Let's read Ovid's Metamorphoses! And perhaps more.

Who would like to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) with me?  We have had some discussion of this good idea, and I feel I am up to it now.  Up to writing about it.

Metamorphoses is a compendium of Greek myths that feature transformation, which turns out to be hundreds of pages worth of stories.  Ovid’s poem is not a catalog of any kind, but rather an original weaving of the myths into a new form.  Ovid enacts the title of the poem.  A translation should flow.

The translations.  The appeal of the 1567 Arthur Golding translation is it is the Ovid that Shakespeare read.  I believe Jonathan Bate’s Shakespeare and Ovid (1994) is the place to go for the details.

The George Sandys translation (1621-6), in heroic couplets, is superb but sadly Shakespeare did not read it, so it loses the celebrity boost.  It is likely – a bit of trivia – the first English book written in the Americas (Sandys was for a time treasurer of the Virginia Company).

A 1717 version by many hands, including Dryden, Pope and other great poets of the time, as well as some of the duds, sounds interesting and was the default Ovid translation for a century but in my experience the translations of this period, like Pope’s Homer, wander pretty far from the original, and I would at least like to pretend I am reading Ovid.

Skipping way ahead, I have no opinion about the many modern translations.  Twenty years ago I read some samples of Charles Martin’s flexible 2004 version which I liked a lot, so I’m going to read that one.  But I am sure several of the other options are good.

I would advise against the many 19th and early 20th century Ovid translations written as trots for Latin students.  There are likely better and worse, but they seem like dull stuff.  Ovid should be translated by a poet.

What should the schedule be?  Metamorphoses has fifteen chapters that typically fill thirty to forty pages.  Normally I would read one a day with some breaks, but three weeks seems too fast.  Let’s say I read a couple cantos a week.  Perhaps I will read Martin and Golding, which will slow me down.  Eight weeks, with some slippage – December, January, maybe into February.  Or is that too long?  Please advise.

I’ll try to write something once a week. 

I also hope to fit in more – much of the rest of – Ovid, who I suppose is my favorite Roman poet. 

The Heroides are a collection of monologues or letters sent by Greek heroines (and Sappho) to their lovers.  They were written by a young, even teenage, Ovid, circa 20 BCE.  They, too, were a significant influence on Shakespeare, on his great heroines, and on the European novel generally.  Daryl Hine’s Ovid’s Heroines (1991) is the obvious recommendation.

I have Peter Green’s thorough Penguin Classics book The Erotic Poems (dated after Heroides and before Metamorphoses), containing his great love elegies the Amores, as well as The Art of Love – how to seduce – and The Cure for Love – how to break up, as well as a fragment about how to apply makeup.  180 pages of Ovid in a 450 page book.  I said Green was thorough.  And I remember the translations as good, but I plan to revisit Amores in Christopher Marlowe’s remarkable translation.  Marlowe was also likely a teenager when he did Ovid’s elegies.  Teenagers and their love poems.

I have not read Ovid’s calendar poem, Fasti, or the poems in exile, Tristia and the Letters from Pontus.  Christoph Ransmayr’s enjoyable fantasy novel The Last World (1988) explores this part of Ovid’s life.  We’ll see if I get this far.   Why wouldn’t I, Ovid is my favorite Roman poet.  Except maybe for Horace.

Please advise about anything I mentioned, or missed.  Good translations, a better schedule, supplemental books, favorite essays on Ovid, tips for learning Latin fast, anything.  It is all appreciated.

Poetry, theater: French literature Petrarchizes - However well one may be educated / In Greek and Latin subtleties

More from the difficult French 16th century. I won’t get to Montaigne.

3.  French classical theater, this is just what I mean when I say that 16th century French literature is in some sense too hard.  French writers were absorbing and transforming a flood of new classical texts coming to France from Italy, plus what had already been a century or two of Italian responses to those discoveries.  With the plays of Seneca as the crucial example, a new kind of French theater came into being.

The English history is a little bit later, but parallel.  In England, though, the academic theater quickly turned into a chaotic popular theater, while in France it became more of a purely courtly form.  More intellectual, specialized, and boring.

Shakespeare, or Kyd, or whoever, read Seneca and thought “Ghosts and murders!”; French writers apparently thought “Sententiae!”  The two plays I have read (in English) are not dramatic.  They are both by Robert Garnier, the most important French playwright of the century, although by no means the earliest.  I wrote about Les Juifves (The Hebrew Women, 1583) a few years ago, and have also read Marc-Antoine (1578), a tragedy about Anthony and Cleopatra, in Mary Sidney’s 1592 version.  These are plays where characters barely interact.  Anthony declaims a monologue and leaves the stage; Cleopatra ditto and ditto; Anthony returns etc.  The two characters do get to talk to each other at the very end of the play.

