Ovid's Metamorphoses: A New Translation

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

A New Translation

Translated, Annotated, and Introduced by

C. Luke Soucy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Luke Soucy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 A.D. or 18 A.D. | Soucy, C. Luke, translator, writer of introduction. |Title: Ovid's metamorphoses : a new translation / translated, annotated, and introduced by C. Luke Soucy.

Other titles: Metamorphoses. English

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and glossary.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022058898 (print) | LCCN 2022058899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520394858 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520394865 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mythology, Classical—Poetry. | Metamorphosis—Mythology—Poetry. | LCGFT: Narrative poetry.

Classification: LCC PA6522.M2 S68 2023 (print) | LCC PA6522.M2 (ebook) | DDC 873/.01—dc23/eng/20230501

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058898

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058899

Manufactured in the United States of America

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publication supported by a grant from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven as part of the Urban Haven Project

To Hannah Semmelhack and Kyle L. Freiler

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Translator’s Note

METAMORPHOSES

Book 1

Prologue • The First Creation • The Ages of Man • The Gigantomachy • Lycaön • The Deluge • Deucalion and Pyrrha • The Second Creation: Python • Apollo and Daphne • Io, Part 1 • Argus: Pan and Syrinx • Io, Part 2 • Phaëthon, Part 1

Book 2

Phaëthon, Part 2 • The Heliads and Cygnus • Callisto • The Raven and the Crow • Ocyrhoë • Battus • The Envy of Aglauros • Europa

Book 3

Cadmus and the Dragon’s Teeth • Actaeon • Semele • Tiresias • Echo and Narcissus • Pentheus and Acoetes

Book 4

The Daughters of Minyas, Part 1 • Pyramus and Thisbe • The Loves of the Sun • Hermaphroditus and Salmacis • The Daughters of Minyas, Part 2 • Athamas and Ino • Cadmus and Harmonia • Perseus, Atlas, and Andromeda • Perseus and Medusa

Book 5

Perseus and Phineus • Proetus and Polydectes • Pyreneus and the Muses • The Pierides, Part 1 • The Rape of Proserpine • Arethusa • Lyncus and Triptolemus • The Pierides, Part 2

Book 6

Arachne and Minerva • Niobe • Latona and the Lycians • Marsyas • Pelops • Tereus, Procne, and Philomela • Boreas and Orithyia

Book 7

Medea • Theseus • The War with Minos • The Myrmidons • Cephalus and Procris

Book 8

Scylla and Nisus • The Minotaur • Daedalus • The Calydonian Hunt • Althaea and Meleäger • Acheloüs • Baucis and Philemon • Mestra and Erysichthon • Acheloüs and Hercules, Part 1

Book 9

Acheloüs and Hercules, Part 2 • The Death of Hercules • Lucina and Galanthis • Dryope and Lotus • Iolaüs and Themis • Byblis and Caunus • Iphis and Ianthe

Book 10

Orpheus and Eurydice • Cyparissus • Ganymede and Hyacinth • The Cerastae, the Propoetides, and Pygmalion • Myrrha • Venus and Adonis

Book 11

The Death of Orpheus • Midas • Peleus and Thetis • Daedalion and Chione • The Wolf of Psamathe • Ceÿx and Alcyone • Aesacus

Book 12

The Greeks at Aulis • The House of Rumor • Achilles and Cygnus • Caenis Becomes Caeneus • The Centauromachy • Hercules and Periclymenus • The Death of Achilles

Book 13

The Judgment of Arms • The Sorrows of Hecuba • Memnon • The Daughters of Anius • Galatea, Acis, and Polyphemus • Scylla and Glaucus, Part 1

Book 14

Scylla and Glaucus, Part 2 • The Sibyl of Cumae • Polyphemus • Ulysses and Circe • Picus and Canens • The Crew of Diomedes • The Apotheosis of Aeneas • Pomona and Vertumnus • The Apotheoses of Romulus and Hersilie

Book 15

Hercules and Croton • Pythagoras • Egeria and Hippolytus • Cipus • Aesculapius • The Apotheosis of Julius Caesar • Epilogue

Commentary

Appendix: Text and Translation Notes

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Glossary of Names and Places

About the Translator

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

FIGURES

1. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne

2. Kiki Smith, Daphne

3. Attributed to Angelica Kauffman, Jupiter and Callisto

4. A. van Diepenbeeck, The Rescue of Andromeda

5. Harriet Hosmer, Medusa

6. Anonymous, Tereus, Procne, and Philomela

7. Frederic Leighton, Daedalus and Icarus

8. Auguste Rodin, Ovid’s Metamorphoses

9. Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean Galbert de Campistron, Acis et Galatée

10. Dan Norman, Vertumnus and Pomona in Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman

11. Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions, still from Miscellaneous Myths: Hippolytus

Introduction

Whether they know it or not, when people talk about mythology they are usually talking about Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Casting the entire mythos of classical legend as a cosmos-spanning series of its titular transformations, Ovid’s irreverent Roman epic has done more even than the works of Hesiod and Homer to codify what has become known as Greek mythology. From Narcissus and Icarus to Pygmalion and Medusa, many of the world’s best-known stories take their familiar form or even their origin from Ovid’s telling. Much as the Neo-Confucian Classics did for Chinese writers and the Mahabharata for Indian literature, the Metamorphoses stands apart as a truly seminal text, at once the foundation of a literary canon and one of its highest peaks, holding all subsequent works in its indelible shadow. In the European tradition, it is rivaled in this respect only by the Bible.

