Metamorphoses
by Ovid, translated by David Raeburn, introduced by Denis Feeney
(Penguin, £8.99)
As you must be a rather cultivated person to be reading this section of the paper, you probably have your own idea of Ovid and his Metamorphoses . "Um, very witty, but in Latin, liked sex, the Metamorphoses is all about people being changed into trees etc, Ted Hughes translated him 10 years ago." Which is all true, although Hughes's After Ovid does less than half the book. But while it seems as though the Metamorphoses has never really gone away - Ovid's line at the end about his own poetic immortality is still borne out - people don't necessarily feel any urgent need to read it.
This is not exactly the case around my neck of the sacred woods. I have been doing some work for the last few years that has involved steeping myself in, among other things, a good deal of Graeco-Roman mythology. One unforeseen side-effect of this is that I have come closer to accepting this mythic corpus as a convincing explanation of human motives than any other philosophical system. I may not have a shrine to Jupiter in the back garden, but it feels like it's only a matter of time.
So a new verse translation from Penguin of the Metamorphoses is an exciting prospect. The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read Allen Mandelbaum's amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.
As it happens, Mandelbaum has translated the Metamorphoses (and his prosody is so good it's actually distracting) - but you won't find it for sale here unless you're very lucky. So now we have this new Penguin, and we should rejoice.
The first thing to say about the work is that, considering its age (2,000 years, almost on the nail), it is still remarkably vivid. There is hardly a dull moment in it. It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text apart, perhaps, from the Odyssey (with Apuleius's Golden Ass coming in a close third). It is also (and for some reason I'd forgotten this) even gorier than the Iliad. My marginal note for the flaying of Marsyas is one word long, and the word is "yuk". You may also feel that Ovid's description of Philomela's tongue twitching on the ground after her rapist, Tereus, had sliced it out of her mouth, was a little over-detailed. And as for the details of the fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, this should be read by anyone who thinks that amoral violence as grotesque comedy began with Quentin Tarantino. Even Hughes shies away from these episodes.
Ovid is modern in other ways: you will recognise his attentiveness towards the very mechanics of metamorphosis. Here is Actaeon, punished by Diana for accidentally seeing her in the nude: "The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; / the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; / she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender / forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; / last, she injected panic ..." What is that but, two millennia avant la lettre, a computer-generated animation in words?
Reading that, you may think the poetry of the translation isn't that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn's fault: he isn't a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a "vile degenerate age". But while Raeburn isn't afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery ("white as a sheet", and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud. Or even actually speak them aloud. Performance is Raeburn's speciality and interest, and at one point he notes that the erotic story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus would be even better in recitation if its narrator, Alcithoë, "is delicately characterised". Anyway, he's doing something right: you'll suddenly find that you've read 600 pages of verse, and enjoyed all of them.
