Penguins on Parade: Ovid's Metamorphoses!

Some Penguin Classics certainly qualify as secular scripture, which we probably need after a dose of the holies. We all have a shelf of such books that qualify as such personal scripture, and my tastes being what they are, many of mine are included in the Penguin Classics line. The foremost of these, my single favorite book, is Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it was curiously ill-treated by Penguin in the 20th century. The Penguin Classics edition, definitely aimed at the same school-textbook niche had had made their prose Iliad such an astonishing success, was a 1955 prose translation by Mary Innes, who "spent over twenty years proving to schoolgirls that the classical languages can and should be enjoyed" (as we're told in a bio-note clearly - and tellingly - dictated by her). Under her careful, accurate, bowdlerizing touch, we get Ovid's fifteen-book epic as a changed thing itself: gone is the glitter, the liquid grace, the jazzy contrapunction. Gone is the wordplay, the teasing irreverence, and all the wit. What's left is a big miscellany of 'tales of gods and goddesses' in the vein of Edith Hamilton, perfect for Scottish schoolgirls, even though its original author, drunk and flushed from some unsuccessful boy-chasing at a party on the Esquiline, would have extemporized the most exquisite execration of the end result.

Mainly because it's lifeless, and Ovid's great poem, more than any other from the ancient world, absolutely teems with life (as a certain wise man once hopefully described the universe). He wrote it in the blinding fullness of his talents, after his journeyman work and the challenges to orthodoxy were out of his system, after he finally began to understand what Virgil, for example, knew right away: that there's nothing inherently wrong (or worse, embarrassing) about working in canonical terms. In this as in all things, the performance is all - Ovid at last saw this and determined to embrace it. Change is the theme of his masterpiece, and not the least among the changes it signaled was his own: "We have laughed and reveled together, you and I," the Metamorphoses told its readers, "now let me sing you a different song." It's in every way a transcendant work, richly meriting the immortality Ovid himself predicts for it, and it deserves better than Miss Innes calling it a "treasure trove" and calling its author "the prince of story-tellers."

It deserves, first, verse. Yes, this is difficult - not only because Ovid's dactylic hexameter fits poorly in mouth-breathing English iambs, but also because Ovid intended it to be difficult; he weaves more complexity into a couple of lines than any poet after him until John Donne (the problem works both ways, incidentally: if you want to ruin a perfectly good hour, try translating one of the Holy Sonnets into Latin) - this is bound to be a translators' graveyard.



Nevertheless, Penguin could have done better than a prose outline, and I kept expecting them to. I wanted to see a Penguin Classic of Arthur Golding's 1567 masterpiece, still possessing all its unmistakeably Elizabethan crashing suavity. Even better, I wanted to see Horace Gregory's fantastic 1958 translation, still, to my mind, the finest English version of Ovid's poem ever made. But I had to wait and look elsewhere during the 20th century, and in 2004 Penguin Classics published a verse translation by David Raeburn, and my wait was over. Raeburn's Metamorphoses doesn't have the power of Golding's nor the assurance of Gregory's, but it does a good job of convincing me that it doesn't aspire to such things. Instead, it's got a supple, conversational charm all its own. Listen to the rhythms he manages in the famous scene where poor Actaeon surprises the goddess Diana while bathing and is instantly changed:

As she splashed his hair with revengeful drops,

she spoke the spine-chilling words which warned of impending disaster:

'Now you may tell the story of seeing Diana naked -

If story-telling is in your power!' No more was needed.

The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;

the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;

she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender

forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;

last, she injected panic. The son of Autonoe bolted,

surprising himself with his speed as he bounded away from the clearing.

But when he came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers,

'Oh, dear god!' he was going to say; but no words followed.

All the sound he produced was a moan, as the tears streamed over

his strange new face.

Right after the publication of the Metamorphoses (while it was itself still changing, in fact, constantly being revised by its fretting author), a horrible transformation came upon Ovid himself: he was banished from Rome, sent into exile at Tomis on the edge of the Roman world (I've written about it here). He begged to be returned (or at least exiled someplace with decent food), but his pleas, like those of his heroes and heroines, his hapless mortals, went unheeded. I myself think he would have found it poor comfort indeed that we're still reading his books two thousand years after his misery dried to dust, but I can hope I'm wrong.

