Metamorphoses

Ovid, Rolfe Humphries

Description

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the most influential works of Western literature, inspiring artists and writers from Titian to Shakespeare to Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most famous Roman myths as you've never read them before—sensuous, dangerously witty, audacious—from the fall of Troy to birth of the minotaur, and many others that only appear in the Metamorphoses. Connected together by the immutable laws of change and metamorphosis, the myths tell the story of the world from its creation up to the transformation of Julius Caesar from man into god.

In the ten-beat, unrhymed lines of this now-legendary and widely praised translation, Rolfe Humphries captures the spirit of Ovid's swift and conversational language, bringing the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet to modern readers.

This special annotated edition includes new, comprehensive commentary and notes by Joseph D. Reed, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE

The Creation

The Four Ages

Jove's Intervention

The Story of Lycaon

The Flood

Deucalion and Pyrrha

Apollo and Daphne

Jove and Io

BOOK TWO

The Story of Phaethon

Jove in Arcady

The Story of the Raven

The Story of Ocyrhoe

Mercury and Battus

Mercury, Herse, and Aglauros

The House of the Goddess Envy

Europa

BOOK THREE

The Story of Cadmus

The Story of Actaeon

The Story of Semele

The Story of Tiresias

The Story of Echo and Narcissus

The Story of Pentheus and Bacchus

BOOK FOUR

The Story of Pyramus and Thisbe

The Story of Mars and Venus

The Sun-god and Leucothoe

The Story of Salmacis

The End of the Daughters of Minyas

The Story of Athamas and Ino

The End of Cadmus

The Story of Perseus

BOOK FIVE

The Fighting of Perseus

Minerva Visits the Muses

BOOK SIX

The Story of Niobe

The Story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela

BOOK SEVEN

The Story of Jason and Medea

War Between Crete and Athens

The Story of Cephalus and Procris

BOOK EIGHT

The Story of Nisus and Scylla

The Story of Daedalus and Icarus

The Calydonian Boar

The Brand of Meleager

The Return of Theseus

The Story of Baucis and Philemon

The Story of Erysichthon

BOOK NINE

The Story of Achelous' Duel for Deianira

The Story of Hercules, Nessus, and Deianira

The Story of Hercules' Birth

The Story of Dry ope

The Story of Caunus and Byblis

The Story of Iphis and Lanthe

BOOK TEN

The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice

The Story of Cyparissus

The Story of Ganymede

The Story of Apollo and Hyacinthus

Two Incidents of Venus Anger

The Story of Pygmalion

The Story of Cinyras and Myrrha

The Story of Adonis

Venus Tells Adonis the Story of Atalanta

The Fate of Adonis

BOOK ELEVEN

The Death of Orpheus

The Story of Midas

Midas Never Learns

The Building of the Walls of Troy

The Story of Thetis

Ceyx Tells the Story of Daedalion

The Story of Peleus' Cattle

The Quest of Ceyx

The Story of Aesacus and Hesperia

BOOK TWELVE

The Invasion of Troy

Nestor Tells the Story of Caeneus

Story of the Battle with the Centaurs

Nestor Is Asked Why He Omitted Hercules

BOOK THIRTEEN

The Argument between Ajax and Ulysses

After the Fall

The Sacrifice of Polyxena

The Discovery of Polydorus

The Story of Memnon

The Pilgrimage of Aeneas

The Story of Anius' Daughters

The Pilgrimage Resumed

The Story of Galatea

The Song of Polyphemus

The Transformation of Acis

The Story of Glaucus

BOOK FOURTEEN

The Story of Glaucus Continued

The Pilgrimage of Aeneas Resumed

Achaemenides Tells His Story

The Story of Picus

The Pilgrimage of Aeneas Resumed

The Narrative of Diomedes

The Return of Venulus

The Deification of Aeneas

Legendary History of Rome

Pomona and Vertumnus

The Story of Iphis and Anaxarete

More Early Roman History

BOOK FIFTEEN

The Succession of Numa

The Teachings of Pythagoras

The Return of Numa

The Story of Hippolytus

The Story of Cipus

The Story of Aesculapius

The Deification of Caesar

The Epilogue

COMMENTARY by Joseph D. Reed

EXPANDED GLOSSARY AND INDEX

Sujets

• Classical antiquity
• Poetry
• Classical
• Ancient
• Classics

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 13 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253033703
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