Yet in many ways, the Metamorphoses is the opposite of the traditionalist, highfaluting work its stature suggests. With its unique blend of silliness, mockery, and subversion, if Ovid’s poem is less famous today than the Aeneid or the Odyssey, that is largely because educators have found it too entertaining. Unlike those grand, reverent narratives that give the epic genre its name, the Metamorphoses overthrows all things stately, weighty, and heroic to depict an unstable universe ruled by capricious gods and men, one where virtue, vice, and even excess of feeling are at constant risk of turning mortals and lesser deities alike into the natural features of our known world. The poem is shot through with a rebellious streak, satirizing Roman values of tradition and stoic gravity while taking every opportunity to point up the injustice of the divinities and royals who enforce them. In Ovid’s telling, the hero Perseus is a feckless brute reliant on a deus to spring out of the machina, the Argonauts are at sea for a whole four lines, and all the effusive praise for Rome’s gods and rulers is belied by the tell-tale whiff of mock zeal. Best and worst of all, Ovid refuses to take his world seriously. Continually skirting his poetic predecessors, he deploys a constant stream of wit and rhetoric to turn moments of drama into melodrama, while saving true pathos for the victims of powerful oppressors whom other poets would make their protagonists.

Small wonder, then, that the Metamorphoses should have proven unpopular with Victorian readers and the orthodox scholars who followed them. In sharp contrast to their treatment of Homer and Virgil, critics largely steered clear of Ovid’s work until well into the twentieth century, dismissing it as self-indulgent and amoral even as translators exerted themselves to rob the poem of its most colorful qualities, assigning Ovid their own homophobia and humorlessness while evincing a level of indifference toward sexual assault and misogyny not to be found in the original. This derisive attitude was typified by Edith Hamilton, at one point America’s most popular classicist, whose 1942 collection Mythology retains a stranglehold on high school curricula despite being dated, bowdlerized, and openly disdainful of its foremost source. In its preface, Hamilton concedes that no ancient writer can compare with Ovid as a compendium of myth, yet continues:

I have avoided using him as far as possible. Undoubtedly he was a good poet and a good storyteller and able to appreciate the myths enough to realize what excellent material they offered him; but he was really farther away from them in his point of view than we are today. They were sheer nonsense to him. . . . He says in effect to his reader, ‘Never mind how silly they are. I will dress them up so prettily for you that you will like them.’ And he does, often very prettily indeed, but in his hands the stories which were factual truth and solemn truth to the early Greek poets Hesiod and Pindar, and vehicles of deep religious truth to the Greek tragedians, become idle tales, sometimes witty and diverting, often sentimental and distressingly rhetorical (15–16).

It is a matter of taste whether the reader agrees that Ovid’s rhetoric is distressing, that his being a good poet and a good storyteller is insufficient grounds to engage with him, or that his work deserves to be avoided . . . as far as possible. But where Hamilton must be challenged is her contention that Ovid’s myths are sheer nonsense, blasphemous aberrations from a mind too clever by whole to appreciate the solemn truths revealed to the credulous likes of Hesiod and Pindar. What she takes as dismissive misunderstanding is in fact calculated subversion, and there is no subverting what one does not thoroughly understand. Presumably also no fan of the riddling antics of Socrates, Nasreddin Hodja, or the wise Shakespearean Fool, Hamilton cannot conceive that there may be a point to all Ovid’s pretty dressing, a deeper irreligious truth to his out-there point of view.

The political and cultural shifts of the last half-century, however, have made it less objectionable to speak truth to power or to shed satirical light on old, accepted ideas. In recent years especially, Ovid’s blend of irreverence toward authority, skepticism toward tradition, and compassion toward victims has become especially timely. Such shifting of sands is part and parcel of all literary reception but seems particularly suited to the metamorphic nature of this work, which wears the idea of fluctuation as a badge, a shackle, and a spine, not to mention as a title. Though few would be surprised that prudish midcentury authorities failed to understand Ovid’s approach, part of what makes his poem so essential and worthy of study is that its contents—the shared cultural basis for a whole artistic tradition—have always been controversial, both among those who failed to understand them and those who did not like what they understood. Indeed, Ovid’s biography has long made him a symbol of oppressed writers in every age. After all, was it for telling merely idle tales that he was banished by the Emperor?