At least his work is now properly enshrined as a Penguin Classic! This volume also sports an Introduction by Denis Feeney that's not to be missed.

Poetry Class!

Pentheus - man of sorrows, king
of Thebes - despised the gods, and had no time
for blind old men or their prophecies.
'You're a fool, Tiresias, and you belong
in the darkness. Now leave me be!'
'You might wish, sire, for my afflictions soon enough,
if only to save you from witnessing
the rites of Dionysus.
He is near at hand, I feel it now,
and if you fail to honour him - your cousin
the god - you will be torn to a thousand ribbons
left hanging in the trees, your blood
fouling your mother and her sisters.
Your eyes have sight but you are blind.
My eyes are blind but I see the truth ...'

But before Tiresias had finished with his warning,
even as the king pushed him away,
it had already begun.

He was walking on the earth,
and you could hear the shrieks
of the dancers in the fields, see the people
streaming out of the city, men and women,
young and old, nobles and commoners, climbing
to Cithaeron and the god
who was now made manifest.

Pentheus stared out in disbelief.
'What lunacy is this? You people
bewitched by cymbals, pipes and trickery -
you who have stood with swords drawn
in the din of battle on the fields of war -
now dance with a gaggle of wailing women
waving tambourines? You wear garlands
instead of helmets, hold fennel wands
instead of spears, and all for some boy!
If the walls of Thebes were to fall
- which they will not - it will be
at the hands of soldiers and their engines of war,
not by the flowers, the embroidered robes
and scented hair of this weaponless pretty-boy.
Find him! Bring him here, where he'll
confess that he's no son of Zeus and these
sacred rites are just a shaman's lie.
Bring him here to me now, in chains!'

His counsellors gathered, muttering restraint,
which just inflamed the king who
like a river in spate
boiled and foamed
at any hindrance in the way.

His men returned, stained in blood
and claiming they saw no sign
of Dionysus, just this priest of his
- a comrade and an acolyte - and they
pushed forward the man, an foreigner,
hands tied behind his back.
Eyes bright with rage, Pentheus
spoke slowly:
'Before you die, I want your name,
your country, and why you came here with this
fraud and his filthy cult.'
Unblinking, the prisoner replied:
'I am Acoetes, from Lydia,
son of a humble fisherman,
now a fisherman myself.
I learnt how to steer, set a course,
to read the wind and stars,
so I left the rocks of home and went to sea.
I'd raised a crew, and on our way to Delos
a storm forced a landfall
on the shores of Chios. The next morning
I sent the men to fetch fresh water
and they came back with a child.
The bosun pulled him up on board, saying
they'd found him in a field, this prize,
this boy as beautiful as a girl, stumbling
slightly from sleep, or wine.
I knew, by the face, by every movement,
that this was no mortal, that I was looking at a god.
"Honour this child," I said to the crew,
"for he is not of us." And to the boy:
"Show us grace and bless our labours
and grant these men forgiveness,
for they know not what they do."
One slid down the rigging, calling
"Don't bother with your prayers on our account,"
and the others circled, nodding and shouting,
their voices fat with greed.
"I am the captain, and I'll have no
sacrilege aboard this ship, and no
harm to our fellow traveller."
"Our plunder," said the worst of them
taking me by the throat
to the cheers and yelps of the rest.
And their noise woke Dionysus for it was him
who opened his eyes -
"Tell me sailors: what's happening?
How did I get here and where am I going?"
One told him not to worry, asked him
to name his port of call.
"Naxos. Turn your course for Naxos,
my home, and you'll find a welcome there."
And so the mutinous crew
swore by all the gods of the sea they would do
just that and told me to set sail.
Naxos lay to starboard but
winking and laughing
they made me steer to port.
"I'll have no part of this," I said,
and was shouldered from the helm.
"No one is indispensable, captain.
Our safety does not lie with you alone."
And the painted prow was turned
away from Naxos, out to the open sea.

Then the god began to toy with them.
Gazing out from the curving deck
across the ocean, feigning tears, he cried:
"These are not the shores you promised me,
these shores are not my home.
What glory is there when men
deceive a boy: so many against one?"
My tears were real, but the mutineers
just laughed at both of us and kept rowing.