OVID
METAMORPHOSES
THE NEW, ANNOTATED EDITION
OVID
METAMORPHOSES

TRANSLATED BY ROLFE HUMPHRIES
ANNOTATED BY J. D. REED
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 1955 Indiana University Press
Text © renewed 1983 by Winifred Davies
Commentary © 2018 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03369-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03359-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-03449-6 (web PDF)
ISBN 978-0-253-03450-2 (MOBI)
ISBN 978-0-253-03370-3 (ePub)
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INTRODUCTION
J UST A YEAR and a few days after Julius Caesar’s fatal Ides of March, Publius Ovidius Naso (we know him as Ovid, though W. S. Gilbert uses Naso , rhyming on say so , in one of the lyrics in Iolanthe) was born, on his brother’s first birthday, in the town of Sulmo. That was in hill country, “rich in streams,” some ninety miles east of Rome, and Ovid’s father was sufficiently far out of the way, or lucky, so that his wealth was not touched during the civil troubles that raged from the death of Caesar till Octavian disposed of Antony at Actium. Ovid was twelve then, in 31 B.C., and, by his own account, already lisping in numbers. This did not please his father, who could afford, for both his sons, an education for public life; Ovid conformed, reluctantly, still persisting in his own way until at last the father grew weary of reproaching him for wasting his time and reminding him that Homer died poor. At his majority the poet felt free to declare his independence, lived gaily among the company of his peers in Rome, and enjoyed the fame and popularity brought him by his poems.
These poems included the Loves , the Heroines (imaginary letters from fifteen famous women of legend to their lovers, sometimes even including their husbands), The Art of Love, The Cure of Love , and a briefer treatise (also in what we would call the self-help category) On Make-up. Then, in more serious vein, there was the lost tragedy, Medea; the Religious Holidays , a calendar, only half-finished, of Roman festivals, and, before the final Book of Sorrows and Letters from the Black Sea , the great collection, the definitive compendium of ancient mythology, which is known to us as the Metamorphoses , or the Stories of Changing Forms.

