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cahn asked me: What Classics works (to be read in English translation) would you recommend to hook someone who doesn't know anything about it? (Aside from the Illiad/Odyssey/Aeneid -- but would also be open to interesting translations of those!) (And especially for someone who preferred the Aeneid to the Illiad and Odyssey?)

With the caveat that different things work for different people, and also my knowledge of good English translation is limited because I read most of those works in German (and/or had to translate them in school, like Cicero's speeches against Catilina and Sallust's work about the conspiracy), here are some recs I would go with. Note that they aren't literal translations but poetic ones, much like the Faust translation by Howart Brenton I recced to

cahn where he had someone do the literal prose translation for him first so he could be sure about the literal meaning and then put it into verse. They're also by terrific poets, which means when you read these works in English, you get something of the visceral excitement and beauty of the originals, not a sense of dutiful bland dictionary (or worse, bowlderized) rendition.

1.) Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (i.e. a selection from Ovid's Metamorphoses). Praise, quotes and explanations why I think that's an awesome book to read here.

2.) Ted Hughes: Alkestis by Euripides. The last thing he ever published, shortly before his death, with a theme of personal relevance. Hughes and Euripides were as good a match as Hughes & Ovid. More praise and quotes here.

3.) Roz Kaveney: Catullus. Lots of well deserved praise and buying link here.

Now as I said elsewhere, I've been hearing good things about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, so it's definitely on my to read list, but I haven't gotten the chance to yet. And with Cicero's letters and speeches, Suetonius, Plutarch, Herodotus etc. I don't know any English translations, since, see above, I read them in German (or in Cicero's case translated some of the speeches in school and read the rest in German).

The other days

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Bad Wiessee

I wish everyone a good new decade (why limit it to just one year? I'm feeling ambitious right now). As today the authors of Yuletide stories are revealed, I can confess I wrote this:

Spinning Fate

Which is Ovid fanfiction as well as my attempt to write a subversive myth. Now, I had seen Ovid's Metamorphoses listed as a Yuletide fandom (sidenote: considering parts of the Metamorphoses are, if you like, Ovid writing fanfiction about Homer and Virgil stories, is this more meta than usual?) and considering I love Ovid in particular and Greek myths in general, I signed on for this as well as for B5, Crusade, Sandman, the Marvelverse and RKO 281. What I got was an Ovid prompt, go figure. It went thusly:

Request 1: Ovid - Metamorphoses (Any)
Details: Anything, really, from a retelling from an unexpected point of view to a transformation (mythic or original) Ovid "forgot" to include. Bonus points for unexpected happy ending, given how few Ovid has, but if the Muses or the Pierides suggest another path, go down it. Extra bonus points for verse, but again, follow your inspiration.

This was excellent fodder for inspiration. (As evident by the fact several other people took up this prompt as well once the prompts went public.) At first I thought I might do something with the very last of the transformation Ovid describes being the one of the dead Julius Caesar. (Don't bother checking it up, btw, the end of the Metamorphoses is a bit embarassing in its Augustus compliment paying, and not really about Caesar; instead, lots of verses about how great Augustus is. Didn't save Ovid from exile.) But this idea would have either ended up as a one note thing or as basically history fanfic with some mythical allusions, so I abandoned it. And thought about the Metamorphoses some more. As well as about what transformations could mean, and happy endings.

Now, back as a child I read a version of the Greek myths retold by a man named Gustav Schwab which is one of the most popular book to give to youngsters interested in myths in the German language. As a teenager, reading Ovid in school when my Latin class got around to the Metamorphoses, I was somewhat surprised and, being a teenager, shocked and angry to find out good old Schwab had bowlderized the mythos somewhat. Take Arachne, for example. A gifted weaver admired for her skills who rejects any notion she might owe these to Athena and challenges the goddess herself to competition. In Schwab's version, Arachne loses said competition, hangs herself in shame and is transformed into a spider at the last moment by Athena as a gesture of mercy. Ovid's version goes somewhat differently. Arachne wins; Athena cannot help but see her art is flawless. It's also insolent, because Arachne has chosen as the subject of her tapestry all those times the gods screwed up, or just plain screwed mortals over. (In a word, she's Ovid's Mary Sue?) Athena in a fury destroys Arachne's work and changes her into a spider.