Now I swear to you by that god himself
- and there is no god nearer than him -
that this is true: that the ship just stopped.
It stood still on the sea as if in dry dock.
The panicked men pulled harder,
letting out sail to try and find the wind,
but ivy was swarming up the oars
twining tendrils round the blades,
whipping along the decks and up the mast,
dragging at the encumbered sails
till they sagged in heavy-berried clusters.
And now the god revealed himself at last.
Around his brow a garland of grapes;
in his hand a wand, tight-twisted with vine;
and at his feet, the slinking
phantom shapes of wild beasts:
tigers, lynxes, panthers.

Illusions, perhaps, but the crew began to leap
overboard, in terror or madness or both.
One body darkened and went black,
back arcing in a curve; another started to call out
just as his jaws spread wide, his nose hooked over,
his skin hardened into scales. Another, still
fumbling with an oar, looked down
and saw his hands shrinking till they were
hands no more, just fins.
And I watched one, reaching up for a rope, finding
he had no arms
and as he toppled over,
finding he had no legs either:
all torso, he back-flipped into the sea,
tail horned like a crescent moon.
They leapt on every side in a shower of spray:
bursting free of the water, plunging down again
like dancers or tumblers at play.

The only human left of twenty
I stood there shaking
till I heard the god speak out:
"Hold your nerve
and this empty ship
and track us down the coast to home!"
And so I did. And there I joined
his rites and sacrifices, and now I follow him:
Iacchus, Bromius, Liber, Dionysus.'

'Well,' said Pentheus, 'I have listened patiently
to this long, rambling fantasy of yours:
an attempt, no doubt, to diminish my anger
and delay your punishment. Well, it didn't work.
Take him, men, and break him on the rack.
Send him down to Hell.'
And so Acoetes was dragged away
to the cells; but while the fire, the steel,
the instruments of pain, were being prepared
the doors flew open of their own accord
and the chains feel from his hands.

Hearing this - not trusting anyone now -
Pentheus stood and went
to settle things, once and for all.
Alone, he clambered up Cithaeron, the mountain
chosen for these rites, now ringing
with the songs and chants of the maenads,
the celebrants of the god.
And he was stirred by them, roused like a warhorse
at the sound of battle trumpets, their
shiver in the air. The long cries
thrilling through him
he pressed on:
skittish, fevered, feeling again
some passion in him flare.

Halfway up the mountainside,
surrounded by woods, was an open clearing.
Here he stood, in full view. Here he looked
upon the naked mysteries with uninitiated eyes.
The first to see him, the first
to rush at him, the first
to hurl her sharpened wand into his side,
was Agave, his mother,
screaming: 'Come, my sisters, quick!
There is a wild boar here we must kill!'
And the three sisters led the rest
and fell on him in a frenzy,
and Pentheus the king was terrified, crying out,
confessing all his sins. Blood
streaming from a hundred wounds
he called to Autonone: 'I am Pentheus!
Don't you know your own nephew?
Would you do to me
what was done to Acteon, your son?'
But the names meant nothing to her,
and she simply
tore his right arm out of its shoulder.
Her sister, Ino, wrenched off the other
like a chicken's wing.
With no hands left to pray, no arms
to reach for his mother, he just said,
'Mother, look at me.'
And Agave looked, and howled, and shook
the hair from her face, and went to him
and took his head in her hands
and in a throb of rapture
twisted it, clean off.
In her bloody grip, the head swung
with its red strings: 'See,
my sisters: victory!'
And quicker than a winter wind strips
the last leaves from a tree,
so all the others ripped Pentheus to pieces
with their own bare hands.

By this lesson piety was learned,
and due reverence for the great god Dionysus,
for his rites and for this holy mountain shrine.

Pentheus and Dionysus by Robin Robertson ("after Ovid")

The Golding Ovid!

Our book today is not just Ovid's epic, twisty-delightful poem The Metamorphoses but one particular English version of it: the translation by Arthur Golding begun sometime in the early 1560s and given its more of less final form in 1567.