OVID’S LIFE AND TIMES

When Publius Ovidius Naso was born at Sulmo on March 20, 43 BCE, some forty miles east of Rome, the internecine wars that had marked the last century of Roman Italy were reaching a fever pitch. Julius Caesar had been dead for less than a year and the next month’s battle between his heir Octavian and his lieutenant Mark Antony saw the last hopes of a free republic die on the besieged walls of Mutina. But Ovid was only twelve when Octavian polished off his rival at Actium, and not yet sixteen when he proclaimed himself Augustus and founded the Roman Empire. While these enterprises of great pith and moment would have colored the young poet’s worldview, the Rome in which Ovid spent his adult life, though still freshly scarred by battle, was one in which power, conflict, and change had moved behind the scenes. On the surface, society would experience a prolonged stability unavailable to his immediate literary forebears.

According to Ovid, his own poetic instinct was innate. Born to a prosperous but not patrician family, he was apparently destined for a life in politics, yet although his father warned him that even Homer had died penniless, Ovid claimed that his attempts at writing always came out in verse. Sent to be educated in the capital, the teenager was wildly successful in the schools of rhetoric, even as he became a celebrated reciter of his own poems. After a few half-hearted stints in minor bureaucratic roles, he resigned to become the youngest fixture of the Roman literary scene, then blossoming into what has since been deemed the Golden Age of Latin literature.

The golden boy of that Golden Age was undoubtedly Virgil. Author of Rome’s court-commissioned national epic the Aeneid, Virgil is traditionally grouped with Horace and Ovid as the three major Augustan poets. Augustus, however, enjoyed a very long reign, and Ovid later wrote that he only ever clapped eyes on the older writer. Instead, Ovid’s introduction to cultural circles would come through friendships with the elderly didactic poet Aemilius Macer and Ovid’s slightly senior contemporary Propertius, the third (after Gallus and Tibullus) of the great love elegists. Upon publishing the Amores (Loves) in 16 BCE, Ovid would make his name by establishing himself as the fourth.

The very notion that there existed such a genre as the Latin love elegy, or that there were four primary contributors to it, is itself a sign of Ovid’s influence. Developing tropes from the Hellenistic Greeks, early Augustan writers had penned strings of subjective first-person poems that dramatically recounted the joys and especially the miseries of being in love. These were invariably set in the elegiac meter, an uneven form of couplet (one hexameter paired with one pentameter) that would be Ovid’s go-to form for his entire life, the Metamorphoses excepted. Tibullus and Propertius expanded the variety of topics elegy could address in mounting ever higher heights of melancholy, but the genre achieved its actualization in the hands of the twentysomething Ovid, who returned love elegy to its basics even as he approached them from new angles, practicing the pose of the anagrammatist of desire who narrates much of the Metamorphoses. Unlike their self-serious predecessors, the Amores are lighthearted and funny to the point of flirting with parody. At a stroke, Ovid seemed to fulfill the genre’s promise and kill its future. Later in life, he would look back on his early success and place himself at the end of the Roman elegiac canon; no subsequent critic has revised his list.

The approach Ovid took with love elegy would become a blueprint for his whole literary life: pick a genre, zero in on its idiosyncrasies, and stand them on their heads. Much as he had done for Propertius’ elegies, he soon upended Aemilius Macer’s genre of didactic poetry, pretending that love and sex could be taught from a literary manual in the same manner as farming (Virgil’s Georgics) or writing (Horace’s Ars Poetica). The resulting Ars Amatoria (Guide for Lovers) made a tongue-in-cheek show of teaching the art of seduction in three books—two for men and one for women—that quasi-systematically explored, explained, and exploded social conventions for relations between the sexes in cheeky defiance of the Emperor’s campaigns for public morality, and extolling among other things the importance of mutual orgasm. The Ars was succeeded and subverted by the faux-serious Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), and the sadly fragmentary Medicamina Facei Feminae (Women’s Facial Cosmetics), whose surviving lines contain five surprisingly plausible makeup recipes put, absurdly, into verse. The strength of these works, all written in elegiac meter, catapulted Ovid to unparalleled fame and notoriety. On the deaths of Propertius and Horace, Ovid was by age thirty-five the leading poet in Rome.

