The Secret Poet (Metamorphoses, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Ovid's Metamorphoses, we welcome translator Charles Martin to discuss Ovid's well-documented life and his exile, the popularity and subversiveness of Ovid's writings, and the creation of a new epic form through the lack of one epic hero. 

Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The recipient of numerous awards, Martin has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Three of his poetry collections—Steal the Bacon (1987), What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002)—have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

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Transcript

[Music]

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I’m your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael von Cannon producing. Today, we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Ovid’s Metamorphoses as we interview its translator, Charles Martin. In part one, we discuss Ovid and his world, the controversies surrounding his life, and the work itself. Its design, its significance, and some of its contents. Charles Martin is an award-winning poet and translator, whose books of poetry include Steal the Bacon, What the Darkness Proposes, and Starting from Sleep. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Wharton Landon translation award from the Academy of American poets. We are so pleased he could join us today. Charles Martin, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast. 

[Charles:] Thank you! It’s a pleasure to be here.

[Mark:] Well, it’s great to have you here. And we’re looking forward to this discussion about your edition of Metamorphoses by Ovid. Perhaps we can start with the author. What do we need to know about Ovid and what is even to know about this figure?

[Charles:] Well, Ovid is something of an exception in terms of classical writers because quite a lot is known about it. He is one of those people whose life is pretty well-documented. His full name was Publius Ovidius Naso. Naso at the end means nose, and he inherited that name from one of his ancestors who must’ve had a fairly distinguished nasal appendage. Roman families went back to peasant origins, and apparently one of the peasants was called nosy or the nose. At any rate, he was born in 43 B.C. in a little town called Sulmio about 40 miles east of Rome. And it was a very interesting time to be born because a year before that, Julius Caesar had been assassinated and the whole world was in a great uproar which went on for about 10 years until Caesar’s grandnephew, Octavian, became the ruler of Rome. It was a time of civil war and violence but, apparently, he did not suffer from any kind of violence. The civil war didn’t reach Sulmo apparently. And he grew up on a farm in a family, and he was a member of the—what was called the equestrian class, which was sort of . . . by that time it was synonymous with upper middle class. And it had originally meant that you were an equestrian, a member of the equestrian class, could bring a horse to battle with him when he was summoned to go to war. So, he was a knight as it were. At the time that when Ovid was born, it meant basically you were a member of the upper middle class, and you were expected to compete for honors with the members of that class. In his adolescence when he was about 14, 15, he was sent off to Rome with his brother, who was one year older than he was, to pursue a career which would’ve been a public career. He would probably go into law, and he would probably become a political figure. What happened was that when he was 20, his brother died suddenly, and Ovid had been a kind of secret poet, I think. He explained that he had done his best to study law, he had done his best to write prose, and what happened was that the prose—was he set out to write a sentence in prose, and it would wind up as a poem. His father discovered some—you have to remember that Homer died poor, and this was meant to discourage Ovid, but after the brother’s death the father seems to have relented and Ovid, I think, probably had some kind of a breakdown at that point. His brother’s death left him isolated and perhaps depressed, and he turned to poetry, and at any rate he served in a few minor judicial posts and then gave it up and decided he was going to become a poet instead. He had his father’s approval at that time and probably a trust fund, and he went off and started a career as a poet. By that time, Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian had become the emperor really, had taken over in Rome and he was the single powerful figure in Rome, it was one-man rule. And up until that time, Rome had been a republic. It had been kind of a corrupt republic, and now it had turned into a kind of monarchy that wouldn’t call itself a monarchy but pretended to be a republic with Augustus at the head and all honor had to go to one man.

[Mark:] What role did art play in this society?