Sidney’s poetry is exquisite, and I assume Garnier’s is comparable, but you can’t give this stuff to high school kids, even French ones.  They are punished enough with Corneille and Racine.  The 16th century French theater is for graduate students.  I guess English is not so different – who outside of graduate school reads Gorbuduc (1561)?  Still, Garnier is contemporary with Marlowe and The Spanish Tragedy – dramatic plays.

4.  French poets are working on the same project, pulling the Italian Renaissance into French.  The parallel with English poetry is close.  The equivalent of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the first poet to bring Petrarch into the language, is Clément Marot, who I have not read.  The most important is Pierre de Ronsard, who is lying when he writes that his suffering is so powerful that he does not know how to express it, either “Tant lamenter, ne tant Petrarquiser” (Des Amours, sonnet 129) – “as lamenting, nor as Petrarchizing.”  This man knew how to Petrarchize.  He was the greatest of Petrarchizers.

One result, just like in English, was ingenious but esoteric demonstrations of poetic learning like the Délie of Maurice Scève, which I read some portion of in Richard Sieburth’s translation.  The reader is assumed to know his Petrarch, his Horace, and his Horace-via-Petrarch inside out, while also interpreting riddle-like emblems and so on.  Advanced intellectual pleasure.

By contrast there are The Regrets (1558) of Joachim du Bellay, expat poetry.  Du Bellay worked in Rome and missed France.  He wrote a 191-poem sonnet sequence on that subject, mostly in some way about life in Rome, although he makes it home at the end.  The poems are full of personality, and are almost conversational, a good trick in a sonnet.  Ronsard is a genius, but is always performing, however beautifully.  Du Bellay – well, he is performing, too, but he tricks me into intimacy.

However well one may be educated
In Greek and Latin subtleties, I think
The effect of this place is to teach something
One didn’t know before one came this way.
Not that one finds here better libraries
Than any that the French have put together,
But that the atmosphere, perhaps the weather,
Spirit away our less ethereal faculties.
Some demon or other, with his sacred fire,
Purifies even the worst of us, tempers and refines
Till our judgment is too wary to be misled.
But if one stays here too long, all one’s strength of mind
Goes up in smoke, and leaves nothing behind,
Or so little that one loses the thread.  (Sonnet 72 in C. H. Sisson)

It’s complex, but not because it is learned.  We are lucky to have C. H. Sisson’s 1984 translation of (most of) Les Regrets.  An all-time great translation, partly accomplished by a subtle mastery of slant rhymes.

Someday I should read the entire sequence in French.  I should read an entire book by Ronsard, too, Les Amours (1552) or something.  Long ago, I scoured the versions of Ronsard in English; they range from functional (the Penguin Classics edition, clearly meant for French students) to hilariously bad (there is one from the 1960s in free verse with “erotic” drawings by the author).  So without French, du Bellay yes, Ronsard no.

The great feminist rediscovery of the period is Louise Labé.  French critics spent the 1990s debating whether she existed, or was really a persona of Scève.  That’s some feminism!  Anyway, the consensus, now, is that she existed.  I should read her, too.  When you go to see Rabelais’s hospital in Lyon, look for the plaque identifying Labé’s childhood home, which is just across a little restaurant-packed plaza.

"Rome is inexhaustible." - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I think he has quite exhausted Rome.”

“Ah no, that’s a shallow judgment.  Rome is inexhaustible.”  (The Portrait of a Lady, Ch. 46)

The Portrait of a Lady, the 1881 novel about a young American woman who travels to Europe and attracts a series of stalkers, has a peculiar relationship with Rome, the city, not the empire.  One scene in America, barely more than one setting in England, glimpses of London and Paris, a bit more of Florence, but plenty of Rome.

James reverts to the travel writing mode I noted in his 1871 story “The Passionate Pilgrim,” but now he integrates the plot more closely with the tourism.  The heroine, Isabel Archer, is attending church at St. Peters (as a tourist – she is not Catholic) when she comes across one of her many obsessive suitors, Lord Warburton, and a scene with him takes place amidst the service.  “In that splendid immensity individual indiscretion carries but a short distance” (Ch. 27) – that is James taking a jab at the suitor, who should know to behave better in church, more like the second suitor attending the service:

“What’s your opinion of St. Peter’s?” Mr. Osmond asked of Isabel.

