Metamorphoses

CRITIQUE | TRANSLATIONS

Changing dull and accurate to wild and funny

Translators seem to love working on Ovid. Dozens of translations of the Metamorphoses are available.

The earliest were produced during the Renaissance when Ovid, the bad boy of Latin literature, was rediscovered and embraced by scholars and writers. The first well-known English translation though was actually from a French translation in 1480. William Caxton, England's first printer, produced a prose version that has not survived in its entirety.

The most influential early translation, however, was Arthur Golding's in 1567. This is the version that Shakespeare read and borrowed from. You can see why. Ovid's hexameter (six beats to the line) are rendered into beautiful rolling lines of seven beats (fourteen syllables, giving the form the nickname of "fourteeners"). The diction is both Elizabethan and ancient—in the same way the King James Bible would be a few decades later. Ezra Pound would call Golding's translation the "most beautiful book in the English language".

Pound was exaggerating. Golding's Metamorphoses still makes for majestic reading, but those long lines and the high tone take some some of the fun out of it. Golding was a religious man and for him Ovid's work was a morality tale, or a series of morality tales.

In 1632 George Sandys published a translation into the iambic pentameter lines (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) more common to English poetry. It's naturally more condensed and somewhat difficult to read today.

Many other British poets were not only inspired by Metamorphoses but tried their hand at translating some of the stories. In 1717 Samuel Garth compiled a complete edition made up of translations by Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and others. It too was mainly in iambic pentameter and, like previous poetic versions, was composed of rhyming couplets. Ovid's original Latin was unrhymed, but for some reason English translators right up to recent times have often opted for rhyme.

Brookes More produced an unrhymed version in 1922 that became a standard for much of the twentieth century. It's in blank verse (iambic pentameter without the rhyme) and shows a catchy enthusiasm—if you don't mind dashes and exclamation points all over the place.

A.D. Melville tried the same verse style with a more sedate volume in 1986, allowing a few rhymes for effect now and then, especially at the end of stories. It too has gained a modern following. The Melville translation is quite accurate and quite well footnoted. And quite dull. This edition in Oxford World's Classics is one you may want to have handy for reference while you're enjoying another translator's wilder rendition.

Such a wild rendition might be that of the American poet David R. Slavitt. The Metamorphoses of Ovid is said to be "translated freely". Which is to say it's nothing like Melville's Metamorphoses—nor Golding's, Sandys's, Garth's or More's. But it may be like Ovid's. He uses lines of six accents as Ovid did, albeit with irregular meter. The lines run into each other, rushing ahead to tell the story. Slavitt manages to capture the sweep of the stories while getting in all the little jokes and aides. Thoroughly enjoyable.

However, you might question while reading Slavitt how much Ovid you are actually eading. Slavitt has no qualms about putting his own spin on even the jokes. For example, he writes about a war in which both sides enlist the support of heaven:

...They had
not only gods but courage, which sometimes is as good
as divine assistance (or may be another way of describing
the same natural force)

The same passage is translated by Melville as:

Both sides had gods, and what's as good as gods,
Courage...

Slavitt's added parenthetical remark underlines the punchline. But Melville's wording is closer to Ovid's. Also, classicists may find Slavitt's modern idiom, including slang expressions and anachronisms, like "cars" and "hubcaps", unsettling.

But if you like the creative approach, you may appreciate Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes. The late British poet laureate didn't translate the stories of Metamorphoses so much as he re-imagined them. Unfortunately Hughes rendered only twenty-four of the passages. But if you want to see how a modern-day Ovid might have written up these stories, you could find this volume quite a lot of fun.

— Eric

 

CRITIQUE | TRANSLATIONS

See also:

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Odyssey

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Metamorphoses

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