[Charles:] Poetry, which is Ovid’s art, played quite an important kind of role. Augustus had a friend named Maecenas who found poets for him, and he put together a little stable of poets who were talented poets but were also would hew the Augustan line one way or another, and Virgil who wrote the Aeneid was one of them, Haras who wrote great odes was another of them, and Ovid was never in that category. Ovid didn’t fit in because he was really a little bit subversive. His first two books—one was called The Amores, which translates as love affairs, and it answers the question how does a young man of means with no urgent public business occupy his time, and the answer is amores, with love affairs and relationships, and this was written in his own voice. Another book that he published around the same time was called Heroides, and it was the voices of women, heroines, complaining about their men who have abandoned them. He gave these women their own voices and let them argue against the acts of man. 

 [Mark:] Would this work have been performed or disseminated in a different way?

[Charles:] Poetry was a very social kind of art for the remnants, so it was performed at parties and at social gatherings. We have examples from the time of Catullus, who was a generation before Ovid, of poets reciting their poems and improvising poems at parties and improvising lines and tossing out lines, and other poets reciting lines in response to that. So, it was a very social kind of act. Books were published, scrolls, you know scrolls so of Papyrus were published in book form, that was the form that a book of poetry would take.

[Mark:] So, Ovid was prominent during his lifetime and ever after?

[Charles:] Yeah, we was apparently pretty well known. He said he was giving readings from the time he started to shave and, well, the first shaving was a sort of Roman ceremony, so he would’ve been eighteen or so when he started reading.

[Mark:] The introduction to the Norton Library edition of Metamorphoses, written by Emily Wilson also mentions this episode in Ovid’s life where he is exiled. What was behind that controversy? Was he a controversial figure in society?

[Charles:] Ovid was controversial in his books, basically.  After he wrote those first two books, he went on to write others that were a little bit more subversive perhaps. And one of them was called the Ars Amatoria, the art of love. It was divided into basically just three books and the books would correspond to hunting, catching, and keeping women, and Augustus at that time was a very moralistic kind of ruler and had propagated laws that were against adultery and were encouraging men to settle down and have children, especially people of the middle and upper classes. The nobles and the equestrians were supposed to have plenty of kids and not fool around. Now, the other thing about Augustus was that he was a kind of serial philanderer and a total hypocrite about his sexual life. So, I think this would probably make Ovid even a little bit more subversive in those terms. You asked about Ovid’s exile. When he gets exiled, he said there are two reasons why he was sent to exile. He said it was a Carmin Et Error. Two Latin words. Carmin means poem. Error means, well, not a crime not a sin, a kind of mistake; something that he saw maybe that he didn’t talk about in time. Ovid uses the word error and when he’s describing, in the Metamorphoses he’s describing Actaeon who stumbles upon the goddess Diana bathing, and this was his error and for that error Diana curses him, and he is turned into a stag and devoured by his own hunting dogs. So, error as a mistake and of the poem and the poem that he says got him in trouble was the Ars Amatoria. He’s in exile 10 years after the publication of the Ars Amatoria. So, some people have argued that it couldn’t have been—that couldn’t have been the poem that got him into trouble. I don’t believe it was because Ovid would—Augustus would’ve had to have a very long fuse if he was going to wait 10 years before. What happens is the Metamorphoses is published when Ovid is about 50 and certain copies of it are circulated among the public and suddenly—bang, Ovid is called in and sent out on an exile to a place called Tomas, which is on the far eastern edge of the Roman Empire, and from there he never returned. My guess is that it was the Metamorphoses. My belief is that it was the Metamorphoses that got him into trouble.

[Mark:] Okay, well, let’s talk about The Metamorphoses. Why is the text called Metamorphoses. What is Ovid focusing on?

[Charles:] He describes it as a book of metamorphoses—of changes—in a poem of Metamorphoses in five times three books, so it’s a fifteen-book epic and it deals with transformations, changes and that seems to be what is the theme that is holding it together. Also, it’s a different kind of metamorphoses.

[Mark:] What do you mean transformations. How so?

[Charles:] One rather we would think of as typical in the Metamorphoses is the change of an ordinary human big who insults a god perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally, and is transformed as a result into something else, usually something less desirable. For instance, there is Daphne who is pursued by the god Apollo. Apollo is madly in love with her and wants to have sex with her, and she evades his desire, his lusts, and the only way she can do that is by being—allowing herself to be transformed into a loral bush. So, it is like you lose your personhood, and you become something else that is usually less, less distinguished shall we say. You have no agency as a human being anymore.

