born.

Already was the Ghost of Orphye gone
To Plutos realme, and there he all the places eft beehild
The which he heretofore had seene. And as he sought the
feeld
Of faire Elyson (where the soules of godly folk doo woonne,)
He found his wyfe Eurydicee, to whom he streyght did
roonne,
And hilld her in imbracing armes. There now he one while
walks
Togither with her cheeke by cheek: another while he stalks
Before her, and another while he follower her. And how
Without all kinde of forfeyture he saufly might avow
His looking backward at his wyfe.

There are, of course, things here that Ovid's Latin omits, but one has to respond to the way Golding's "Orphye" "streyght did roonne" to hold his "Eurydicee" in "imbracing armes." There is a directness in the narrative that lets the poignancy of the moment speak for itself. Dryden's translation seeks another kind of tone, a loftier one.

His ghost flies downward to the Stygian shore,
And knows the places it had seen before:
Among the shadows of the pious train
He finds Eurydice, and loves again;
With pleasure views the beauteous phantom's charms,
And clasps her in his unsubstantial arms.
There side by side they unmolested walk,
Or pass their blissful hours in pleasing talk;
Aft or before the bard securely goes,
And, without danger, can review his spouse.

Despite the heroic couplets, this sounds like having too much Milton on your mind, if not in your ear. And although the "unsubstantial arms" are an unsentimental reminder of the actual state of the happy reunited pair, there is a most unhappy obsolescence to the idea that now Orpheus "without danger, can review his spouse." Granted a translator is going to speak in the style of his time, although Golding seems to be trying to provide an accurate translation in a meter approximating Ovid's and no more. In our time, David Slavitt has tried something metrically similar to the Golding translation.

The shade, free now to flee to the land of shades below,
could recognize those landscapes it passed through before,
as it searched
through all those ashen faces for Eurydice's dear face —
which he at last beholds. He takes in his eager and airy
arms her beloved wraith, and side by side they walk
through the blessed fields. He leads a step ahead and
looks back
again and again to see how each time she follows him still.

Slavitt goes for a hexameter which does approximate the speed of Ovid's metrical line. In the preface to his translation, he mentions this speed as a characteristic of Ovid's verse. Slavitt's own contribution to this moment is to give us the intensity of Orpheus' search, "through all those ashen faces" for the "dear face" of his beloved which, we know, must be ashen, too.

But Charles Martin, like Golding, is most interested in the most accurate possible translation. From what I can tell of the Latin, the following by Martin is very close. The simple regularity of the blank verse lets the affecting moment speak for itself.

The shade of Orpheus now fled below,
and recognized all he had seen before;
and as he searched through the Elysian Fields,
he came upon his lost Eurydice,
and passionately threw his arms about her;
here now they walk together, side by side,
or now he follows as she goes before,
or he precedes, and she goes after him;
and now there is no longer any danger
when Orpheus looks on Eurydice.

The touch Martin gives is not to tell us for whom Orpheus searches until he finds her, almost as if by accident. But I don't want to suggest that Martin writes merely a serviceable blank verse. He dispenses with it when the Muses answer the challenge of the daughters of Pierus. They sing their tales, including the rape of Proserpina, in dactylic pentameter, as does Orpheus when he charms the king and queen of Hades with his appeal to retrieve Eurydice. And only a gifted metrist could perform the legerdemain that Martin easily accomplishes, as when he describes how the music of Orpheus enchanted trees and beasts, "and made the very stones skip in his wake."

Ovid is our contemporary because, as with Shakespeare and the Bible, his narratives continue to intrigue us. We still speak of a Midas touch, refer to the family of spiders as arachnids, and most recently have seen the namesake of Diana, the huntress, eulogized by her brother as one of the most hunted creatures in the world. But it is literary critics who have also kept Ovid's great poem alive. Contemporary critics have been especially interested in the ways victims are silenced in a number of Ovid's tales, usually tales of rape, the most notable being the maiming of Philomela by Tereus. Certainly the assault on Orpheus by the "raving Thracian" women makes one see some contemporary parallels in the silencing acts of political movements, like political correctness, against those who refuse to go along with them. It is, admittedly, one tale in which silencing is not achieved, for Orpheus' head and lyre, after he is torn apart, keep singing as they glide down the River Hebrus: "the plaintive lyre makes some kind of moan, / the lifeless tongue moans on along with it, / the moaning riverbanks respond in turn." To paraphrase Lillian Hellman's famous rebuke to the House Unamerican Affairs Committee, art will not cut its cloth to suit the fashion of the times, even if the times have ripped it to shreds. The Maenads, however, are silenced by their angry god Bacchus and turned into oak trees for their crime against his favorite devotee.