Somewhere along the way, Ovid composed the two works (both of uncertain date) that most obviously prefigure the Metamorphoses. These are a tragic drama on the mythical sorceress Medea, one of the most bemoanedly lost works of the period, and the Heroides (Heroines), a collection of letters written in the voice of female characters from mythology, each addressed to an absent and often traitorous male lover. This innovative narrative choice prefigures several of the most prominent speeches in the Metamorphoses, including those of Medea (Book 7), Scylla and Althaea (both Book 8), Byblis and Iphis (both Book 9), and Myrrha (Book 10). These extended monologues take the same tactic of breathing new life into old stories by viewing them from an entirely unexpected angle, granting unprecedented voice and character to women traditionally depicted as somber queens, evil witches, sex-crazed maniacs, or even devoted ciphers. (Medea, for instance, appears in both extant works, occupying a full six hundred lines between them that barely mention the infanticide for which she is otherwise best known.) Though likely deriving from a much earlier time in Ovid’s career, the Heroides are the clearest antecedent to the Metamorphoses, in whose stories Ovid shows the same knack for reinventing familiar myths through the minds of their neglected female characters.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Ovid’s output underwent a distinct shift in both form and content. Instead of glittering collections of unconventional love poetry, he began laboring concurrently on two monumental works treating Roman religion: the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. Straddling the didactic and the epic, the Fasti was to be a twelve-book encyclopedia of Roman religious practice set against the outline of the Julian Calendar (one book per month), delivered in the form of jocular interviews with the Roman gods. In contrast, the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses would capture the whole of the Greco-Roman mythos in both epic voice and epic hexameter—the sole deviation in Ovid’s corpus from his elegiac standard. The Fasti was halfway done and the Metamorphoses all but complete when, in 8 CE, the Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to the Black Sea town of Tomis, in modern Romania, in the furthest reaches of the Roman world.

It does not appear that Ovid committed a crime, and his famously vague explanation for his exile—a poem and a mistake (carmen et error, Tr. 2.207)—has led to the spillage of vast tides of scholarly ink. In the moralizing context of the Augustan regime, Ovid’s most obviously offensive poem was the Ars Amatoria, though it was hardly a recent publication and alternatives (including the Metamorphoses) have been suggested. The error in question is murkier still but seems to have been a scandal; more fanciful scholars have invented an affair with the Emperor’s daughter Julia. Whatever happened, the writer and his writings had plainly become dangerous, and his career fell into a disfavor from which it would never recover. Ovid’s last two works, the Tristia (Sorrows) and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), consist of elegiac letters to friends, family members, and political operatives, reflecting on his life and pleading for pardon with ever-diminishing hope. If the Fasti was ever finished, its second half does not survive, nor do the poems he supposedly composed in the local language of Getic. The death of Augustus in 14 CE did nothing to alter the poet’s circumstances, and Ovid died three years later after a decade in exile. He was about sixty.

STRUCTURE AND THEMES

While Ovid’s own popularity has waxed and waned in the two millennia since his death, there has never been any question as to which was his most significant work: Ovid’s one epic has always defined his legacy. Yet despite its epic scale, epic form, and clear place in the epic tradition, epic is a strange word to describe the Metamorphoses, whose artistic program seems predicated on defying any easy description. No other work from antiquity is so unsubtle about being so slippery. Far from the epic norm of pursuing a single hero on a singularly heroic pursuit, the poem endlessly shifts its focus, tone, pace, and place in a flouting of convention and expectation that dazzles with its taxonomies of scale, cramming all of time and space into a uniform structure, even as its themes of identity, credibility, and power continue to register on a humble human level.

The structural point is made clear through comparison with Virgil’s Aeneid, to whose paramount position in Roman literature Ovid is constantly reacting. In true epic fashion, Ovid’s poem is divided into a series of books. But where the Aeneid set a neat bar of twelve episodic books per epic, later followed by the likes of Statius and Milton, Ovid instead plumps for the three-upmanship of fifteen, only then to ignore the framework he has chosen. Multiple books cut off in the middle of a story, while several more begin on a conjunction, as if lampooning the structural division by showing how easily it can be bridged. Further complications arise when attempting to group the books by theme, as is easily done with the Aeneid’s six-book halves. At the most general level, the Metamorphoses progresses chronologically from the creation of the universe to the death of Julius Caesar, in the process gradually shifting focus from a divinity-dominated cosmos (Books 1–5) to an age of heroes (Books 6–10) and on into human history (Books 11–15). This pattern only holds, however, so long as one wears pattern-colored glasses. Once the reader is down in the storytelling trenches of the poem, Ovid’s narratorial force will carry them here and there, jumping o’er times in a series of kaleidoscopic transitions—some natural, many utterly ridiculous, but all highly stylized—making the poem difficult to classify or segment, in large part because it just keeps rolling along. The difference is evident even in the poems’ titles. The Aeneid is about Aeneas, a lone hero of heroic qualities embarked on a hero’s journey. The Metamorphoses is about change.

All this flies full in the face of how a good epic ought to behave. Where the Iliad and the Aeneid channel the will of fate, making plain in omniscient narration where they are headed from the opening verse, Ovid takes a meandering approach that belies the very notion of a neat, destiny-driven plot. Accordingly, a good third of his poem is occupied by nested sets of stories within stories (often compared to Russian dolls and Chinese boxes) such that the Book 10 tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes—a parable narrated by Venus to Adonis in a song sung by Orpheus to a collection of walking trees—is not even close to the most layered moment of narration in the poem. Despite appearances, however, this device does not make the plots difficult to follow so much as difficult to believe, as droves of secondary narrators pop up to take over for a story or seven, import their own biases, and conflict with one another. Such contradictions were long ascribed to simple sloppiness, the result of a foolhardy attempt to fit so much into a single work, yet the poem’s anachronisms and discrepancies are often so ostentatious that it would be silly not to view them as an intentional rebellion against the typical epic’s pursuit of its inexorable ending. In the Metamorphoses, chronology is a haze, credibility an open question, and the finality of fiction rendered undisguisedly fictional. Amid the blur of space, time, and narrative, what remains are the thematic resonances to be found as one story transforms into another.

