Links, but mostly Ovid and Hughes

[selenak]

Firstly, I changed my default icon again, since twinkledru created such a beautiful one of my favourite pair of sisters. Secondly, fernwithy wrote an intriguing analysis of how BTVS and HP use monsters as metaphors, here. (I also admire the way she dealt with a troll.) Thirdly, penknife posted the next chapter of "Fear the Rest", her great work-in-progress about the way the enmity between the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants developed from a common start, Erik and Jean Grey pov mostly. She linked the previous chapters, if you missed those. I shy away from WIPs normally, but this is just to die for.

***

Watch me vent my inner ancient authors/poetry fangirl. Or: Why fanfic writers ought to read Ovid. Well, not just him, of course. But the thing is, what both the Greeks and the Romans did (and then the rest of the world for 2000 years) was to take a basic stock of stories and characters and then to give them their own interpretation. Sounds familiar?

Ovid's Metamorphoses is probably one of the most well-known collection of myths, and writers continue to draw on him to this day. Whether you're watching Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream or Titus Andronicus, or reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman, notably the volumes Fables and Reflections and Brief Lives, you're seeing adaptions from the Metamorphoses.

There are several translations and collections (mostly a selection of the most famous myths, not the entire thing), but my favourite is Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid, because it's really more than a translation. It's a poet responding to another poet with a recreation. While both Ovid and Hughes were fascinated by passion, they also were very different in other ways; Hughes lacked Ovid's urban elegeance, and I don't think he'd have been interested in translating the Ars Amatoria, for example. But he had a totally unsentimental and powerful take on the world of animals and myths, and the Metamorphoses were ideally suited for this.

An example of what Hughes does in Tales of Ovid in terms of bringing his own language to render Ovid's vision is this excerpt from the introductory tale of the four ages. I'll first quote Hughes and then a literal translation.




Last comes the Age of Iron
And the day of Evil dawns.
Modesty,
Loyalty,
Truth,
Go up like mist - a morning sigh off a graveyard.

Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain - a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning form the roots of the eye-teeth.

Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots.
And the long trunks of trees
That had never shifted into their lives
From some mountain fastness
Leapt into their coffins
From wavetop to wavetop,
Then out over the rim of the unknown.

Meanwhile the ground, formerly free to all
As the air or sunlight,
Was portioned by surveyors into patches,
Between boundary markers, fences, ditches.
Earth's natural plenty no longer sufficed.
Man tore up the earth, and rummaged in her bowels.
Precious ores the Creator had concealed
As close to hell as possible
Were dug up - a new drug
For the criminal. So now iron comes
With its cruel ideas. And gold
With crueller. Combined, they bring war -
War, insatiable for the one,
With bloody hands employing the other.
Now man lives only by plunder. The guest
Is booty for the host. The bride's father,
Her heirloom, is a windfall piggybank
For the groom to shatter. Brothers
Who ought to love each other
Prefered to loathe. The husband longs
To bury his wife and she him.
Stepmothers, for the sake of their stepsons,
Study poison. And sons grieve
Over their father's obdurate good health.


Classic literal translation

From a hard thing was the last race, from Iron.
Straightway there erupted into this age of worse vein
Every unspeakable thing, and shame fled and truth and faith;
Into their places came down frauds and deceits
And treacheries and force and the love - a wicked one - of having.
Sails were given to the winds (nor yet did he well know them,
The sailor) and what previously had stood on high mountains
Now on unknown waves leapt up, as ship's keels;
And upon the ground, which was common previously like the light of the sun and the breezes,
The careful measurer marked long limit-lines.
Not only were crops and the food it owed
Demanded form that rich ground, but men went into the guts of earth,
And what had been hidden away and covered by Stygian shades
They dug up - wealth, the incitement of evils.
And now the harmful iron, and than iron more harmful, gold,
Had come forth, then came forth war, which fights with both,
And in bloody hand they shook clashing arms.
Livings were made from plunder; not guest from host was safe,
Not father-in-law form son-in-law; among brothers grace was also rare;
The man hung upon the death of his wife, she upon that of her husband;
Terrible stepmothers mixed lurid aconite poisons;
The son before the day inquired after his father's years.