“It’s very large and very bright,” said the girl.

An answer worthy of Daisy Miller, although Isabel is smarter than Daisy Miller, or is smarter than Daisy Miller acts.

In the next chapter, the encounter with the Lord Warburton takes place in front of “the lion of the collection,” (Ch. 28), the Dying Gladiator (“It is a work of profound interest and unrivalled excellence,” see p. 208).  Is James going to write his novel by working his way through his Baedeker, I wondered?  No, James used Murray, not Baedeker.

After her marriage, Isabel lives in Rome in a palace, “a dark and massive structure,”

which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in “Murray” and visited by tourists who looked disappointed and depressed… (Ch. 36)

Whatever my frustrations with James, I have learned to get his humor, and also his indirection.  In this scene one secondary character (Mr. Rosier) is fretting over another (Pansy), but James has not yet described the living arrangements of the heroine; this is the way he slips that in, as if I care about where Pansy lives.

The theme culminates with Isabel taking a drive on the Campagna, on the Appian Way, thus connecting her to Carducci and Pater:

She had long ago taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.  She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet were still upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself  and grew objective…  (Ch. 49)

That last is a highly Jamesian phrase.  The pathetic fallacy amongst the ruins.  “[S]he had grown to think of [Rome] chiefly as the place where people had suffered.”  Thus her cruel husband who, a few chapters earlier, had called Rome “inexhaustible,” an irony for poor suffering Isabel.

Walter Pater's Rome - at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red

Marius the Epicurean is in form a historical novel about 2nd century Rome, but a historical novel that allows itself lines like:

And the scene of the night-watching of a dead body  lest the witches should come to tear off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier.  (Ch. 5, describing The Golden Ass)

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all times.  (Ch. 6, from a rich argument about style and literary decadence)

A phrase from Goethe’s Faust, a long quotation from Rousseau’s Émile, offhand references to Cardinal Newman and Walter Savage Landor – one might think the book is in fact some kind of work of literary criticism.  In part it is.  Part of the challenge of reading Pater is that the art criticism, literary essays, and fiction are all in service of a long continuing argument.  The imaginary portrait of Marius is different in form than the historical portraits of Leonardo and Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873), but not in purpose.

I am not convinced that all of these forms should be used like this.  Maybe they should have different purposes!  All part of learning to read Pater.

Regardless, if the historical novel is rarely convincing, the novelized history is often excellent, especially in the chapters about Rome, “that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people… heroism in ruin” (Ch. 12), as in the descriptions of the horrific “games” involving the slaughter of men and animals in Chapter 14 – Marius rejects Stoicism in large part because of Marcus Aurelius’s indifference to the cruelty of the arena combats – or the marvelous “day in the life of Rome” in Chapter 11:

They visited the flower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed on them the newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas.  Loitering to the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen's drug-shop [another celebrity cameo], after a glance at the announcements of new poems on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller [there is more reading, more book-buying in Marius than I would have guessed], they entered the curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the Diurnal or Gazette of the day…

I began to wonder if Pater was secretly describing a day in London.

The twelfth chapter is one of the book’s hybrids, a “speech” by Marcus Aurelius that is – I think – an ingenious hodgepodge of Meditations, Ecclesiastes, and Shakespeare. The speech somehow ends with not just the fall of night but the coming of winter, “the hardest that had been known in a lifetime.” 

The wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the short day was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna.  The eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky.  Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth.  The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red.

Now, this is not London, right?  This is Rome, Pater’s Rome.

So next, the Rome of Henry James.

Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte, this is the answer he makes me - Arthur Hugh Clough's Rome

“Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
…
Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!” (I, 35 & 41-44)

Alas! Claude, hero of Clough’s Amour de Voyages (1849), is a restless youngster. He’s a tourist in Rome, and not happy about it, but the passage above, nominally a letter to his friend Eustace, suggests that the problem might just possibly not be the fault of Rome, exactly.

Fortunately, for Claude and the reader, two things soon happen that interest even him. First, Claude is forced to spend time, much against his well, with other English tourists, and is surprised to find himself falling in love, although he thinks it can’t possibly be serious. He’s a bit like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the distant man who cannot quite believe that he has met a woman who is actually interesting. One wonders what kind of company these fellers had been keeping before, but that’s beside the point.