Mulling over my prompt, I thought about weaving as a metaphor of storytelling, the power of creation - and the fact Arachne was a creator - about that other creator (of mankind), Prometheus, punished by the gods, and about Niobe, forbidding worship of the goddess Leto, hubristically taunting her and being punished with the slaughter of all her children in front of her. And lo and behold, the muse did indeed speak and I wrote with a vengeance. (This is something of a bad pun, if you've read the story.)

The biggest problem afterwards was that my silly brain couldn't resist coming up with titles proving my fondness for a certain genre. I swear, I really had to fight not to call this one of the following:

Revenge of the Spiderwoman
Spiderwoman II
Spiderwoman: The Return
The Spiderwoman Strikes Back

Thankfully, sanity prevailed. The recipient liked the story, I got some nice reviews (all by people I don't know) and a respectable number of hits, which made me very happy indeed, because the resulting story is one I'm really proud of. Thank you, Publius Ovidius Naso.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Bad Wiessee

International Translation Day is celebrated every year on 30 September on the feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered as the patron saint of translators.

Ah, translations, the not bablefish type. I wouldn't be familiar with a third of the novels, plays, movies I am without them, not to mention the non-fiction books essential for researching anything of interest. Last year several book awards were handed out at the Corine in Munich, to ten books, eight of which were translated, but did anyone mention the translator(s) in their praise? No. And they're getting paid lousy wages in general, too. So, let's hear it for translators once in a while.

Now, while matter-of-fact scientific translations are important, the absolutely best thing which can happen if we're talking about poetry or fictional prose is that the translator has poetic gifts of his/her own, and sometimes even manages to achieve a work of art of its own. (Classic famous examples: Catullus' version of Sappho's most famous poem. The Schlegel-Tieck-Translation of Shakespeare. Also Rilke translating Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as quoted here.

All of these examples are, however, either translations from English into German or from Greek into Latin, not into English, the language I'm currently using, which is not my own. I am, however, familiar enough with it to appreciate the beauty of a great translation/version, and have previously written about two of my favourites:

Ovid as rendered by Ted Hughes

and

Seneca's Oedipus as rendered by Ted Hughes

Hughes' has a way of recreating the ancients in his own fierce poetry that enchants me every time I read one of his versions, which is why I do so more often than reading more accurate German translations of the same writers. Here are some quotes of the very last one he wrote, his version of Euripides' Alcestis. As Keith Sagar pointed out in an essay, Hughes never translated one of the most famous Ovidian tales, the one of Orpheus, the poet who tries to retrieve his dead wife from the underworld, but fails to. However, the story haunted him for obvious biographical reasons, and in his version of Alcestis - not the most popular of Euripides' plays, an odd choice to work at - or not, if you're dying, and the play is about a wife lost through your own fault but also returned again to life -, he inserts a sudden speech of Admetos about Orpheus which isn't there in the original (A glance. Think of it. Only a backward glance,/ And he had done what he should never have done/ At the crucial moment./ He lost her). Alcestis as rendered by Hughes is one long passionate argument with death (also with Death, who shows up as a character early on), loss, love and selfishness, and in it he comes up with lines like these:

A dead woman, a falling star
With a long train
Of burning and burned-out love.
Falling into non-life.
Into endless time, endlessly falling.

or:

You live now
Only because you let Death take her.
You killed her. Point-blank
She met the death that you dodged.(...)
You are the cannibal. Only you.
Thrive on that feast. Nobody else.
Think of it.
Every day you live she nourishes you
With her dead body.

Or:

We should never have married.
Men who have never married
Keep their nerves inside their own skin.
The nerves of the married man,
His very entrails, all his arteries
Are woven into the body of his wife -
And into the bodies of his children.

And then again:

Necessity could not frighten Alcestis,
We pray to Necessity to spare us,
But we pray to Alcestis
To give us courage to live - as if death
Were no more than the outline of life,
The outline of a shadow on a wall,
Maybe the shadow of a dancer, a reveller.

And in conclusion: read translations. Sometimes, they're absolutely magnificent.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Location: Munich

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.

( Fierce Poetry )

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: We didn't start the fire, Billy Joel