Humphries Rolfe - Metamorphoses

OVIDS Metamorphoses OVID METAMORPHOSES translated by ROLFE HUMPHRIES INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington & Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press
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Gilbert uses Naso, rhyming on say so, in one of the lyrics in Iolanthe) was born, on his brothers first birthday, in the town of Sulmo. That was in hill country, rich in streams, some ninety miles east of Rome, and Ovids 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 Ovids 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 onewhen 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 loves 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 Virgils 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 Ovids 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 writers 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 Ovids romanticism has few enough of the connotations we have come to associate with the term; there is no brooding Schwrmerei 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 himthe 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 perfunctoryoh, well, we have to grind this part of it out, all in the days work, and whats 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 Ovids, he has certain clichs, 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, becomesof course!perfectly natural.