Transformation is, after all, the name of the game. Boldly jettisoning a traditional unified narrative in favor of variations on a theme, the critical understanding that Ovid uses to construct his epic is the pinpointing of metamorphosis as the one great thread running through Greco-Roman myth, whose stories are made mythical by the presence of supernatural transformative power. Yet despite being the stated theme of the work, the act of metamorphosis remains fundamentally ambiguous, without consistent rationale or moral bearing. Transformations occur as punishments, as rewards, as escape mechanisms, plot devices, memorials, and mysteries, with every body at potential risk of bursting out into something as new and variable as the world of the poem itself—a world, however, that becomes increasingly recognizable as metamorphosis after metamorphosis explains the origin of some familiar real-life feature. The poem’s metamorphic playground is the scene of a tug-of-war between permeability and permanence, where forces as different and unpredictable as the whims of gods, the sorcery of witches, or even the strongest mortal emotions are liable to yank the rope in a new direction.

At stake throughout is one of Ovid’s main concerns: identity. With each transformation offering an opportunity to compare the before and after, questions naturally arise about what it is to be human or inhuman, and to what degree such distinctions are societal, theological, and/or scientific. Some characters’ metamorphoses equate with the freeing of some inner, truer self; for others, their essence is horribly perverted. Yet although describing such a variety of changes may make the poem sound like one great muddle, so many colors swirling into brown, the observance of categorical distinctions in spite of categorical shifts is a precondition to having a metamorphosis: the magic lies in distinguishing what changes from what does not. In Book 1, when the nymph Daphne turns into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s assault, Ovid writes that just life’s glow remained (1.553), indicating a complete metamorphosis that would seem to fulfill an inevitable fate, since daphne means laurel in Greek. Yet the trunk’s bark continues to shrink before the god’s touch, and the passage’s final line, like a head the treetop seemed to nod (1.567), teases the possibility that some aspect of the vanished woman has survived her transformation, imbuing the wood with her will. There must be a point in each metamorphosis when the human ceases to be one, and the fascination is in the uncertainty of when that is and what is left of them thereafter.

The story of Apollo and Daphne has acquired further renown for its relation to Ovid’s other main thematic interest, the abuse of power. In spite (or, inevitably, because) of his status as a poet of empire, Ovid exhibits a refreshing problem with authority, and the reader is constantly treated to tales of deities and rulers subjecting unlucky mortals (or even less mighty gods) to horrifying wrongs on the flimsiest of pretexts, with the poet often changing the details from his mythic sources to accentuate the cruelty of these powers that were. In one stark example from Book 4, Ovid invents for Medusa a human backstory in which the monster’s monstrosity results from a double miscarriage of divine justice: first at the hands of Neptune, who raped her in the temple of Minerva, then from Minerva herself, who punished the sacrilege by turning the girl into her famously snake-haired self. In no tradition prior to the Metamorphoses had Medusa ever been anything but a monster, and the liberties taken in Ovid’s revision are revealing of both the poet’s priorities and his influence, since this version of Medusa’s legend underpins most modern retellings. Hearing her origin story narrated dispassionately by Perseus, whom we have witnessed dandling Medusa’s severed head for several scenes, instantly flips our view of the feats we have watched Perseus perform. Suddenly invited to pity the monsters slain throughout the poem, we are simultaneously forced to question the heroism of the myths’ accepted protagonists. Considering Ovid’s eagerness to destabilize any narrative expectation with an oddly timed pun or mannered exaggeration, the frequency with which he chooses to punch up when faced with a power dynamic reveals an authorial agenda of at times breathtakingly subversive sympathies.

Bearing this in mind will aid in discussing one of the poem’s most delicate aspects—namely, rape. In addition to Daphne and Medusa, the pages of the Metamorphoses contain seventeen other extended stories of sexual assault (many more are mentioned), nearly all of which are suffered by women, mostly at the hands of gods and kings. Even now it is not uncommon for scholars to meet this fact with a mere grimace or shrug, and there are collegiate horror stories of students whose professors have guided them through passages detailing profound acts of abuse with little comment other than on the beauty of the poetry, a callous oversight historically exacerbated by translators disinclined to call a rape a rape. Compared to the Latin original, English versions of the Metamorphoses reliably have more victim-blaming spread out across fewer assaults, resulting in editions of the epic at odds with Ovid, whose general sympathy for the oppressed against their celestial or lordly oppressors often results in near parables on the effects of power abused. The story of Callisto in Book 2, for example, paints a startlingly intense portrait of psychological trauma as the disgraced former huntress suffers ostracism, insomnia, personality changes, and misplaced guilt at the hands of three unconscionably malicious and unfeeling gods. As in the Heroides, Ovid takes special interest in giving maligned mythical women a degree of feeling and focus almost unheard of in Roman writers, a narrative choice of enormous transformative potential both for how a tale is told and what is made of it in the telling.