Many of the transformations in Ovid's poem involve a loss of humanity or the loss of human agency. They offer themselves to all kinds of interpretation, including the sociopolitical ones that currently dominate literary criticism. For those interested in the construction of gender, Ovid provides a number of illustrative stories. There is Jove seducing the nymph Callisto by pretending to be Diana. There is the birth of Hermaphroditus in the pool of Salmacis which makes any man who sets foot there "depart from it without virility." There is the girl Iphis, given a name that will suit either sex and raised as a boy to mislead her father, who on her wedding day is granted her wish to become a man. And there is Tiresias, relating the story of his transgression of gender boundaries, and his punishment from Juno for confirming Jove's claim that it is women not men who derive the most pleasure from sex.

The political act of dehumanizing or demonizing, so prevalent today, we can also see reflected in many of Ovid's transformations. Consider both occasions when serpent's teeth are sown, first by Cadmus, then later by Jason, only to produce an army of faceless soldiers who slaughter one another in so-called civil war: "These brothers of a moment slew each other, / until young men, whose lives had just begun, / lay beating the breast of their ensanguined mother." This brings to mind A. E. Housman's epitaph for those slain in battle that ends, "Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; / But young men think it is, and we were young." But I also think of the presentation of masses created for slaughter in recent digital films, from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings, in which the serpent's teeth of reproduction have been sown, and monsters — they are always monsters — may be killed wholesale. Ovid reminds us constantly that we begin the destruction of another human being by transforming him or her first into an inhuman creature.

We may read Ovid as we read the Bible, as events that happened then, not now, events that could only happen then, not now. And yet, if we consider the mythos of motion pictures like The Matrix, we realize that now is then and that transformation remains something we not only want to see, but we expect to see. Is desire behind it, as it was for Ovid's stories? Yes, though frequently it is a desire, not for godlike power to have our will with the unwilling, but to confirm our suspicions. Now the Ovidian stories tell us that, indeed, there are forces at work beyond our control, changing us at their leisure, particularly when we get out of hand. Ovid has been digitalized to enact our lust for transformation, for tricks of incarnation and reconstitution. Think of how easily the human form in movies can be altered seamlessly by digital magic. Most of these transformations — I'm thinking of those especially in The Lord of the Rings — suggest the interference of powers beyond our control. But Ovid remains Ovid, the poet of desire, in many other contemporary narrative forms.

In the weekly dramatic/comic TV series "Joan of Arcadia," God takes various ingenious disguises to appear to his handmaiden. God, male or female, may be stocking a vending machine or monitoring a metal detector or may simply walk up to Joan as a geeky kid in the hall at her high school between classes and give her some mysterious instruction. Remarkably, despite the absurdity of all this, Joan has learned that these appearances are genuine and not to be disregarded. How are they Ovidian? It is simple enough to recognize that God assumes a different shape in every case — another body. But aside from that obvious parallel, in every case two changes occur: one is Joan's, as her maturity deepens, and the other is the person's she is helping. In each episode, Joan learns a new level of maturity and helps someone else indirectly effect a change. A recent one was the transformation of her own mother from housewife into teacher. The problem, I know, is that the show runs the risk of becoming a "Mary Worth" or a "Father Knows Best" for the twenty-first century. Hollywood loves do-gooding meddlers, and Joan continues to threaten to be one, although her crabby adolescent self always redeems her at the last moment. What interests me is the Ovidian shapes taken on by God, and the Ovidian shapes proposed to Joan. Every week she must become something she is not: a cheerleader, a party girl, a debater, and so on. Even the Bible doesn't carry on like this with its prophets and vehicles for divine birth. Joan of Arcadia deepens with Ovid's Metamorphoses in the background.

But so does a contemporary phenomenon like Michael Jackson. With but one exception — Tiresias — human transformation in the Metamorphoses is permanent. It is doubtful that Michael Jackson could reverse any of his bizarre changes, all of them induced by some god only his psychotherapist could name. And yet Ovid's great poem helps us to understand what motivates this sad contemporary demigod.

Ovid shows us the forms taken by our desire. And he reminds us, as well, of the shapes others must take at times to resist our desire. For it is clear in his stories that the gods are merely behaving as men and women would if they were gods. Charles Martin's new translation of the Metamorphoses, the latest in a 500-year-old tradition, both gives us an Ovid for our times and reminds us that in our times Ovid is everywhere.

(From The Hudson Review, Vol. LVII, No. 2 (Summer 2004))