If you know your Greek myths via more modern and/or bowdlerized retellings, like Gustav Schwab (for Germans) or whoever wrote them in English for modern schoolbooks, it's striking, when reading these versions for first time, of how they don't care about modern perceptions of justice at all. Take the story of Arachne, the weaver who enters into a competition with the goddess Athena and ends up as a spider. In Schwab's version, the one I read as a kid, Athena wins the competition, Arachne refuses to accept this and in shame hangs herself, Athena then transforms her into a spider. But Ovid's story goes quite differently. Arachne wins the competition, Athena is in a rage and destroys Arachne's work, Arachne, infuriated at this injustice, hangs herself, and then comes the transformation. The gods are rarely kind in ancient myths, and seldom noble. And the humans, passionate as they are, are utterly unlike the characters of shows like Hercules or Xena which draw on Greek templates. Prometheus aside, rebellion against gods isn't carried out for anyone else's sake. Niobe, pointing out the women of Thebes should not worship Leto, whom they never see, but herself, is not striking a blow for atheism, she's indulging in hubris.

Also, the eroticism of the Ovidian version usually does not make it into modern retellings. There is nothing whatsoever comfortable about it. When the nympth Salmacis desires the youth Hermaphroditus, she draws him under with little regard for his own wishes:

Burning for air, he can do nothing
As her hands hunt over him, and as her body
Knots itself every way around him
Like a sinewy otter
Hunting some kind of fish
That flees hither and thither inside him,
And as she flings and locks her coils
Around him like a snake
Around the neck and legs and wings of an eagle
That is trying to fly off with it,
And like ivy which first binds the branches
In it meshes, then pulls the whole tree down,
And as the octopus -
A tangle of constrictors, nippled with suckers,
That drag towards a maw -
Embraces its prey.


Or take a part of the myth which turns up, in one way or another, in modern films or books from Labyrinth to Hannibal. Hades, the god of the underworld - Pluto in Roman terms - abducts Persephone and marries her. This, to Ovid, who tells the tale from an exclusive female perspective (Persephone's mother Demeter/Ceres and the various nymphs who aide her in her search or her lost daughter), is not a happy romance, or Hades a Byronic hero before his time, and Hughes doesn't mince words, either. The rape imagery in the following passage is clear, but since it's also poetic, which in turn increases the disturbing factor. Just after Pluto has abducted Persephone/Proserpina, on his way back with her to the underworld, the lake nymph Cyane tries to stop him:

Cyane stretched her arms as she spoke,
To block the path of the horses.
Then the son of Saturn, in a fury,
Plunged his royal sceptre
Down through the bed of her pool
And called his savage horses.
The bottom of the pool split wide open,
And they dived -
Horses, chariot, Pluto and his prize -
Straight into hell.

Cyane bewailed the rape of the goddess
And the violation of her fountain.
She wept over these wrongs
In secret, as if her heart
Were weeping its blood.
Nothing could comfort her.
Gradually, her sorrow
Melted her into the very waters
Of which she had been the goddess.
Her limbs thinned, her bones became pliant,
Her nails softened. Swiftly she vanished
Into flowing water - first
Her slighter parts, her hair, fingers,
Feet, legs, then her shoulders,
Her back, her breasts, her sides, and at last
No longer blood but clear simple water
Flowed through her veins, and her whole body
Became clear simple water. Nothing remained
To hold or kiss but a twisting current of water.


Medea, most famous for killing her children was a character who fascinated Ovid - she's in the Heroides, twice, once as a letter-writer, once as the subject of a letter, and he wrote a drama about her which is lost. In the Metamorphoses, he included another mother who kills her child in order to revenge herself on her husband, its father: Procne, whose sister Philomela gets abducted, raped and mutilated (he cuts out her tongue) by Tereus, Procne's husband. When Philomela finally finds a way to tell her sister what happened, Procne frees her and swears revenge.

'O my sister, nothing now
Can soften
The death Tereus is going to die.
Let me see this palace one flame
And Tereus a blazing insect in it,
Making it brighter.

Let me break his jaw. Hang him up
By his tongue and saw it through with a broken knife.
Then dig his eyes from their holes.
Give me the strength, you gods,
To twist his hips and shoulders from their sockets
And butcher the limbs off his trunk

'Till his soul for very terror scatter
Away through a thousand exits.'

While Procne raved Itys came in -
Her demented idea
Caught hold of his image.
'The double of his father', she whispered.
Silent, her heart ice,
She saw what had to be done.

Netherless as he ran to her
Calling to her, his five-year-old-arms
Pulling at her, to be kissed
And to kiss her, and chattering lovingly
Through his loving laughter
Her heart shrank.