This is not, of course, to say that Ovid is some kind of present-day feminist out of time. With few exceptions, these earnest investigations of power are compromisingly conducted through a male gaze quite willing to take aesthetic pleasure in the distress of victims whose plight, however piteous, seems always to increase their paradigmatic beauty. Yet wrong as it is to teach the rape scenes of the Metamorphoses while dismissing all but their artistic properties, it is also wrong to dismiss the poem as a hopelessly antiquated work with no insights of value to the contemporary reader. In Book 12, when the maiden Caenis is granted a wish by her divine rapist, the sea-god Neptune, she makes a chilling demand expressly intended to be as mighty as his crime: make me immune to rape (12.202). When the god accedes by transforming her into a man, how else are we to interpret his act but as the poet’s caustic assessment of his society? For the newly-transitioned Caeneus, there is a newfound security; for women outside the poem, the only solution Neptune proposes was not possible.

The uneasy, fascinating truth is that there exists in the poem a strange balance of sympathies that defies reduction. The natural tendency to focus on individual stories can only lead to unpleasant simplification, since each story has its own circumstances deserving of analysis, some more challenging than others to societal norms and sensitivities, ancient and modern. Yet for the structural reasons described, there is much more to be gained from taking the poem as the continuous whole it is, where the tales of Daphne, Callisto, Medusa, and Caenis do not stand alone but must be read and reread in light of the tales that precede and follow them. While such a reading does not lessen the individual tragedies, it does reveal a greater, critical purpose to all the pain and suffering. Unlike so many Disneyfied and YA retellings of the Greek legends, Ovid’s mythos does not overlook the flaws and transgressions of its most powerful characters, pretend it can fix them, or try to make them less awful than they are. Instead, it presents them, plays them up, and calls them into question. For all its fantastic miracles and magical transformations, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is disarmingly modern in its humanist depiction of a fragile and inequitable universe, where heroes are drained of their heroism, victims deserve to be heard, and the earth is always holier than heaven.

STYLE AND POLITICS

Even so, viewing the Metamorphoses from the airy vantage point of themes and structural composition cannot begin to capture the actual experience of reading the poem. This is because the poet, faced everywhere with the horrors of an unjust world, prefigures the absurdists by confronting them with a sardonic smile. From its opening lines, the work is pervaded by the wit and wobble of Ovid’s poetic style. The narrator is delightfully intrusive, often addressing characters and readers in the second person (though most translators edit this out), and his repetition of such phrases as they say, rumor has, and if we can believe it in the midst of narration reminds the reader that, for all their divine characters, the tales being recounted are far from divinely revealed truths.

Yet muddying the waters of narratorial credibility is only one of the many tricks up Ovid’s sleeve. In the tales of abuse discussed earlier, he can be deadly serious, but when handling familiar myths of heroism and glory, the poet’s tongue is never far from his cheek. Scenes of high passion are hyperbolized into burlesque, while less impressive moments are lavished with flights of rhetoric they have obviously failed to earn. The death of Achilles (Pelides) is a fine example:

Now he is ash, and all that yet remains

Of great Achilles scarcely fills an urn;

But still his fame lives on and fills the world,

And in this, the true measure of the man,

Does Pelides endure and shun the void.

(12.615–19)

At first, this seems an impressive eulogy for a great hero tragically slain. The only problem is that Ovid’s Achilles has done nothing to lend his demise real impact: his victory over Hector is barely mentioned, Patroclus—the fallen comrade usually so central to Achilles’ character arc—has yet to appear, and the only feat we have watched him perform is his confused killing of the demigod Cygnus, who does not even figure in Homer. The silliness of Ovid’s grandiloquent epitaph is made plain by the preceding sentence, which relates the corpse’s cremation: Now, he—Troy’s fear, the guard and grace of Greece, / Aeacides, the tireless warlord—burned.

Such anticlimaxes abound. Heroes are particular targets of irony, and the narrator calls characters by that name only when doing so is ridiculous, as in moments of cowardice or repose (Autonoë’s heroic son turned tail, 3.198). But incidental bits of farce lurk in every story, as situations of would-be intensity are undercut by excessive alliteration, dissonant puns, or bizarre displays of metaphoric language that amuse the reader even as they highlight the artificiality of the plot, as when Ovid strings together ten lines of sparkling wordplay for the last gasps of a dying lover. In one extreme example from Book 12, Ovid uses his favorite trick of pairing verbs with their own participles to propel a battle forward with appalling consonance:

Then, rushing forward, trailing his own guts,

He trod what trailed, the trodden entrails burst,

And, tripping, down he tumbled, disemboweled.

