A Man Half Bull and a Bull Half Man (Metamorphoses, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Ovid's Metamorphoses, translator Charles Martin returns to discuss his first encounter with Ovid, the potential to learn Greek and Roman mythology through reading Metamorphoses, and other scholars' work with the text in the twenty-first century. 

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.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Metamorphoses, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/MetamorphosesNL.

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Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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{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 second of our two episodes devoted to Ovid's Metamorphoses as we interview its editor, Charles Martin. In part one, we discussed Ovid, his life and times, his masterwork, and some of the treasures within. In this second episode, we learn more about Charles Martin's history with Ovid, how he came to translate this work, his favorite line in it, and how we might think about Metamorphoses in the 21st century. 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 Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Charles Martin, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast.  

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

[Mark:] It's good to see you again. Why don't we get to know a little bit more about Ovid, but also your connection to Ovid and this text. Do you remember when you first encountered Ovid and Metamorphoses?  

[Charles:] Yes, I do, actually. I first met Ovid in translation. I had a good deal of Latin. I had Latin through all four years of high school, and then I had it for two years in college. The Latin curriculum, when I was an undergraduate, it was designed basically to be very edifying. It was supposed to improve us, and we read a lot of serious poets. We read Virgil, and we read Horace, and somehow Catullus slipped in. Catullus was not at all edifying, and I took to him like a duck to water. But Ovid was left out. Back in the 19th century, Ovid was found to be immoral and not something that you would give to children to read because they would enjoy it too much, basically. So, Ovid got kind of thrown out of the curriculum. He was still around, poking back in maybe in the 20th century. And the 20th century really did rediscover Ovid and bring him back into the curriculum. But when I was an undergraduate, no. I learned about Ovid because I was an English major, and I read Christopher Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe in the Renaissance did a wonderful translation of Ovid's Amores, great love poems in English. I was just astounded by these, and I went to my English teacher, and he said, oh, you should read Dryden's translations too. He's much more cynical than Marlowe is.  

[Mark:] Through your reading and your career, how did you pick up this incredible challenge of translating him?  

[Charles:] I started off actually translating Catullus and did a collection of his poems. And then I wrote a little book about Catullus. And I had been reading Ovid in Latin by that time, reading the Metamorphoses. And somebody suggested that I should translate the Metamorphoses. And I thought, that would be fun. If you can't write an epic poem in English, you can always translate one. So I got involved in it through Bernard Knox, who suggested that I do it. And I began work on it. I soon realized that like most people, I had only read the first five books pretty thoroughly. I'd read stuff in the next five books, but I hadn't read the last part. So I was coming to that really as a beginner, actually.  

[Mark:] Why is the last part less prominent?  

[Charles:] I think because most of the famous Metamorphoses, the ones that sort of stop us in our tracks, are in the first 10 books. We tend to focus on certain figures. Narcissus, for example. Echo, Atalanta, all of those people.  

[Mark:] When you translate Metamorphoses, are you starting in book one and just working your way through it? Or did you have a different strategy than that?  

[Charles:] I had a strategy born out of fear. I thought if I started in Book One, this would be overwhelming. So I started with Book Three. I started in the middle, because Ovid's idea of a book is Book One starts at the beginning, or before the beginning with chaos. But every other book after that until the last book is a continuation. One book will end — Book One will end, and Book Two will begin with the same story and move on over into another story. Among the things that Ovid shakes up is the idea of a book. What exactly is a book? Well, it's not really something that has a beginning and an end. It has a continuation and then something else that's going to be continued. 

[Mark:] We touched on this a little bit in our first episode, but if you try to imagine the people who are coming to your Norton Library edition for the first time, what do you think are the challenges that this text poses to those readers?  

[Charles:] This is a question that's really so hard for me to answer. I don't know. I like to think that there aren't any overwhelming challenges. There's nothing that will make a reader say, I can't go on with this. I think there's, in Ovid, there's everything that makes you want to go on and just, you know, enjoy the stories.  

[Mark:] What about readers who are not steeped in the mythology that Ovid's audience would have known?  

[Charles:] Well, that's all of us, basically, I think, or most of us, me included. But I had a young friend recently who said he wanted to read my translation, but he would wait until he learned about Greek and Roman mythology, in which he felt he was deficient. And I said, no, no, that's doing it backwards. Ovid will teach you the mythology.  

[Mark:] And there are helpful notes in the back, helpful end notes that explain all of these references that Ovid uses.  

[Charles:] You will not learn a kind of systematic theology, but there really wasn't a systematic theology. And what Ovid tells you is he gives you the stories, but he also tells you, shows you what a talented poet can do to transform them.  

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in Metamorphoses?  

[Charles:] Not exactly. I've got a story about a favorite line.  

[Mark:] Sure.  