[Mark:] Why would these episodes of transformation be captivating for a reader? Is Ovid trying to teach us a lesson or entertain us? What’s the connection?

[Charles:] Well, Ovid is doing both really, and there are some people who look on the Metamorphoses as a just a kind of grab bag of terrific and entertaining stories and there are others who see in it a political meaning or social meaning that is very serious. And I think it’s sort of like the duck vs rabbit situation that at times if you look at it once, it looks like a grab bag of entertaining stories. If you start to look at it a different way, you see serious meanings in the stories and the kind of political involvement.

[Mark:] Emily Wilson’s introduction talks about how transformations can take on so many different forms and, as you say, depending on how you look at it, it can mean something different, so how would a reader approach this theme of transformation?

[Charles:] You mean a contemporary?

[Mark:] Yes, or even throughout the history of this text. Perhaps the transformation, the notion of a transformation, meant something different to Ovid’s readership than to today’s readership

[Charles:] It’s quite possible that it did. One of the things that argues or that may argue against a political understanding of the Metamorphoses, is the fact that the political situation that existed at the time that he wrote it is no longer around. Augustus is gone, the Roman Empire is gone, but the stories are there, and the stories remain, and the stories—it’s very easy for us to enjoy them. They give pleasure with their narrative, stories of great transformations. They are entertaining in themselves and that hasn’t changed, that goes on, so it’s—I think it’s easier to see them in that than it is perhaps easier to see them in a political way.

[Mark:] Sure, can you talk a little bit about the text itself? How did Ovid write it? What were his techniques? What do the words on the page look like?

[Charles:] He wrote it as an epic because he wrote it in the meter, the dactylic hexameter, that poets used when they were writing epics, and his other poems are written in the elegiac couplet, which is regarded as a slightly lesser form or less serious form. The heroic poems, the epics, were written in this dactylic hexameter. So, he had a colleague named Virgil, a Roman poet who was writing at the same time; he was a little bit ahead of Ovid in years. Virgil was writing an epic called the Aeneid, and the Aeneid was written in hexameter. I think he was saying—Ovid was saying, yes, I’m going to write an epic but it’s going to be a different kind of epic, and you will understand it as a different kind of epic because first off, there’s no epic hero. Okay? There’s no Aeneas who founds Rome, there isn’t an Odysseus who’s trying to get home to Penelope, there isn’t a Hector or Achilles in the Iliad. So, this is a poem, in a sense, without a hero, and it’s a poem that is modern critics would say a kind of cultural synthesis, that Ovid takes everything he can get and throws it into this one poem so that you have examples of the form called the Epyllion which is a short epic. You have stories in which they appear to come out of a law court in which two people are arguing over things. There’s a story which I’m very keen on called— about Ephis, that begins with a man, a husband who goes off to, I think its Alexandria, somewhere in Egypt on business. His wife is pregnant, and he tells the wife in a letter, you must, if the child is a boy, keep him. If it’s a girl you have to pt her away you have to put her out because we can’t afford a girl; we can’t afford a dowry. And curiously enough, there’s a fragment of a letter from a real person that has been discovered with explaining exactly that same predicament, so it’s every different form that you can imagine form drama, epigrams, everything is included in this one epic.

[Mark:] So, as a translator, is it your impulse to keep that dactylic hexameter? Are you trying to render it as closely to Ovid’s original?