The work on which Ovid’s reputation was founded shows a great deal of the spirit of the Restoration; unhappily for this happy man, there was in Augustus a great deal of the spirit of Cromwell. And from the official point of view, Ovid must often have seemed mischievous, if not downright subversive. Virgil, in his noble epic, had made its hero the son of a mortal and the goddess, Venus; the implications of this genealogy were a temptation Ovid could not resist. If, so he seemed to be saying, we are all sons of Venus, why should we not be proud of it and live up to it, what have we to do with other matters, why not fulfill our Manifest Destiny? Ovid, I suspect, would have enjoyed, appreciated, and sympathized with, the last stanza of the little poem Oliver Gogarty calls Amor:
“So when you next denounce the ways
And times and town where Caesar dwelt,
Before disparaging those days
Recall what Rome spelt backwards spelt.”
This sort of attitude must have fretted Augustus considerably, and such tolerance as he had (and it was considerable) eventually wore thin, as he grew older. The women of his own household were something of a scandal, so much so that one of them, his daughter Julia, had to be banished. Might as well, while we are about it, banish the rascal who was the cause of it all, that writer of books, so that Ovid, too, was cast into outer darkness, sentenced to a miserable town named Tomi, on the Black Sea. The official reason was probably not the real one—when was it ever? Ovid says that his fault was a mistake, not a crime, as if there had been some particular incident; he had seen something, or known something, rather than written too much. At any rate, for the rest of his life, and after that of Augustus ended, it was the shores of the Black Sea indeed, and he died, after some ten years of bitter complaint and abject pleading, in the year 18 of our era. His third wife, with whom he had been happy after two earlier, brief, and unsuccessful marriages, survived him.
Ordinarily, we do not think of the Romans as a loving people. Yet, stop to think of it, their three great poems all offer testimony in praise of love’s great power. Lucretius begins his work on physics, the De Rerum Natura , with a splendid invocation of Venus, that goddess who alone governs the nature of things, without whom nothing comes to the shores of light. In Virgil’s Aeneid , all the tension, all the dramatic conflict, springs from the struggle between two forces, love and hate, symbolized in the divine personages of Juno and Venus, with Juno, in the end, reconciled, and love carrying the day even to the point of forgiveness and love for the enemy. And Ovid’s great work, whatever the official and ostensible theme, is really one long love poem, or series of love poems: not only the love of young man for young woman, and vice versa, but also the love of father for son, of daughter for father, of brother for sister, god for mortal, mortal for goddess, two old people for each other and the gods, even the love of the self. There are, to be sure, some poems of hate, enough to give the proper chiaroscuro. And, pervading all, is the writer’s love for this daedal earth, its people, its phenomena.
The critical judgment that labels Ovid a glib and superficial writer seems to me glib and superficial. Charm, it may be, is superficial; is grace? Is tenderness? Can the story of Philemon and Baucis be dismissed as superficial? And gaiety, perhaps, is not so easy to come by as we used to think. Ovid, surely, was a romantic writer, not a classical one, if we base the distinction on an attitude and a tone, the difference between “I write as I please” and “I write as I think a citizen should.” Yet Ovid’s romanticism has few enough of the connotations we have come to associate with the term; there is no brooding Schwärmerei in him, no lugubrious self-preoccupation, no protest against the spirit of the time. He loved his time, as he might, up to a few years ago, have loved ours; and if he was fashionable, is that to be held against him? It would seem, rather, a compliment to the critical intelligence of the people who read and enjoyed him.
Dwelling with him rather closely as I have been working on this translation, I have found two aspects of him less sympathetic than most. For one thing, he has a sadistic streak in him—the fighting of Perseus, the battles of the Centaurs, the rape of Philomela, are as violent and ugly, while they go on, as anything in Mickey Spillane. But the difference is that Ovid can snap out of it, whereas we could hardly imagine Spillane writing anything like the story of Phaethon or Polyphemus’ song in praise of Galatea. There are also times when Ovid is bored, and shows it, two thousand years away; the writing becomes perfunctory—oh, well, we have to grind this part of it out, all in the day’s work, and what’s the difference? But presently, and before not too long, it brightens again, and here is the old insight back, the fun, the delight, the luminous shine over all of it.
Like any writer, especially one whose scope is as wide as Ovid’s, he has certain clichés, certain devices, certain respect for conventions, a certain proportion of rhetoric. His two incestuous girls, Myrrha and Biblis, in their guilt-ridden soliloquies, will use almost identical tropes. But, for all that, they are different girls. The great virtue of this writer of fantasy, of improbable events, is that both his people and places are real, the landscape and motives credible, so that, in the end, the impossible event takes on the truth of symbol, becomes—of course!—perfectly natural. There is little abstraction in Ovid, and what a wealth of actual detail! You can see these people, catch their intonations and gestures, watch them moving, delight in the sunshine, the shade, the greenery, the running water, of the scenes through which they go. No stock props of pastoral here, no literary landscaping, but real food on the tables, and sometimes real blood on the ground. “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
I had thought, before I actually set out on this translation, that I could be less respectful to Ovid than I had to be with Virgil, that he would mind liberties less, that I might, for instance, render one story in eight-beat couplets, another in Spenserian or Byronic stanzas, and so on, and so on. This might take a little longer, but it would be fun, and who was Ovid to object to fun? But it would not work: the Metamorphoses are all of a piece, as much so as The Canterbury Tales , and there was fun enough in the original, variety and richness enough, for all the metrical sameness, so that to perform feats of virtuosity would have been an intolerable license on the part of the transl