Although Golding probably did most of the early work on his translation while staying on the estate of that ultimate Elizabethan courtier William Cecil, nobody should mistake Golding himself for a courtier, at least not of the polished, refined kind that's become synonymous with the word. Golding came from money, it's true, but it was the money of a grounded, four-square landowning family out in the hills and dales of Essex, not a newly cosmopolitan clan like the Cecils. Golding came from livestock-keeping, cony-catching, ruddy-faced rural stock. He was what a later writer of genius would term a country booby squire. A great English novelist could have been describing Golding's father:

He was a short, stumpy man, with red cheeks and a round face; who was usually to be seen till dinner-time dressed in a very old shooting coat, with breeches, gaiters, and very thick shoes. He lived generally out of doors, and was almost as great in the preserving of game as in the breeding of oxen. He knew every acre of his own estate, and every tree upon it, as thoroughly as a lady knows the ornaments in her drawing-room. There was no gap in a fence of which he did not remember the exact bearings, no path hither and thither as to which he could not tell the why and the wherefore.

Unfortunately for Golding, when his father and brother left the world, they left behind a mass of financial entanglements and debt, but it would likely not have mattered in any case: Golding was terrible with money and it was terrible with him - when he died in 1606 (after having spent a couple of stints in debtors' prison), he had scarcely an unattached farthing to his name.

He always had hopes of money, however, and never more so than when his sister married one of the foremost peers of the realm, John de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford. That John's son - and therefore Golding's nephew - was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has been catnip to conspiracy theorists for over a hundred years, for obvious reasons. Shakespeare's plays are absolutely rife with allusions to Ovid, echoes of Ovid, thefts from Ovid, and in one case Ovid's book as an actual prop on stage. Shakespearean scholars have proven to their own satisfaction that their boy (despite Ben Jonson's claim) could read Latin with handy skill, but even if this is true (it isn't, but even if), it's still certain he knew Ovid in English translation front to back - and that means he knew the Golding Ovid, since there were no other serious contenders for the whole of that generation. Authorship theorists naturally say young Edward had a hand in writing Golding's translation, and even if he didn't, they say, surely the presence of his uncle-in-law translating away right under his nose is the reason Ovid's work is so heavily represented in Shakespeare's - that is, Edward's - famous stage plays.




Golding certainly dedicated works to Edward, no doubt in hopes of financial consideration, and the dedications themselves are enough to satisfy the authorship theorists, despite the fact that Golding's prose reads nothing like Edward's, and despite the fact that his signature iambic heptameter (his rolling "fourteeners," a meter that's gone entirely out of fashion, alas) is both better and worse than - and in any case totally dissimilar to - anything Edward wrote. There comes a point, always, with authorship theorists where you just have to declare a pace on all their houses and walk away from the whole subject. If Edward de Vere wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, well then his connection to Golding makes all that much more sense. If Shakespeare wrote his own plays, his debt to Golding - and his ease of contracting it - is obvious.

In either case, we come back to the Golding Ovid itself, the poem Ezra Pound was fond of calling the most beautiful in the English language (rather embarrassing that, even for Golding fans such as myself). Critics have pounded on Golding's clumsy inaccuracies since the ink was first wet on them, and more than one august modern authority has pronounced him shallow, wayward, and thoroughly obtuse - bad Latin and worse English. These authorities always grudgingly admit that his version of The Metamorphoses is fun to read (one recent editor compares Golding to a sports caster), but that's about as far as they'll go - as a translation of Ovid, they're all quick to point out, Golding is a travesty.

Let's see an example from one of these killjoys, in this case John Frederick Nims:

In XIV the Sibyl tells Aeneas that nothing is impossible for human worth to achieve: "Invia virtuti nulla est via." The point is in the words: no via is invia. If one believes, with Goethe and Valery, that what one wants from a translator of poetry is not mere paraphrase of thought but a rendering of equivalent effect, then one will not be satisfied with a translator who ignores such points, as Golding does with "No way to vertue is restreynd."

But is this so unsatisfying? Ovid's word order is intentionally inverted, to start the line with its own obstacle, literally something like "Impassible to virtue, there is no way" (by smoothing this out to 'no via is invia,' Nims is, ironically enough, misserving Ovid) - and Golding preserves this by starting his line with that flat 'no way.' He also preserves the liquidity of Ovid's agent in the line - his 'to vertue' very neatly acts as both a path and a personification: vertue is both the seeker and the destination.

A best-seller in his own day because of how incredibly damn lively his verses were, Ovid would certainly have approved of how lively Golding's version of his great poem is. Examples are everywhere (his time in William Cecil's house wasn't wasted), and in order to enjoy them, all the Latinless modern reader has to do is a) overlook the less formal spellings of the day, and b) train the ear to hear the bawling, anthem-at-the-ballpark rhythm of the 'fourteener' at its best. Here's poor Cadmus in the horrifying process of becoming a snake:

He falleth groveling on his breast, and both his shankes doe growe
In one round spindle Bodkinwise with sharpnd point below.
His armes as yet remayned still: his armes that did remayne,
He stretched out, and sayde with tears that plenteously did raine
Adowne his face, which yet did keepe the native fashion sownd:
Come hither wyfe, come hither wight most wretched on the ground,
And whyle that ought of mee remaynes vouchsafe to touche the same.
Come take mee by the hand as long as hand may have his name,
Before this snakish shape doe whole my body over runne.
He would have spoken more when sodainely his tongue begunne
To split in two and speache did fayle: and as he did attempt
To make his mone, he hist: for nature now had cleane exempt
All other speach.

And his wife's misery at witnessing this transformation is no less riveting:

His wretched wyfe hir naked stomack beete
And cryde: What meaneth this? Deare Cadmus, where are now they feete?
Where are thy shoulders and thy handes? thy hew and manly face?
With all the other things that did thy princely person grace
Which now I overpasse?

And Golding's lifelong protestations of extreme devout (even Puritan) religious belief - in his dedication to the Earl of Leicester, he actually tries to maintain that reading Ovid is good for your moral fiber - are constantly undercut by this translation of his, since staying true to Ovid means giving readers (including Robert Dudley, who needed no instruction in the ways of princely persons) time after time things they won't find in their Sunday psalters, as, to look no further, Cadmus' serpentine reaction to his wife's entreaties:

When this was spoken, Cadmus lickt his wyfe about the lippes,
And (as a place with which he was acquaynted well) he slippes
Into hir boosome, lovingly embracing hir, and cast
Himself about hif neck, as oft he had in tyme forepast.

Purists (from whose ranks Golding has had the bad luck to draw virtually all his editors) will protest that whatever this is, it isn't Ovid - and technically they'll be correct. Ovid's Latin is whittled and supple, cascading over the listener with the transparent mastery of water. He achieves metrical effects that even Marlowe, attempting to translate, couldn't duplicate.

Those purists will point out that even if Golding's conscious response to this steep gradient was therefore to embrace the effusive prolixity of English, to make a country song out of what was a city entertainment, he largely fails, stuffing Ovid's gorgeous lines with inept circumlocutions that a better poet - even a better 16th century versifier - would have avoided.

To which I say, fine, yes, you're probably right. But Golding was good enough for Shakespeare (even a heroically Latinate Shakespeare), who knew a thing or two about versifying, and if you spend even half an hour reading Golding's Ovid, you'll see why. There's life here, in leaping, quarreling, laughing abundance. That's pretty good, for a country booby squire. I'm no poet, but I think Ovid would have approved.

In the Penny Press! Ovid and John Masefield!

Some fun and interesting things in this week's London Review of Books and the TLS.

Mark Kishlansky writes a very good, succinct piece on the Restoration, reviewing a new massive two-volume history by Tim Harris. Kishlansky's review is negative, which is surely not something an author wants to read after spending 1100 pages on his subject (we'll see what other critical organs have to say about the books), and one thing he writes distracted me from the rest of his review:

Kings refused to justify their actions, or, as in the case of the secret Treaty of Dover (signed by Charles and Louis in 1670), were deliberately misleading about them. Divine-right monarchs didn't always care about the opinions of their citizens. Kings reigned, a concept so out of fashion as to be almost unrecoverable.

A ruler who believes he acts on God's wishes, who deliberately misleads, and who does what he does without reference to the opinions of even the majority of his people? Such a concept may be "unrecoverable" in the UK, but who in present-day America wouldn't offer a rueful little laugh at the suggestion that it's gone from the world entirely?