[Charles:] The short answer is no. There’s a difference between the hexameter line in English and the hexameter line in Latin. When I think of translating any poem there are basically two problems that you have, and one is what I call the out-of problem. T. S. Eliot once said when he heard that Yeats was translating Oedipus Tyrannus, he said William Butler Yeats doesn’t know Greek I don’t know what he could be translating it out of. The out-of problem is the one that people think of as the problem, but if you are a translator, you probably know the language pretty well, and if you don’t have that, if you run into a problem, there are always commentaries or there are native speakers in the case of a language like Hungarian or Chinese that would help you with the translation. The other problem is the into problem. The problem there is you don’t want to bring into your translation something that’s not in the original, something, you don’t want to have ideas in motions, images that just don’t belong in the poem that you’re adding to it in your own voice, so what I try to do is not bring things over that aren’t there in the first place. 

[Mark:] How confident are we about Ovid’s original text? What was the text that you used to base your translation on?

[Charles:] The text that has come down is—there are very few questions about that. It’s not really a problematic text. There are poets—Catallus for instance—there are a lot of problems with his text, but Ovid, nah, not so much. 

[Mark:] Is that rare that they would have the manuscript from, you know, over 2000 years ago and it would be relatively pristine?

[Charles:] It’s kind of a miracle, yeah. There are always there are always going to be little problems, but one of the things that makes me think that Ovid was popular in his own time and kept popular afterwards was the fact that so much of his work has survived and has survived really intact. There are poets who have disappeared, many of them and to a certain extent it has to do with when you appear on the historical scene. A generation before Ovid, you had Catullus’s poetry and that survived by virtue of a single manuscript that was copied in the Middle Ages.

[Mark:] Putting the language aside and the text aside was there a quality of Ovid’s’ writing, either a mood or a rhythm or a tempo, that you were trying to capture in your English translation?

[Charles:] Yes, what I began with was trying to get a line that was not quite hexameter but almost as long as an examina, and I realized it just didn’t work with Ovid. One of the marks of Ovid’s poetry and the Metamorphoses is its speed. He really—the lines are very, very fast in Latin. You need something that’s going to continue—that’s going to be as quick in English as he was in Latin. So I finally just kept pairing the lie down and finally wound up with what I hope will be a kind of light sounding iambic pentameter line that would be analogous to what he was doing but would not, you know, I wasn’t trying to reproduce the hexameter in any way. I was trying to come up with something that was analogous to it in this situation.

[Mark:] Of the 15 books that make up the Metamorphoses, are they different in tone and rhythm or are they kind of unified?

[Charles:] I would say that the rhythm actually does unify them.

[Mark:] Charles, you mention that the Metamorphoses has been accused of being a grab bag of various anecdotes spread over 15 books. Is there a linear progression? Can readers go into any book that they want out of sequence or is there a beginning middle and end

[Charles:] Well, again, that’s one of those duck vs rabbit questions—issues. I think there is a beginning and a middle and an end, and I think that every reader has to find that for him or herself, but I think the best thing to do is to start reading it and go—follow the flow as Ovid intended. It will strike you, perhaps, as being a grab bag of interesting stories, and as you read those stories you’ll see that there is a kind of pattern, that the first five books are subtly different from the next 5 and the last 5. One of the things that I didn’t get to talk about was Ovid’s connection to dance. You asked before about the social nature of—we were talking about the social nature of the poetry. Ovid’s poems were used as librettos for a kind of dance called pantomime dance. which was a Greek theatrical form that had been taken over by the Romans which is very popular in Ovid’s time, and a dancer would get up and would dance mythological stories, and somebody said that the dancer had to know every mythological story, from Chaos to Cleopatra. That basically is the Metamorphoses; it’s from chaos to a little bit past Cleopatra. Augustus would’ve gone in on Cleopatra. 

[Mark:] That’s great. 

[Charles:] Yeah, and one of the interesting things about the stories we’ll see, I suppose, is that in each book of Ovid’s the connections between stories are like the connection between a man getting up and dancing, doing two different dances. A dance of, say, Minerva and Arachne, followed by a dance of Nyobi who lost her children to the god Apollo.

[Mark:] Charles Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the Norton Library Podcast

[Charles:] I can’t believe it’s happened.

[Laughter]

[Charles:] Thank you, Mark.

[Mark:] Thank you.

[Music] 

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Charles Martin is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.