(12.390–92)

The gruesomeness of the image is belied by the playfulness of the poetry in a scene whose brutality—the reader will be unsurprised to hear—is too incessant to be taken seriously, landing more like a lampoon of such set-pieces in other epics. The wit and invention involved here are undeniable, yet one should remember that these are the very features historically dismissed as the unrealistic devices of an overactive mind.

Critics unable to imagine any worthwhile meaning in such stylized lapses of verisimilitude have taken special offense to Books 12–14, which dance around the tales of the Trojan War and the voyages of Aeneas, characterizing them as poor efforts in comparison to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. This criticism completely misunderstands how Ovid revels in the very act of running circles around his predecessors, uninterested in retreading the same narrative or tonal ground. The entire story of the abduction of Helen leading into the Trojan War is dispatched in a mere three verses (12.5–7), yet the action grinds to a halt for a three-hundred–line digression on a completely different battle between humans and centaurs. Considering the themes discussed above, however, what some scholars have disparaged as impish iconoclasm is instead seen as carrying profound political intention: Ovid’s verbal frolicking fails to produce the epic effects of Virgil and Homer not because he cannot but because he does not wish to confer such grandeur on the gods, kings, and heroes whose traditional supremacy, authority, and worthiness he meets with unstinting skepticism. Since the narrator often makes it clear that he is speaking from the perspective of a Roman in the time of Augustus, there is a subversive quality to the poem’s attitude that is often at its most brazen where it pretends to be most obsequious. One almost gaspworthy moment comes near the end of the poem, where Ovid explicitly states the Machiavellian motive behind Augustus having the Senate deify his adopted father: Then, lest the son should spring from mortal seed, / The sire must be made god! (15.760–61). Only after the deification has been baldly exposed as a political machination do we realize that these are the thoughts of the goddess Venus, who is orchestrating the apotheosis from heaven. In every instance of Ovidian ovation, it is difficult not to come away thinking that the poet doth prostrate too much.

This, then, is the Metamorphoses. By turns ironic where one expects sincerity, irreverent in the face of authority, bombastic to the point of teasing, and yet somehow shocking in the sensitivity of its humanism, the Metamorphoses is as surprising as it is rewarding, balancing subversion and sympathy on the beam of a rapier wit that deserves much more credit than it has gotten. Besides—the wordplay is fun. While Edith Hamilton and so many other prudish voices have faulted Ovid for his blaspheming repartee, there is another long tradition that has been unabashedly willing to find enjoyment in what is enjoyable. In Book 6, when Latona turns a band of Lycian peasants into frogs, Ovid quietly slips an onomatopoeic ribbit into one of the lines describing the metamorphosis (6.377). It’s an Easter egg for the reader who happens to notice, little more. How great is that?

RECEPTION

Even if the Metamorphoses were a dull slog with nothing to interest the modern reader, the work’s preponderant artistic influence would still make it worthy of intense study. Whereas critical appraisals have fluctuated across time, there has been a far steadier current of artistic appreciation for a poem whose myriad multitudes unsurprisingly contain something for everyone. Era after era, not only writers and poets, but painters, sculptors, composers, and artists and storytellers of all stripes and media have drawn inspiration from Ovid’s narratives, style, and narrative stylings. Every age gets the Ovid it prefers.

Ovid’s influence stayed strong for the remainder of antiquity, as evidenced by the unmistakably Ovidian techniques and motifs cropping up in later poets from Seneca to Statius to Claudian, despite grumblings from Roman teachers of rhetoric that the poet’s turns of phrase could be a bit much. The stature of the Metamorphoses is further attested by the influence of both its form and content. Both the elegiac couplet and the epic hexameter line, each of which had been adapted from Greek to Latin verse through a centuries-long process of carmen and error, attained their final Roman form with Ovid, after whom experimentation effectively ceased. As for content, the many innovations, interpolations, and recombinations Ovid contributed to the mythological canon were thenceforth transmitted as definitive. The once-separate stories of Echo and Narcissus were forever paired. Pygmalion held onto his new job as a sculptor. Pyramus and Thisbe kept on existing. In all the mythos, a few tales apiece from Hesiod, Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil are perhaps the only stories of any cultural currency that have reached us unrefracted through the prism of Ovid.

Throughout the medieval period, the poem known simply as Ovidius major (Ovid’s Big One, if you will) was continuously read as a kind of pagan Bible. Even in the first centuries of post-Roman Europe, when rejection of the pre-Christian classical was at its highest, teachers valued the Metamorphoses both as a school text from which to learn Latin—the better to read the Vulgate and St. Augustine—and as a source text on the falsehoods of heathen belief. (Some thousand years later, the puritan Milton would still be found using this approach in Paradise Lost, where Ovid’s gods are enlisted by name in Lucifer’s army of demons.) As the High Middle Ages brought a renewed tolerance for antiquity, enthusiasm for the work ballooned to such a degree that scholars commonly refer to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the aetas Ovidiana (Age of Ovid), a period when the poet was routinely consulted as an authority on not only mythology, but cosmogony, natural philosophy, and literary style. The goliard satirists of Germany cribbed his verbiage and the chivalric romancers of France adapted his stories. A full tenth of the lines in the Romance of the Rose, perhaps the period’s most ubiquitous poem, are paraphrased or translated from Ovid.