[Charles:] And I don't know if it's true or not. I'm not going to vouch for it. But Ovid had three friends who were talking to him one time about his poetry. And they said, we love your work, but we have three lines that you have to take out of the Metamorphoses. And he said, okay, fair enough. I'll do that. But I've got three lines that I simply cannot do without. So they sat down and they all wrote on paper what the lines were. And of course, the three lines that the friends wanted to take out, uh, were the three lines that Ovid wouldn't take out. Now, I don't know if that story is true or not.  

[Mark:] Do we know which lines they were?  

[Charles:] We know a couple of them. It's a little bit hard to see. What they seem to be objecting to was that he was violating a notion of poetic decorum. I'll tell you what one of the lines was. It was about the minotaur. And Ovid wrote, semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem. And it means a man half bull and a bull half man. I think they thought this was a little too clever by half. I find myself thinking, I don't know why this is so. Why would they object to this line? 

[Mark:] But he liked it. Ovid liked that line. 

[Charles:] Yeah, he liked the cleverness of it and the wit of it. And they felt it was a bit too far gone. And one of Ovid's other critics said that Ovid simply does not know enough, does not know how to leave well enough alone, that he always goes overboard. And Ovid is one for going, he is one for going overboard. And you can see this in, there's a, I've forgotten which book it's in now. I think Book 12, but I may be wrong. No, it's earlier than that. Book Eight, I think. The story of a family called the Lapiths, a tribe called the Lapiths that invite the centaurs to their wedding feast. And the centaurs are not very good on self-control, as one might imagine. And they get drunk, and they try to kidnap the bride and kidnap other women, and all hell breaks loose. And there's a royal battle between the Lapiths and the centaurs. And this was a battle that was regarded as a great, heroic conflict. Ovid turns it into something out of the Irish ballad, Finnegan's Wake, where people get drunk at the wake, and a row and eruption soon began. And he goes on and on, maiming and killing and mutilating, and Lapiths of brains pouring out. And you just think, this is over the top. He's really, he's gone over the top yet again. He does not have the kind of decorum that other poets have. And this, I think, may be the explanation why they didn't like that line. It was just a little bit too clever for them.  

[Mark:] Charles, do you have a Metamorphoses hot take, something controversial or counterintuitive that might go against the grain of popular sentiment?  

[Charles:] What I feel is that Ovid's Metamorphoses was a deeply subversive book, and that in 8 AD, when it came out, when it got published, Augustus was told, you can't let this stand. And that was the reason perhaps for Ovid's exile, not his other poem. I think what he was trying to do in saying that the Ars Amatoriawas the poem that got me convicted here, he was trying to throw the blame on that book, because everybody knew, it's not that bad. It's not such a terrible book. And you don't want people thinking about the Metamorphoses in those as something that could get you thrown into exile, because it was.  

[Mark:] In the 2000 years since this has been published, how has metamorphoses been adapted, repurposed, appropriated in different forms? Do any productions or any other versions stand out, Charles?  

[Charles:] It has been adapted over the years, but in contemporary time, in our time, I don't believe it has been. I'm waiting for the Renaissance to occur. I think there are some signs, but they're mostly literary signs. Michael Hoffman and James Lasden published a collection called After Ovid, very free translations of the poems. In other words, they've “metamorphosed” Ovid's Metamorphoses. And a man named Philip Terry published a collection of short stories based on Ovid's stories by contemporary authors. But there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of, if you look in the art, in the visual arts, there are not too many people who are doing the Metamorphoses. There's a one man named Wally Reinhardt, whose work I've seen, I think is absolutely terrific, turning it into a kind of graphic novel. That's where I would expect people would metamorphose the Metamorphoses.  

[Mark:] Yeah, that would make sense. Did Kafka's metamorphoses have any overlap with Ovid? 

[Charles:] The Metamorphoses is just a single metamorphosis, and it shows what I think Ovid thought of metamorphosis, that it is a dehumanizing experience. Kafka is not putting the blame on it for Gregor Samsa's Metamorphoses. It seems just to happen out of nowhere. Ovid, I think, is pretty clear that it is the gods. It's the bosses who, especially Jove and Apollo, i.e. Augustus, who transform people into something else. Ovid's idea of metamorphosis is deeply political, and of that kind of metamorphosis is deeply political.  

[Mark:] In our first episode, you talked a little bit about how the books at the end of the 15 books, at the end of Metamorphoses, are less well-known, but you were about to make an argument for Book 13 as being either one of your favorites or one of the most compelling. Can you tell us a little bit about Book 13 and why that emerges for you?  