Her fury seemed to be holding its breath
For that moment
As tears burned her eyes. She felt
Her love for this child
Softening her ferocious will - and she turned
To harden it, staring at her sister's face.

Then looked back at Itys
And again at her sister, crying:
'He tells me all his love - but she
Has no tongue to utter a word of hers.
He can call me mother, but she
Cannot call me sister.

This is the man you have married!
O daughter of Pandion!
You are your father's shame and his despair.
To love this monster Tereus, or pity him,
You must be a monster.
It is monstrous.

Catching Itys by the arm she gave herself
No more time to weaken.
Like a tiger on the banks of the Ganges
Taking a new-dropped fawn
She dragged him into a far cellar
Of the palace.

Itys saw what was coming. He tried
To clasp her neck screaming: 'Mama, Mama!'
But staring into his face
Procne pushed the sword through his chest.


Incidentally, this whole passage is considerably shorter in the original, where Procne gets over her moment of hesitation in far fewer words, and also is less verbal in cursing Tereus before. It's tempting to speculate here why Hughes elaborates, since Assia Wevill, the "other woman" in the Hughes/Plath fall-out, later killed not only herself but her and Hughes' daughter Shura, so the mother killing a child had a particular resonance for him. Still, the incredible horror and violence of the tale (see also: Titus Andronicus, for what Shakespeare did with it) pulsates through both original and translation. And then you have the ending, which makes the Roman Metamorphoses so different from Greek tragedies. For change, transformation is after all the red thread through all the tales, and it usually comes at the point where a tragedy would end with the death of all participants. Observe how the sudden note of grace is echoed in the rhythm of the words. Tereus pursues the sisters:

And suddenly they were flying. One swerved
On wings into the forest,
The other, with the blood still on her breast,
Flew up under the eaves of the palace.
And Tereus, charging blind
In his delirium of grief and vengeance,
No longer caring what happened -
He too was suddenly flying.
On his head and shoulders a crest of feathers,
Instead of a sword a long curved beak -
Like a warrior transfigured
With battle-frenzy dashing into battle.

He had become a hoopoe.
Philomela
Mourned in the forest, a nightingale.
Procne
Lamented round and round the palace,
A swallow.

Author Marina Warner, in her essay about Tales of Ovid, comments about this:
Ted Hughes' own process of metamorphosis points up throughout the Ovidian originals with fresh colour, taut rhythms, bright percussions (was he a Stravinsky, rescoring a Handel?). His English diction syncopates the sonorities of the Latin, catches the hexameter's long breath. But not all is louder and brighter and more pent up: the final stanza of his 'Tereus' reveals the enthralling quietness of his voice when he wanted to draw out the shape of the myth and modulate the screams and bellow of its mayhem to a mood of redemptive elegy: He had become a hoopoe (…) swallow. These lines don't appear in Ovid, except as ghosts flitting between them.

Comments

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

Yesyesyes - I do love the Hughes translation. Not that I can read Ovid's original to compare and contrast, but these poems - fabulous. Yes. I did not know, however, that his lover killed their daughter - that certainly puts a spin on the Procne. Good God.

Have you read Heaney's Beowulf? I've not read it in full yet, myself, but it looked like A Very Good Thing.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I did not know, however, that his lover killed their daughter - that certainly puts a spin on the Procne. Good God.

Yes, she did. Otherwise her suicide - gassing herself - was an exact imitation of Sylvia Plath's suicide, and whether the fact she killed their daughter as well was some kind of ghastly competition with the dead Sylvia or simply despair, nobody can ever know. It's worth noting, though, that the few poems addressed to Assia in New Selected Poems do have one major difference to the Sylvia poems from Birthday Letters - there is an undertone of anger there with the adressee which there never is with SP. It's mildest in Descent -

Cowardly
They scattered in the splinters of weeping
As your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry
Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you
The last raiment
Clinging rund your neck, the sole remnant
Between you and the underworld -

and harshest in The Error -

Her grave mouthed its riddle right enough.
But maybe you heard it in the air somewhere
An answer to one of your own
Unspoken enigmas. Misheard,
Mistook, and kneeled meekly.
Maybe they wouldn't stone you
If you became a nun
And selflessly incineratred yourself
In the shrine of her death.
Because that is what you did. From that moment
Shops, jobs, baby daughter, the German au pair
Had to become mere shapes
In the offered-up flames, a kind of writhing
That enfolded you and devoured
Your whole life.
I watched you feeding the flames. (...)
Six full calendar years -
Every tarred and brimstone
Day torn carefully off,
One at a time, not one wasted, patient
As if you were feding a child.
You were not feeding a child.
All you were doing was being strong,
Waiting for your ashes
To be complete and to cool.

