Ovid, Our Contemporary

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Jarman, Mark

EITHER IT WAS THE STORY OF ARACHNE, the weaver turned into a spider, or Midas' golden touch that I heard first, not from Ovid himself, of course, but retold by someone, like my grandmother Nora or perhaps a grade school teacher. My parents owned a copy of Bullfinch's Golden Age of Fable, and there I read about the gift the dying centaur Nessus gave to the bride of Hercules, Deianira-a tunic soaked in the blood of his wounds, wounds given him by Hercules as Nessus attempted to make off with said bride. It was horrible to imagine how later Hercules innocently donned the garment, given him when his wife suspected him of infidelity, only to have it stick to his flesh and burn like napalm. Yet it was fascinating and changed the way the natural world appeared to discover that the laurel tree (we had them in California) had been a girl, fleeing before the lustful pursuit of a god, and that the four seasons (in Los Angeles we only had two) reflected the sorrow and joy of a mother-Mother Nature herself-whose daughter must spend half the year in the underworld. When I think of my first encounters with most Greek and Roman myths, they were almost always versions of a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses. As I made my way through English literature, I discovered the poem again and again, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Waste Land. One of the recognitions any literate Christian must experience is how much the Annunciation looks like any number of Jovian seductions as recounted by Ovid. Like Shakespeare and the Bible, Ovid's book of changes has long been part of the air we breathe. Now Charles Martin with his new translation1 reminds us that in these tales Ovid remains our contemporary.

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In the preface to his own excellent translation of Ovid's poem, David Slavitt argues that Ovid, faced with the intimidating example of Virgil's monumental Aeneid, transformed the epic to suit his own lambent and ironic sensibility. Slavitt calls the Metamorphoses "a dream poem in which one story blossoms into further stories." This seems exactly right, and that provisional sense of narrative, as we find it in our dreams, has been reproduced in Martin's translation. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Ovid anticipates our post-modern irony with respect to narrative. Today his pseudo-epic speaks to us with a resonance Virgil's may lack. But we also have to remember that Ovid had collected most of the important stories of his religion, the faith of the Greco-Roman world. Claiming to "speak now of forms changed / into new bodies," he began with creation as the first of these changes and ended with the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Story after story in the Metamorphoses manifests a divine connection with and involvement in the mortal world. For all the rapes and assaults and catastrophes the gods visit on the hapless humanity they love and hate, their interest in that humanity is never questioned. Ovid's poem appears ready for publication around A.D. 8, just before Augustus for reasons that remain mysterious exiles him to Tomis, on the Black Sea. Can we see Ovid's Metamorphoses as the final record of a wornout religion? Yes, we can, for new deities were about to supplant those whose exploits he records. And yet looking back over two millennia, it is more helpful, perhaps, to see continuity. The names of gods and their stories have changed, but the human desire for gods, and for divine interest in human affairs, has remained the same.

Charles Martin has conveyed something of Ovid's famous wit by giving free rein to his own, especially by translating wherever possible into contemporary colloquialism and slang. Thus, Actaeon when he stumbles upon Diana bathing is "wandering clueless." Juno, learning of Semele's involvement with her husband, opines, "She's just a one-night stand, / a momentary insult to my conjugal rights." Semele, given her wish to behold her lover Jove in all his glory, is "[t]ickled to death by her appalling fate." "Often she wanted to come on to him" is how Echo is described, pining for Narcissus. Perseus, preparing to free Andromeda, informs her desperate parents, "the deal is that she's mine if I can save her." In the incredible send-up of Homeric slaughter, when Perseus confronts Phineus and his allies over rights to Andromeda, the first act of violence makes the crowd go "totally ballistic." As Apollo flays him, poor Marsyas protests, "Why do you deconstruct me?" The rapist Tereus, lusting for Philomela, "looks at her and sees himself / with her already, doing it to her." Nor is Martin above adding lines, usually in brackets, that suggest an irresistible urge to make a punning comment. After recounting the transformation of the Heliades into poplar trees, weeping drops of golden sap for their brother Phaëthon, following his unfortunate outing with his dad's chariot, Martin quips: "[And so, in myth, morning becomes electrum; / the sisters' tears are, now and forever, amber.]"

One of Martin's numerous tours deforce, as he transforms Ovid into contemporary American English that dogs, cats, and the hip can understand, is to depict the daughters of Pierus challenging the Muses to a poetry slam, as follows:

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Ovid, Our Contemporary

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Jarman, Mark

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