Also in this issue, Denis Feeney has a very good, verp penetrating piece on Ovid's exile years. He's reviewing Peter Green's new and excellent translation of Ovid's exile poems, but he takes the opportunity to examine many facets of Ovid's time at Tomis, at the furthest edge of the Roman world.

My only quibble? Feeney writes that Ovid's tragedy 'Medea' is "the only work of his that did not survive to the age of printing." This is hardly the case. Not only does Feeney ignore the raft of little or occasional poems alluded to in Ovid's extant works, but he overlooks the fact that Ovid himself mentions one other work of his we don't have, potentially the most interesting thing he ever wrote: a work in the language of Tomis. For me the idea has always been fascinating - the picture of this most cosmopolitan of poets, exiled from the greatest city in the world and fetched up at the ass-end of nowhere, but still compelled to write - and not only to write, but to seek an immediate audience, even if he had to learn an entirely new language to do it. There's no doubt at all that the world of literature is markedly less for the lack of the great works Ovid would have created if he'd been allowed to remain in Rome (or even if he'd been allowed to return). But even so, the exile poems are weird and sad and a little crazed and ultimately very beautiful, I think, though in a very bleak vein.

Over in the TLS, in addition to a long and masterful damnation by Brian Vickers of the new Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare (after ten or fifteen paragraphs, reading it had all the visceral fascination of watching a bloodsport), there were two fun little bits.

The first was in the letters page, where Richard Boston writes in response to the disclosure last time that Poet Laureate John Masefield would always submit his poems with stamped, addressed envelopes - in case of rejection. Boston writes:

Near the end of Masefield's life, I was working for your predecessor, the late Arthur Crook, on the TLS. One day, A.P. Ryan, who had the not very onerous job of editing the Times's sole book page, sought our advice on what to do about the bard's latest contribution. Masefield had written about a royal visit to Australia. Unfortunately, the old boy had got his wires crossed.
The visit had been to Austria. An easy mistake: the names of both countries begin and end with 'A'. Easy solution: remove the 'al' from 'Australia'. This proved not to be enough. The people of Vienna would still have been not the only ones puzzled by the references to kangaroos and boomerangs.
This may well have been the only occasion on which the stamped addressed envelope had to be used. I have the idea that it may also have been, sadly, the last time Masefield sent in a poem. I do hope that someone, somewhere, somehow has a copy of the Australia poem.




I'd bet my last farthing this plea either turns up the long-lost Australia poem or turns up some egghead clarifying the poet's mistake. I'll keep you posted.

And of course there's the main attraction of the TLS, at least for me: the magisterial smackdown. This is not a sunny, bird-chirping book review where everybody is presumed to be doing their best and if you can't say something nice about somebody, you don't say anything at all. This is the NFL, and sometimes it can be delightful (like, for instance, if you hated your older brother and his book received just such a spanking).

Take the case of Lisa Chiu's new book When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish - and other tales about the genes in your body

Jonathan Hodgkin spends two paragraphs of his three-paragraph review summarizing and describing, and then he finishes with this:

This survey of human genetics, written for a general audience, is readable and sometimes engaging, but it is carelessly written and inconsistent in the level of explanation used. Technical terms are introduced before being adequately explained, and several of the stories are left dangling unsatisfactorily, or ended with a labored pun. Chiu also misses some key points - for example, she writes about the discovery of FOX2P, the first candidate for the 'gene for language', but fails to mention one of its most exciting and suggestive properties, namely its remarkably rapid evolution. Better books of this type have been written, such as Matt Ridley's Genome and Armand Leroi's Mutants. When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish has the advantage of being reasonably up to date, but otherwise there is not much to recommend it.

Hee.

The review stops, as they all do, just one step short of advising the author to go out and kill themselves.

Aside from those two wonderful publications, the only ITPP news comes from this morning's Metro, which has a one-paragraph (naturally) blurb enthusiing about World War Z. So now that all the STUPID people in Boston have been made aware of the book, it only remains for the Globe to tell all the ordinary people and the Phoenix to tell all the smart people. Fingers crossed ...