Finally they made a small cairn.

Beowulf: Yes, I've read Heaneys translation, or rather, I heard it on an audiobook. He's good indeed. So is Hughes - if you can get the Tales of Ovid audiobook, do so by all means, it was the last thing he ever recorded, shortly before his death, but he's as good a recitor as ever.

Keith Sagar pointed out in this essay (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes/crit_alcestis.html) that Hughes did not translate one of the most famous Ovidian tales - the one of Orpheus, the poet who tries to get his wife back from the underworld and fails - and quoted a letter from him saying that he just couldn't. However, the story did haunt him for obvious reasons and his very last work, post-BL, was a translation of Alcestis (in which the dead wife does indeed return, and one sentence about Orpheus in Euripides' original is turned into a full scale rendition of the entire tale).

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

thanks for this -- I love Ovid, though I don't know the Hughes translations. I'll have to check them out. I know there was a recent staged version of "Metamorphoses" that I think may have been based on Hughes' text.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I did see a stage version based on his translation at Stratford-upon-Avon, so that's quite possible.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Stratford, Bayreuth, Africa, Rome. . . you're just trying to make me jealous aren't you? Well, hmm, my power came back on and we probably won't get hit by another hurricane until tomorrow. Yes, yes, I love the East Coast!

[selenak.livejournal.com]

What can I say - I'm a travelling kind of girl.*g*

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reminding me why I'm in Classics, and also for shaking me out of my previous opinion---that Augustus was absolutely right in banishing Ovid. I had only read some of the grosser parts of the Art of Love ("Tip #38: Pretend there's fluff on her chest!").

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Great Maker. You're the first person I know who thinks he was. Well, except for Augustus. Incidentally, I very much doubt he banished Ovid for The Art of Love - that had appeared eight years before, so despite being cited, it was clearly a pretense. BTW, read it in its entirety, it's fun, and also, way ahead of its time since Ovid insists it's as important that the woman enjoys herself as the man does. Plus it must have been refreshing after all the Augustan Uberpropaganda of family values and the mos maiorum and Roman greatness.

The Metamorphoses are probably the most important work, though, so if you haven't read any other Ovid, you should start with it.

[cahn]

Oh, huh! Yeah, it had never occurred to me, but the kid's version I'm intimately familiar with follows Ovid a bit more closely -- saying Athena and Arachne were more-or-less equally skilled, but Athena wove stories about the greatness of the gods, while Arachne wove stories making fun of the gods, so that's why Athena destroys Arachne's work and basically declares herself the winner. But as a kid (who usually respected authority) it did rather seem to me more like Arachne was in the wrong than it does to me as an adult!

When the nympth Salmacis desires the youth Hermaphroditus, she draws him under with little regard for his own wishes:

Eeek :( Yuuuup, that definitely wasn't in my kid's Greek Myths...

Gradually, her sorrow
Melted her into the very waters
Of which she had been the goddess.

:(

Philomela
Mourned in the forest, a nightingale.
Procne
Lamented round and round the palace,
A swallow.

This is just -- so lovely and so sad :(

Right, I'm sold :P And it looks like I can get the audiobook, hm.

[selenak]

Is the audio book the one with Hughes' own readings? Then go for it, he was one of those rare poets who were also fantastic readers. (Not just of his own material. There's a great recording of him reading The Waste Land.) To give you an example of his voice and recitation, here's Hughes talking about and reciting one of the very early poems which as a young man helped making his name, The Thought Fox.

[cahn]

Yes it is! And that is an interesting recording, of the Thought Fox (I actually quite liked his discussion before, which I hadn't expected to).

Ha, I looked up Waste Land on youtube as well (you knew I would have to :P ) and found a composite one of him and Eliot and Lia Williams, was that the one you were thinking of? I haven't got a chance to listen through yet, but the little clips I sampled were really great.

[selenak]

Waste Land, no, I wasn't aware of the mix, but I do have both Eliot's reading and Ted Hughes' reading on tape. Having bought them long before CDs conquered all, and even longer before streaming did. :) Who knows whether the tapes still work by now!