Vivamus, Vivamus: living with Ovid's Amores

Prologue with Tristia, Rome, 2003:

It is something to be reading Ovid's Tristia at a cafe in Rome--to feel his exile from Rome here in Rome, at a table on a terrace, under a wisteria trellis, with Roman sparrows overhead flirting through the leaves; in the primrose bed at my feet, Roman lizards, black with yellow spots, dart from one patch of shade to another. It's a truly Ovidian mix of bright light and half-light, light for shape-shifting and transformation. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells us, Ceres, weary in her search for her lost daughter, stops for a drink of barley-water (at a table like this?). When her thirst is mocked by a country boy, she flings the drink at him, "barley grains and all, / And his face was spotted, then, and his arms were legs, / And he grew a tail and shrank, a harmless creature, / Like alizard, only smaller" (Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries). And yet, despite the lizards and the light, there are changes in Ovid's Rome: a few feet away, Roman traffic goes hurtling past.

It is something to be re-reading Ovid's Tristia here. The five books collected as Tristia (Sorrows) make Rome as real as only something lost and gone can be, as Ovid's mind takes him "Not just back to Rome, but to a particular house, a room, a space on the shelf," and back over the threshold where he had to leave his wife: "I turned back, unable / either to move out through the door or back / into the house" (Tristia, translated by David Slavitt). And yet, as real as Ovid makes his Rome for the reader, he warns us in exile:

   I tell you that Rome's for a, her arches and temples,
   are standing on illusions rather than hills.
   The rude huts around me, their occupants always armed,
   even to make the short trip to the outhouse--these
   are the temples to truth and man's place in the cosmos.

This is so different from Ovid's dazzling approach to "truth and man's place in the cosmos" in the Metamorphoses, which travels everywhere, touches everything, explores limits by exceeding them, and epitomizes extravagance. In the Tristia, however, Ovid wants to come to terms with the plain truth about his place, which is neither Tomis nor Rome, but torn between them. The Tristia are remarkable because of how much they make out of how little they have. They repeat, repeat, repeat the same complaints, and trudge back and forth over the same small piece of weary, benighted, unforgiving ground. The speaker of these poems has something in common with Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England," who says, "Pity should begin at home; so the more I pitied myself, the more I felt at home." And yet, Ovid feels at home with such a huge range of human feeling: protesting, despairing, bored, accepting, furious, rueful, scornful, plainly sad. He is constrained, but the poems are not limited. In the carvings on Roman triumphal arches, only the faces of captive barbarians show emotion; the noble Romans are impassive, in control. These are not noble poems; they themselves bewail their inability to hold to noble emotions, and then grimly--as in the passage about Rome's temples--suggest that nobility itself may be an illusion. But if these poems aren't noble, neither are they despairing. They include; they invent. They start over. The encouragement we get from these poems is unsentimental, bleakly funny. Sure, they offer company in our misery. But they also offer a kind of proof that we will invent because we can't stand not to.

My Amores: Boston and Elsewhere

I first read Ovid's Amores hungrily, with complete absorption, while waiting in an interminable line in the passport office in Boston. I was on crutches that fall, with a broken foot; so that is part of the memory, too, although the crutches may have come later. I know I felt stuck in more ways than one at the time.

A friend had recommended selections from the Amores, translated by Guy Lee, in the Norton Book of Classic Literature. That first reading hooked me hard, I fell so fast, the crutches didn't matter, and I didn't need a passport to get where I was going. The Amores were pure invitation--no, impure invitation--and IRSVP'd faster than you could say SPQR. There was somebody real in those poems, and I wanted to find out where he lived, and if there were any more at home like him.

   Your husband? Going to the same dinner as us?
   I hope it chokes him.

Lee's free verse couplets (here in Amores I.iv, for example) have punch and vinegar. The peculiar and compelling force of this poem, in which the speaker instructs his mistress in secret signals to communicate with him and dupe her husband--"stroke that rosy cheek with your thumb. / If you're cross with me, darling, / press the lobe of your ear // but turn your ring around if you're pleased with anything I say or do"----comes first from the energy and immediacy of these lines, and then from the way the poem keeps going--and going--and going (like the Energizer bunny), past its initial premise and into different, slipperier terrain. The more the speaker seeks to script the scene and to control his mistress, the more he reveals the hopelessness of such a task. "Don't lean your gentle head against his shoulder / and don't let him embrace you // or slide a hand inside your dress / or touch your breasts. Above all don't kiss him." We see these gestures, but how are we to know whether she's doing what she's been told to do, or just doing what she does? The speaker is amused, is helpless; they share a game, he's being ignored. As the poem and its instructions continue, it becomes less and less about her, and more and more about the way he extends himself, ridiculously, in her direction. The more he wants to claim a knowing advantage over her clueless husband, the more he's forced to recognize that the husband, of course, is the one who will go home with her. Even there, past the dinner scene of the poem itself, the speaker's imagination follows his mistress: