Just what was Ovid’s crime?
What offense did he commit that prompted Augustus, in 8
A.D., to banish him, for the rest of
his life, to Tomis on the Black Sea? Ovid himself alludes
to the cause, remarking that it was due to carmen et
error, “a song and a mistake.” Scholars have
puzzled over the song, or poem, in question, as well as the
error, for centuries. No doubt we’ll never know
precisely. But the formulation is striking. Ovid pairs
song and error—a dubious couple—in the same manner
in which he links the mythical characters in his

Metamorphoses: Jove and Europa or Mars and Venus or
Daedalus and Icarus. Could his phrase be merely his clever,
if poignant, way of hinting, not at any one poem or misdeed,
but at everything that made him Publius Ovidius Naso, the
toast of Rome: successful and popular poet, bon
vivant, and recklessly candid lover?

My Oxford Latin Dictionary gives six meanings for error.
They range from “traveling on an uncertain course” to
“uncertainty of mind” to “derangement” to “moral lapse,” as
well as to a plain old “mistake.” Taken together, this
constellation of meanings suggests not necessarily a single
action but a way of life, a frame of mind; in other words,
not “an error” but Error, a mistaken path and a wandering
disposition.

Certainly the reader who ponders the question after a fresh
reading, or rereading, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses might
wonder whether a literal interpretation of the phrase is
warranted. For few works could possibly be farther from, or
more potentially subversive of, the monolithic will and
design of the Divine Augustus than this flitting,
discursive, capricious, and magical poem in which nothing is
ever for long what it appears to be. Mutability is its
leitmotif. If Augustus’s character was unbending as stone,
Ovid’s was as various as gossamer, and receptive to the
faintest breeze. In his work, and presumably in his person,
he may have embodied the antithesis of everything Augustus
meant to enact and to represent. Milder despots than
Augustus have been offended by less.

Ovid lacked the decorum and the gravity of his
contemporaries Horace and Virgil, both imperial favorites.
In addition, there was something hectic and undisciplined
about his imagination; in the Metamorphoses, he often
jumps from one topic to the next in a disconcerting way.
After he has moved us with the sad tale of Icarus in Book 8,
he suddenly begins discoursing on the partridge.
Entertaining as this is, it can be irritating, too. True,
feathers play a part in both stories, but still. It’s not
too hard to picture a stern imperial auditor tapping his
divine toes and wondering where, if anywhere, the poem was
heading.

The qualities of Ovid the poet which may have irritated
Augustus, but which have delighted and charmed readers for
two millennia, shine forth beautifully in the new
translation of the Metamorphoses by the superb American
poet Charles Martin.[1]

Narrative speed, wit, lightness of
touch, sly humor, and elegant diction—all Ovidian
virtues—distinguish Martin’s version. In fact, his
translation reads so smoothly that it is easy at times to
overlook the skill and poise of his rendition; we are caught
up instead in the poem, and not distracted by the
translator’s artistry, which is as it should be. In the art
of translation, invisibility is the surest sign of success.

Arthur Golding, perhaps the greatest English translator of
the Metamorphoses, was certainly not above showing off or
padding his lines. His 1567 version may be unsurpassed, and
unsurpassable, but Golding’s
achievement is often at Ovid’s
expense. Consider his treatment of the famous opening of
the work:

Of shapes transformed to bodies straunge, I
purpose to entreate;

Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they y wrought
this wondrous feate)

To further this mine enterprise. And from the
world begunne,

Graunt that my verse may to my time, his
course directly runne

Before the Sea and Land were made, and
Heaven that all doth hide,

In all the world one onely face of nature did
abide,

Which Chaos hight, a huge rude heape, and
nothing else but even

A heavie lump and clottred clod of seedes
together driven

Of things at strife among themselves for want
of order due.

No sunne as yet with lightsome beams the
shapeless world did view.

No Moone in growing did repayre hir hornes
with borrowed light.

Nor yet the earth amides the ayre did hang
by wondrous slight

Just peysed by hir proper weight.

This is grand, and grandly stirring (“peysed,” by the way,
means “weighted”). Golding has perfect command of the long
line—always a problem in English verse—that nicely echoes
Ovid’s hexameter. Ovid, of course, doesn’t rhyme, but
Golding’s rhymes propel the poem forward; by their sheer
emphatic clangor they work to compensate for the absence of
the alternating long and short syllables which Classical
Latin, a quantitative language, affords its poets. Certain
turns of phrase, such as

“a huge rude heape” for ruda
indigestaque moles, show how Golding draws on the English
language’s native strengths—here the force of
monosyllables—to offset the greater vocalic complexity of
the original.

Ovid has been so often translated that it would be easy to
compile further comparisons with Golding; Horace Gregory,
Rolfe Humphreys, and David Slavitt, to mention but American
poets, have produced excellent renditions. But in all
candor, in reading reviews of translations, I’ve always
found it tedious, and rarely edifying, to pore over
snippeted samples of the same passages, laid out like dead
babies on autopsy slabs. Excerpts can only suggest the
quality of a translation of so long a work
as the
Metamorphoses; one translator may succeed in a given
passage which another translator fluffs and yet the
latter’s version may be better as a whole. My purpose here,
in any case, is not to use Golding as a stick with which to
beat Martin, or vice-versa, but to ask which version is the
more truly Ovidian and why, quite apart from their
intrinsic literary merits.
Here’s how Martin opens his Metamorphoses:

My mind leads me to speak now of forms
changed

into new bodies: O gods above, inspire

this undertaking (which you’ve changed as
well)

and guide my poem in its epic sweep

from the world’s beginning to the present day.

Before the seas and lands had been created,

before the sky that covers everything,

Nature displayed a single aspect only

throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,

a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk

and nothing more, with the discordant seeds

of disconnected elements all heaped

together in anarchic disarray.

The sun as yet did not light up the earth,

nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,

nor was the earth suspended in midair,

balanced by her own weight, nor did the
ocean

extend her arms to the margins of the land.

At first sight Golding impresses as the more “poetic.” His
language is full and ornate and glorious. Martin seems
flat, a bit clumsy, distinctly “unpoetic.” On closer
reading, however, we will find that Martin’s rendering is
subtler. Because he exercises restraint, he can modulate
his tone and his diction more variously than Golding who
always goes full-blast and at the same intense pitch. By
beginning on a low note, as it were, Martin is able to build
up to a formulation for chaos which is both more interesting
and more intricate vocalically than Golding’s “huge rude
heape”: “a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk” captures
the Latin original and tickles the palate pleasingly.

It would be absurd to compare two such disparate versions,
from the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries respectively,
for any other
reason than to assess strategies of translation; in that
regard, the wide gulf of time and convention and poetic
practice that yawns between them allows us to see better
than if we were to compare contemporaneous attempts.

Golding tends to whomp us over the head with his spectacular
effects; for example, his “clottred clod of seeds.” Martin,
by contrast, comes up with the lovely phrase “discordant
seeds/ of disconnected elements,” which is unobtrusive but
ultimately more apt, and more Ovidian, than Golding’s
bludgeoning tongue-twister. Notice too how Martin’s version
begins to sing when he reaches the passage about sun and
moon. Martin doesn’t attempt to duplicate Ovid’s hexameter
but employs a basic pattern of iambic pentameter which he
subtly varies, interrupting the cadence at moments so that
it hesitates or seems to stumble, then allowing it suavely
to unfurl. Thus, after three regular iambic lines, he
resorts to a trochee at the beginning and at the end of the
line, “balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean,” which
gives it an unexpected lift; the word “ocean” itself seems
to crest at the rim of the verse before spilling over into

“extend her arms to the margins of the land,” with its
ripple of assonance in “arms” and “margins.”

Martin also enlivens and spices his lines with unexpected
turns of phrase, as when Jove “was just about to sprinkle
earth/ with thunderbolts,” which strikes just the right note
of menace lightly rendered (Ovid never takes the gods quite
seriously, another strike against him!). Again, when the
gods hold an assembly, Martin can get away with the jocular
“All hell broke loose in heaven—what an uproar!” And
because his register of tones is plastic and variable, when
he must render one of those extended metaphors so beloved by
the classic authors, he handles it with impressive deftness:

Now just as in a field the harvest stubble

Is all burned off, or as hedges are set ablaze

When, if by chance, some careless traveler

Should brush one with his torch or toss away

The still-smoldering brand at break of day—

Just so the smitten god went up in flames

Until his heart was utterly afire,

And hope sustained his unrequited passion.

This little passage points up another of Martin’s
inconspicuous devices that subtly complicate the texture of
the translation. This is the skillful way he alternates and
juxtaposes words with Latinate roots against an

“Anglo-Saxon” vocabulary. The first seven lines all employ
plain English words but the eighth is Latinate: “And hope
sustained his unrequited passion.” Such modulations not
only smooth the transitions between one episode or event and
another but also restore a just measure of balance to the
passage, as though Ovid, through Martin’s mediation, were
tactfully drawing us back from the god’s romantic
immolation.

In the story of Jove and Io, all of Martin’s many strengths
come into play. Io, daughter of the river Inachus, has the
misfortune to attract the god’s attention.
Io is terrified even though Jove, rather pathetically,
exclaims: “I am he who hurls the roaming thunderbolt—don’t
run from me!” He sends down a darkening mist to confuse the
girl and then has his way with her in the gloom. But
meanwhile, back at Olympus, Juno notices the untimely mist
and smells a rat.

            
            
     
She realized

That neither falling mist nor rising fog

Could be the cause of this phenomenon,

And looked about at once to find her husband,

As one too well aware of the connivings

Of a mate so
often taken in the act.

Martin has Juno say, “Either I’m mad—or I am being had,”

which is just right for the jealous goddess. Jove at once
transforms Io into “a gleaming heifer—a beauty still,/ even
as a cow.” The whole episode is delightfully farcical.
Jove is a clumsy philanderer (Augustus would not have been
amused), Juno a vengeful wife, the femme fatale a hapless
grazer set out to pasture under the vigilance of Argus.
Ovid elaborates her plight in cruel but comical terms; since
she no longer has arms, she cannot stretch them out in
supplication and whenever she tries to plead, she only moos.
When Juno finally relents, persuaded by Jove (whose
conscience is stung by Io’s non-stop bovine bellowing), the
metamorphosis is as magical as it is humorous:

The goddess was now pacified, and Io

at once began regaining her lost looks,

till she became what she had been before;

her body lost all of its bristling hair,

her horns shrank down, her eyes grew narrower,

her jaws contracted, arms and hands returned,

and hooves divided themselves into nails;

nothing remained of her bovine nature,

unless it was the whiteness of her body.

She had some trouble getting her legs back,

and for a time feared speaking, lest she moo,

and so quite timidly regained her speech.

Ovid’s genius in the
Metamorphoses lies not only in the fluid beauty of
his verse but in his unparalleled ability to imagine all the
minutiae of transformation. The physical details are always
vivid; we seem to witness the stages of bodily change, as in
those time-lapse photographs where we watch a butterfly
stickily extricating itself from its chrysalis before
spreading its wings. No wonder Ovid gave both delight and
inspiration to later artists over the centuries, and not
only poets—doesn’t Ariosto hatch from Ovid’s
chrysalis?—but painters and sculptors too. I
wouldn’t even be surprised to learn that Kafka had Ovid
in the back of his mind when he wrote his own

Metamorphosis; the excruciating details of Gregor
Samsa’s monstrous transformation are as precise as
anything to be found in the Latin poet’s masterpiece.

In Book 15, Ovid introduces the pre-Socratic philosopher
Pythagoras in an evident effort to underpin his extravagant
imaginings with some respectable rationale. The
philosopher’s peroration is a bit windy and not altogether
convincing. If anything, his words may have made the
Metamorphoses more alarming than they already were to
censorious readers. Thus, Pythagoras, again in Martin’s
version, declares:

“Everything changes and nothing can die, for the spirit

wanders wherever it wishes to, now here and now there,

living with whatever body it chooses, and passing

from feral to human and then back from human to feral,

and at no time does it ever cease its existence;

and just as soft wax easily takes on a new shape,

unable to stay as it was or keep the same form,

and yet is still wax, I preach that the spirit is always

the same even though it migrates to various bodies.”

A belief in metempsychosis seems to have been a feature of
ancient Pythagoreanism and remained surprisingly persistent,
mutating not only into various forms in Western thought but,
in conjunction with Indian conceptions of reincarnation,
spreading into the Islamic world, where theologians and
philosophers sought to suppress it for centuries. But with
regard to Ovid, whether or not he actually subscribed to
such a belief, it was ideally suited for his artistic
purposes. The world itself, prime matter, the stuff of
living beings, was as malleable to his imagination as was
the world of words in which he was a kind of secret emperor.

At the end of the Metamorphoses, after recounting the
glorious history of Rome—itself as subject to mutability as
all things under the moon—Ovid inserts the obligatory
praise of Augustus, invoking the “local gods of Italy” as
well as Apollo and Jove, and he entreats that

late be that day and not in our time

when he, Augustus, ruler of the world,

departs from it, and rises to the stars,

and absent, is attentive to our prayers.

Perhaps Ovid should have stopped there, with the ultimate
apotheosis of Augustus. Instead he concludes with fourteen lines
which might seem mere braggadocio had not time proved them
true. Augustus will live forever as a god “like great
Jove,” but so too will Ovid, in a humbler but perhaps more
significant way: “upon the people’s lips.”

My work is finished now: no wrath of Jove

Nor sword nor fire nor futurity

Is capable of laying waste to it.

Let that day come then, when it wishes to,

Which only has my body in its power,

And put an end to my uncertain years;

No matter, for in spirit I will be

Borne up to soar beyond the distant stars,

Immortal in the name I leave behind;

Wherever Roman governance extends

Over the subject nations of the world,

My words will be upon the people’s lips,

And if there is truth in poets’ prophecies,

Then in my fame forever I will live.

There is pride in these wonderful lines, as well as
defiance, and not a small element of lèse-majesté. Ovid
paid for his boast—if that was, in fact, his “song and
mistake”—with ten years of banishment among rough
barbarians ignorant of Latin on the Black Sea coast. He
never saw Rome again—a “metamorphosis” of circumstance as
cruel and as whimsical as any he could have imagined.

Notes
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1. 
   Metamorphoses, by Publius Ovidius Naso. Translated and
   with notes by Charles Martin; introduction by Bernard Knox.
   W. W. Norton, 2004; 623 pages; $35.
   Go back to the text.