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.

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 ...