Second, this is 1849, so Claude and the other tourists wake one morning to discover that the city, under the control of Garibaldi’s Republic, is besieged by the French army (Murray is Claude’s Lonely Planet):

“Yes, we are fighting at last, it appears. This morning as usual,
Murray, as usual, in hand, I enter the Caffè Nuovo;
Seating myself with a sense as it were of a change in the weather,
Not understanding, however, but thinking mostly of Murray,
And, for today is their day, of the Campidoglio Marbles,
Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte,
This is the answer he makes me, and this the sign of a battle.” (II. 95-100)

I detect a hint of a future generation of useless men abroad, those of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, or Turgenev's fretful young intellectuals. Claude begins to find things – the Roman Republic, Mary– interesting, but he has great trouble doing anything, which eventually leads where one would expect. As goes the Roman Republic, so goes the romance of Claude and Mary.

I don’t want to overemphasize the romance, although that’s quite good, and would have made a fine plot in the hands of Jane Austen or E. M. Forster. Amours de Voyage consists mostly of Claude philosophizing and ironizing, and whining and moping, and wandering around Rome, all in his overbaked Oxford style. What he has to say, what he thinks, is interesting. What he does, that's Claude's problem.

Wonderful poet, Arthur Hugh Clough. Not quite like anyone else.

Within a lovely grotto of salami – Giuseppe Gioachino Belli

Belli (1791-1863) was a Roman poet of the early 19th century. His subject was Rome, its corrupt Popes and Cardinals, its coutesans, its daily life. He was a satirist, in a long Roman tradition:

The Coffee-house Philosopher

Human beings in ths world are the same
As coffee-beans before the espresso machine:
First one, and then another, a steady stream,
All of ‘em going alike to one sure fate.

Often they change places, and often the big bean
Presses against and crushes the little bean,
And they all crowd each other at the entrance gate
Of iron that grinds them down into a powder.

And so in this way men live, soft or hard,
Mixed together by the hand of God
That stirs them round and round and round in circles;

And, gently or roughly, everyone moves, draws breath
Without ever understanding why and falls
Down to the bottom through the throat of death.

It’s hard for me to imagine what Rome was like at this time, directly ruled by the Pope, administered by Cardinals, policed by the Papal police. Repressive, backwards, a mix of palaces, hovels, and ancient ruins, teeming year round with religious and artistic tourists. Belli gives us a glimpse of this world:

The Gravediggers

Yaaa! whadaya mean, business? nobody’s dying:
A bit o’ bad air, and it’s gone already:
Everyone’s so attached to this stinking life…
Go, follow the gravedigger’s trade with love – who’s grateful?

O my poor black smock! there, growing mouldy.
An’ if things go on like this here, and the Lord
Don’t inspire some of those smart quacks
- The gravedigging profession is washed up!

The one swell year we had was in ‘Seventeen.
Then, in this square, it was really the good life
The dead filling up the carts like falling snow!

Well, that’s enough; who knows…? Yesterday Joe
Said a gravedigger friend had written him
That there’s a ray of hope from this cholera.

Belli wrote in all sorts of forms, but it’s his sonnets that have gotten the most attention, I think because they are generally about more universal scenes or ideas. Some of them are comical retellings of the stories of Noah or Abraham or Mary and Martha. Some are attacks on the Pope or some lecherous Cardinal. The two “Saint Strumpet of Piazza Montanara” sonnets are brilliant, about a true Christian, but highly obscene. But the depictions of ordinary life are the best, I think. Here’s Rome at Easter:

Tour of the Delicatessens

Of all the delicatessens where they put on
Great shows for the Easter of the Egg,
That of Biascio at the Pantheon
Is the best in Rome this year. There’s big

Columns of round cheeses, that would be
A hundred, to reckon low, support an alcove
Embroidered with sausages, and you should see
The animals in fancy forms! Above,

Among others, way up, there’s a Moses of lamb
Holding a club in the air just like a cop,
On the peak of a tall mountain of ham;

And under him, to get your appetite up,
There’s a Christ and a Madonna made of pastry
Within a lovely grotto of salami.

Belli was a dialect (Romansesco) writer, which adds one more obstacle to translation, as if there were not enough already. These translations are all by Harold Norse, a young Beat poet. On the back cover of my book, he actually says “This keeps me free from schools (beat or square)”, but only a Beat would say that. Norse is an interesting guy in his own right, and has recently (in his old age) gotten some attention as an important gay poet. I recently read someone criticize Norse as having translated Belli into Brooklynese. Well, that’s one solution to the dialect problem. And look at the sophisticated off-rhymes in “The Coffee-house Philosopher” – same/machine/stream, hard/God, circles/falls. He’s does rhyme “bean” with “bean”, which is less sophisticated. If someone has done better with Belli, I’d love to read him.