Ovid's Erotic Poems. Ovid
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to do?
We are told, among various dicta, that to translate at all is to betray or traduce (that tired and by now dreary Italian pun). Or (pace Nabokov1) we are told that a translation should always be exactly literal, without the slightest deviation from the “true” sense … even if the results seem bizarre or off-putting. At the same time, we are also advised that “translationese” (an entity alarmingly like obscenity, in that none of us may be able to define it, but we all certainly know it when we see—that is, hear or read—it) is to be avoided no matter the cost.
By my friends who occasionally succumb to poetic translation (persons who are all highly talented and laureled practitioners of the art of verse), I have been told at various times to do nothing—absolutely nothing—that would harm the English translation as an English poem, no matter what the source language says. But in a sense, isn’t what a poem “says” the very heart of the problem in the first place? How can one get over the almost metaphysically difficult hurdle of eliminating all style as a component of both the thought and the total emotional effect of the poem when they are both inextricably bound up in the execution of that style? Isn’t the very sound of the words, their physicality and resonance, a nonseparable part of the entire aesthetic experience of verse? Yet certain members of that same fraternity have also advised me that all translation is a waste of time: “Go get Proust and read him in French, and to hell with translations.”
I have read, in the thickets of postmodernism, that translation is a poisonous vector of essentialism, an imperialist depredation, a form of colonialist (or postcolonialist?) appropriation, and something to be shunned like Leopold’s sins in the Congo.2 On the other hand, I have also stumbled across the merry thought that maybe none of this matters, so one must write a translation with whatever comes into one’s head. After all, the original “authors”—the scare quotes are necessary, I’m afraid—have all been declared dead anyway, and, well, in the case of Ovid, it’s pretty clearly true.
In short, the poet faces a welter of contradictory—and therefore unhelpful—advice, ranging from the most academically abstruse to the least theoretical, and a great deal of it fractious.
But some decision must at last be made if a poet is to proceed at all, and this seems as good a place as any to lay out an account of my procedure, every step of which bears the inescapable marks of some form of belief about the nature of poetic translation. There is no escape.
Before I do, though, a word or two about what drew me to Ovid in the first place. I am so far from believing that the classical languages, especially as they appear in the works of their finest poets, are “irrelevant,” “dead,” or otherwise valueless to our age of internets and wi-fi and the Cloud, that I would gladly consign today’s student and general reader (does he or she still exist?) to a lifelong study of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid—even if it meant sacrificing the ability to outgame one’s peers at World of Warcraft.
For everything that really matters to us mattered to them. Their poems are imbued with human passion, suffering, wonder, and excitement, and they constitute a priceless record of how the very finest literary artists of the past dealt with the most intensely human subjects. They are part of a continuing conversation, and a precious heritage of the best-considered artistry of those who are every bit as much a part of us as we are of those to follow us. They are the ultimate riposte to a degrading and debilitating “presentism.”
And of these artists, perhaps none is more capacious, free-roaming, exuberant, and passionately committed to every aspect of verse as a means of human exploration (and intellectual and aesthetic pleasure) than Ovid. His Amores and Ars Amatoria are witty, sophisticated, ironic, and a constant delight, treating a subject we can all understand as perpetually human. When love and lust disappear from the world, perhaps these poems may be allowed to wither and die. Till then, however …
When I began work on Amores and the Ars Amatoria at the turn of the century, I made sure to equip myself with Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary (to me, the finest, most scholarly, most helpful Latin dictionary ever) and Traupman’s New College Latin & English Dictionary, with its blessedly time-saving set of paradigms positioned in the first few pages—never too soon to be reminded of one’s high school and college drills in declension and conjugation.
I next availed myself of seven other translations of both works and consulted them often (a list appears at the end of this Preface). Much can be learned from the disagreements among translators (probably a great deal more than from their consonance), and I tried to consider as many possibilities as I could for word choice, syntactical probability, and (if the phrase has any meaning) plain prose sense. What translator doesn’t? Where conflict proved intractable, I opted for the meaning that seemed to fit best with the tone and mood of the immediate lexical environment. Context and common sense would rule.
There followed a prose paraphrase (I believe Dryden3 was right in saying that this is, finally, the only way to proceed, ignoring “imitation” and “metaphrase”). I simply could not envision myself as either Robert Lowell, whose Imitations represent work inspired by an original, or Christopher Logue, whose War Music and other volumes completely reimagine Homeric material with a modern (and mordant) sensibility, nor could I see what was to be gained by becoming the twenty-first-century embodiment of A. E. Housman’s haplessly comic, overliteral schoolboy. (A delightful modern version of that dilemma has been provided us by the fine classicist and poet Charles Martin4 with his own school days attempt at Horace: “Yet you, Impervius, though not unknown to the unsanctified daughter of the Lacedaemonian, live neither meanly nor ostentatiously.”) With this prose paraphrase before me, I began constructing iambic hexameter-pentameter couplets, trying to match Ovid as closely as possible, line-for-line. I settled on iambic meter for a number of reasons.
First, though honorable attempts at English dactylic hexameter for Virgilian epic have been made (Frederick Ahl’s Aeneid, for example), I’m afraid the only real competence, if any, available to me as an English poet lay in the ancient, timeworn (and yes, some would say shopworn) iambic. It is the way I hear English verse (and often, English prose), and is the register in which my mental Muse is always “running”—a little like Pope, one might say, who claimed to “lisp in numbers.” I am not at all averse to other meters in the English canon or in current poetry (who could not admire Byron’s Assyrian coming down like the wolf on the fold?5), but I knew when I began these versions of Ovid that I would be writing iambic hexameter first lines, rounded off with pentameters.
Still, the vexed question of rhyme: what possible defense could I adduce for rhymed couplets, when classical Latin almost never uses the device? (The very few instances in the work of Virgil and Ovid and Catullus only serve to prove the main point.) Latin poets make their music out of long and short syllables (their meters are quantitative), out of assonance and consonance and alliteration, and the wonderful play of broad, open vowels against short, forward ones, in patterns of contrast and balance and antithesis. Music is there.
The question that faced me was, could I possibly duplicate it? Well, Shakespeare could, and other practitioners of rich and sensuous blank verse (Wordsworth, Milton, Wallace Stevens), but it would have been a daunting task, far beyond my capabilities. I settled for the obvious expedient: my versions of Ovid would try for the snap and elegant closure of a finished-off, rhymed couplet, with whatever attendant graces could be added by my attempts at alliteration and assonance and syntactical play, as the opportunities presented themselves. And of course, I could always comfort myself with the observation that centuries of English poets have created their versions of classical poets in rhyme. To the objection that Dryden makes Virgil sound like Dryden and Pope makes Homer sound like Pope, I can only reply, “Would that I could enter such exalted company!” I fully realize that Latin scholars will object, and yes, there have indeed been attempts at exact, unrhymed, accentual-syllabic-equivalent translations of Latin’s quantitative meters. But the results have never given me much pleasure as poetry, and if poems are not to be translated into other poems, why bother at all? It is the totality of the poem—its sounds and syntax and tones, as well as its sense—that define it, and not just the sense. The very last thing I wanted was for readers