[Charles:] Well, it became a favorite because it was one of those books that I actually hadn't read until I started translating The Metamorphoses. I don't know how I missed it, but I had. What I found and still do find admiring about it, what I admire about it, is the incredible skill with which Ovid starts a story. Well, he's not starting the story at the beginning of Book 13, because he started it at the end of Book 12. It's the story of how, after Achilles dies, there's a competition among the Greeks for his armor. The competition is between Ulysses and Ajax, the brains of Ulysses versus the brawn of Ajax. The first part of Book 13 is a wonderful kind of dialogue that you would probably hear in a Roman law court, where Ajax speaks first, then Ulysses speaks, and Ulysses is awarded the armor of Achilles. Then Ajax kills himself, commits suicide. Then it segues into the story of how the ghost of Achilles comes up and demands a sacrifice. You have the sacrifice of Hecuba’s — Queen Hecuba of Troy — her one remaining daughter. Almost all of her children are dead by now. Hecuba's last daughter, Polixena, is the sacrifice to appease the ghost of Achilles. Then there's a lament of Hecuba. Then there's another transition to other stories of loss, of transformation, of grief. Then you realize in one of the minor tales of transformation that, oh, here's a story about Anchises and Aeneas coming to Italy. Then at the end of it, you get the story of Polyphemus, the cyclops, as a lover, madly in love and behaving foolishly. You think to yourself, okay, how does he do this? How does he move from one thing to another? I've been taking Tai Chi lessons. It strikes me that Ovid's technique is very much like the technique of Tai Chi, where you strike a certain kind of pose. Then you move by just a gradual sort of movement, you take up another pose. There's a kind of gentle shifting between stories, transitions between stories.  

[Mark:] Yes. When Ovid portrays this debate between Ajax and Achilles, are we rooting for one over the other, or is Ovid presenting one as admirable, or is this a legitimate debate where both characters have a good argument?  

[Charles:] Well, if you're like me, you're rooting for both of them, one after the other.  

[Mark:] Whoever's talking, you're rooting for.  

[Charles:] Whoever's talking, I'm on that side.  

[Mark:] Ajax isn't the bad guy.  

[Charles:] Oh, no, not at all.  

[Mark:] So, why does he lose?  

[Charles:] Well, because he does in the Iliad, and because I think Ovid is saying, “this is what happens.” The people in charge are not always the fairest people around, and the decision goes to Ulysses because brains here are more important than brawn.  

[Mark:] Charles, as I mentioned earlier, the Norton Library edition of Metamorphoses has generous endnotes that explain a lot of the things that might be unfamiliar to us, and there's one I was hoping you could elaborate on just a little bit for us. In Book 15, there's a subhead amidst this book that refers to the teachings of Pythagoras. I'm wondering if you could put that into context for us of what is Pythagoras telling us, and why does that appear in the middle of Book 15 like this?  

[Charles:] I only wish I could do something absolutely conclusive and brilliant, but when I was translating it, I met a friend of mine who was also a translator of Metamorphoses, and we were talking, and he said, you've come to Book 15. I said, yes. And he said, isn't it a bit of a disappointment to realize that all along this has been leading up to a tract on vegetarianism? So, I don't think any of us has the answer to why it is there. If you think about Pythagoras, it's going to be about music and math and harmony and proportion, and no, it's about don't eat meat. He does talk brilliantly about Metamorphoses and all of the changes that take place, but he goes on for rather a while about this and then circles back to “don't eat meat” again. I have the feeling that this is in some ways connected perhaps with the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs. It's an example of Ovid going over the top. Here's something that you're not going to expect, and I'm going to go on with it, and you will take a certain amount of pleasure in it, but you're not going to be able to say exactly why it's here. 

[Mark:] I think for some of our listeners, this announcement for vegetarianism might be a really triumphant way to end this book.  

[Charles:] It might very well be.  

[Mark:] Maybe that's the point we can end on, where we can think about what a 21st-century reader might get from Metamorphoses. I know Emily Wilson's introduction talks about this sort of maternal appeal and how it's always applicable to whatever society is reading it. Do you have any thoughts about the contemporary relevance of this text?  

[Charles:] There are many stories, but not an enormous number of stories, that deal with issues that we are concerned about, whether or not gender, for instance, is socially constructed, the idea of oppressive violence against women, the overheated world that we are driving our chariots toward. All of those things are very real concerns in our world, and I think Ovid was concerned with them too. But I think that basically the real thing is that Ovid is against autocracy, that the stories themselves are in favor somehow of human freedom, of human liberty. And there's not just the stories, but perhaps the text itself. There's a quotation from Italo Calvino that I found interesting. He describes something he calls the “manifold text,” which replaces the oneness of the thinking eye with a multiplicity of subjects, voices, and views of the world. And he says, think of what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into cells like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language. And then he says, was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote about the continuity of forms, when he wrote his Metamorphoses? I think writers and readers both will find a kind of freedom in the Metamorphoses, a connection with liberty.  

[Mark:] Charles Martin, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast.  

[Charles:] Thank you.  

[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. 

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