Thread by @EmilyRCWilson

If you are, for any reason, in the mood for a long poem about the abuse of power, I'd like to recommend Ovid's Metamorphoses.

I spent the last month rereading the Met. and writing an introduction for a Norton reissue of the Charles Martin translation, which I like. I want to give a shout out for how great Ovid is, before I move back to the Iliad next week.

I love that the Metamorphoses is so obviously written for smart people, who will snicker if a story is dumb or told in a predictable way. I love that it totally works as an intro to Greek myth, but it's in no way boring if you know 100% of the stories already.

It needs trigger warnings. Sexual violence is everywhere, it's horrifying, & Ovid sometimes knows it. So many stories are about being raped then deprived of a voice. Philomela has her tongue cut out, and weaves what happened. Abuse is terrible, and so is silencing.

I love the depiction of nature as a weird community of animate living things, of rocks and plants as transformed, suffering human beings. I love the great speech of Pythagoras, all about mutability and vegetarianism.

Ovid's stories of climate change, like poor idiotic Phaethon wrecking Earth with his overconfidence and incompetence, hit harder than ever when you read them in 2020.

I love the queerness, the way that Ovid is constantly exploring what it would be like to live and love in a different kind of body. I love the awareness of precarity. At any moment, we can change.

I love how articulate the characters are, especially the female characters; the male rapists have less to say for themselves. I love the obvious relish with which Ovid embraces the project of writing 50 lines advocating for incest.

I love Ovid's obsession with craft, with the power and limits of art. So many great artist characters: Arachne, Daedalus, Pygmalion: is it creepy to fall in love with your own creation? Orpheus: in Ovid, it's tragic, but also funny -- he can't stop singing, even decapitated.

I love the way Ovid can combine horror or pathos with almost-comedy, and vice versa. Actaeon trying to tell his own doggies not to rip him to pieces. Narcissus and Echo: we can hear without hearing, see without seeing.

Ovid's Medea is such a great character, dominating nature (like Prospero), and boiling the old guys. We all have a few we'd like to boil.

I don't necessarily endorse the writing of introductions, which are a very tricky genre. But if you haven't read the Metamorphoses, or haven't read it recently, I strongly recommend it. It's beautiful escapist fantasy, and also very close to reality.

Most of the replies are requests for translation recommendations. I honestly haven't read most of the existing versions. If you're into Elizabeth fourteeners, Golding is fabulous. I know @samccart1 is doing one, which I bet will be good. I like the Charles Martin, because:

@samccart1 Martin gets both the humor & the pathos. Uses fluent IP meter, switched occasionally -- seems in the spirit of Ovid's poetic showing-off; ditto the fun anachronisms ("senior moment") & coinages ("bimanous quadrupeds"). You feel horrified, sad and angry at the right moments, too.

@samccart1 This is a really useful essay about how translators obscure, and/or collude with, Ovid’s rapes. electricliterature.com/rape-lost-in-t…

@samccart1 After rereading this essay today, I read the beginning of the Met in a few different versions. It struck me that there's often erasure not only of violence itself, but also of the perspective of the victim.

First sexual assault of the poem: the obnoxiously arrogant god Apollo boasts to Cupid, gets stung by his arrow, and is inspired to try to rape a woman called Daphne, who very much doesn't want it. Apollo delivers a characteristically pompous declaration about how great he is.

When boasting fails to do the trick, he races after her, hoping to rape her. The narrator is clear that there are two entirely different experiences here: she is terrified, while he finds even her terror sexy. He is, unambiguously, a jerk.

The narrator sees more through his eyes than hers; we are told how the terrified victim looks to the attacker, but not vice versa. But the narrator isn't entirely Team Rapist. She "seemed" sexy (visa decens) even then -- presumably, to the rapist. It's his POV, not fact.

Latin:
Plura locuturum timido Peneia cursu
fugit cumque ipso verba inperfecta reliquit,
tum quoque visa decens. Nudabant corpora venti,
obviaque adversas vibrabant flamina vestes,
et levis inpulsos retro dabat aura capillos,
auctaque forma fuga est.

Golding:
As Phoebus would have spoken more, away Peneis stale with fearful steps & left him in the midst of all his tale.
& as she ran the meeting winds her garments backwards blew
so that her naked skin appeared behind her as she flew..
Her running made her seem more fair.

Golding, 1567, is really clear about her feelings ("fearful") and the fact that she's unambiguously cutting a guy who loves the sound of his own voice ('all his tale'), and that what "appeared" and "seem" are his perspective, not necessarily yours or mine.

Dryden:
She heard not half; so furiously she flies,
and on her ear th'imperfect accent dies.
Fear gave her wings; and as she fled, the wind
increasing, spread her flowing hair behind,
and left her legs and thighs exposed to view,
which made the god more eager to pursue.

Dryden also very clear that he's offering her perspective: she has an experience ('heard not half'), a furious desire (to get away, to fly), intense feelings (fear on wings). Apollo is a creep; her vulnerability makes him "more eager", but it doesn't get the narrator excited.

Raeburn, in hexameters:
Apollo wanted to say much more, but terrified Daphne
ran all the faster; she left him behind with his speech unfinished.
Her beauty was visible still, as her limbs were exposed by the wind;
... Flight made her all the more lovely...

"Visible" is weird for "visa" ("seemed"); it makes it sound as if beauty is somewhere other than in the eyes of the beholder, and the last line makes it sound like we, if we were there, would also think she looked "lovely" (rather than e.g. calling the cops).

Humphries:
He would have said
much more than this, but Daphne, frightened, left him
with many words unsaid, and she was lovely
even in flight, her limbs bare in the wind...
... more beautiful than ever.

Very similar: she's objectively "lovely", and objectively extra beautiful for being terrified, rather than just lovely in the eyes of a prolix wannabe rapist; his POV is presented as legit.

Melville:
More he had tried to say, but she in fear
Fled on and left him and his words unfinished.
Enchanting still she looked -- her slender limbs
bare in the breeze, her fluttering dress blown back...
..And flight enhanced her grace.

Melville is very similar in POV (rapist-gaze all the way), but different in that he adds in some pretty details to appreciate our rapist-gaze pleasure: "slender" limbs and "fluttering" dress.

Charles Martin:
He had much more to say to her, but Daphne
pursued her fearful course and left him speechless,
though no less lovely fleeing him; indeed,
disheveled by the wind that bared her limbs...
the maiden was more beautiful in flight!

There's a weird syntactical shift here: he's speechless, and she's lovely, with no clue about when the referent shifts. Maybe the addition of "maiden", with exclamation mark, is meant to make it ironic, so we can sort of laugh at the rapist. Though it isn't very funny.

I have no skin in the Ovid translation game. But as an indication of shifting attitudes about sexual violence, it's depressing that the translations from the C16 and C17 seem more attuned to the rape victim's perspective than those from the C20-C21.