But it was the age of the Renaissance that pushed the influence of the Metamorphoses to its towering summit. Ovid’s combination of erudition and bawdiness appealed alike to the naughty humanism of Boccaccio and the northern ribaldry of Chaucer, and nearly every local literary culture was greatly affected by vernacular versions, from the anonymous fourteenth-century French Ovide moralisé to the Italian adaptation by Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (1561), the Dutch rendering of Joost van den Vondel (1671), and the never out-of-print English heptameter translation by Arthur Golding (1567), whose effect on Shakespeare was so pronounced that excerpts often appear as appendixes to editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, and The Winter’s Tale. Still, even this is not so impressive as the gale-force Ovidian wind that swept through European art and music. The Metamorphoses dominated the worlds of ballet and opera for centuries, with individual myths often put to music dozens of times, as with Book 14’s lovers Acis and Galatea, who titled operas by Antonio de Literes, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Franz Josef Haydn, and two different works by Handel. In visual art, Michelangelo’s sketches, Titian’s paintings, Cellini’s metalworks, and Bernini’s marbles are all crawling with Ovid, not only in the subjects depicted but often in the minutest details. Rubens’ Feast of Achelous (c. 1615) is an exact visual rendition of the décor Ovid describes at 8.562–64, and the spectators in Bruegel’s vastly different Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560) are clearly drawn from 8.217–19. To walk through the Renaissance and Baroque galleries of an art museum unaware of the presence of Ovid is to stand in the blast of a firehose without recognizing one is wet.

Although the mania for Ovid temporarily dipped in the late Enlightenment, when philosopher-critics like Winckelmann dismissed Ovidian transformations as debasements of the human ideal, Ovid’s status as a symbol of suppression of speech and oppression of writers kept him personally popular as a Romantic motif, enrolled alongside Dante and Thomas Chatterton as the underappreciated artists par excellence. Indeed, expatriate authors from the ninth-century Carolingian poets to the Romantic Pushkin (To Ovid, 1821) and the Communist Bertolt Brecht (whom Ovid greets at the door in his Visit to the Banished Poets, 1939) have all written voluminous self-lamenting works identifying with the woes of the original exile-poet. It is a scholarly commonplace to say that in periods of high patriotism and settled morality, the (at least superficially) dutiful and obeisant Aeneid gains in popularity, while in turbulent times of transition and transformation, the disruptive Metamorphoses retakes the fore. But even in those reverent Victorian ages, there are still artists and visionaries alienated by their own eras who turn to Ovid, creation or creator, for inspiration and identification. Somewhere, there is always a Johann Gottfried Herder scolding his pupil for enjoying Ovid’s unnatural urbanity, only for that pupil (whose name was Goethe) to turn around and write Ovid’s characters into his Faust.

And with its endless vagaries and pendulum swings, the twentieth century was rife with both periods. The modernists who overthrew the orotund Edwardian style and proclaimed themselves the voice of the disaffected Great War generation made Ovid their antique emblem. He is threaded through the pages of Pound and Rilke and the stages of Richard Strauss, in the epigraph to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and the endnotes of Eliot’s Waste Land. But the rising swell of nationalism swept Virgil back into favor in the lead-up to World War II, and only in the anticipation of Ovid’s two thousandth birthday in 1957 did his work begin to receive its present degree of attention, this time with renewed scholarly interest as an international phenomenon encompassing German thriller novels and Japanese anime. His influence on the works of later twentieth century writers from Italo Calvino to Ted Hughes and Salman Rushdie was thoroughly treated in Ovid and the Moderns (2005) by Theodore Ziolkowski, who dubbed Ovid the exemplary ‘post’-poet, resonating with postmodernity, postrealism, and the postwar era in his ability to appeal to feminists, postmodernists, the urban satirists, the multiculturalists, and the aficionados of sex, violence, and the fantastic (224–25). Since those last three nouns are major components of virtually all stories, the influence described may be imagined.

Still, as Ovid and time both tell, change is only natural. Writing in 2006 at the dawn of the new millennium, the preeminent Ovidian scholar Philip Hardie drew on this understanding to wonder:

It remains to be seen whether the rapid dwindling of Latin in schools in the last quarter of the twentieth century will finally have the effect of choking off the Ovidian literary reception that produced such riches in the twentieth century (261).

Given the course of history, Hardie was only reasonable in being uncertain. So far, however, the answer has been a clear and resounding no.

THE PRESENT MOMENT

Which draws us down to our times. Not only has Ovidian literary reception not been choked off, his cultural influence has continued to skyrocket. While I was preparing this translation, the tabletop fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons released a classical myth–inspired campaign guide, Hadestown won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Methuen published the landmark Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro, a TikTok trend drove Madeline Miller’s novels Circe and Song of Achilles to the top of the fiction bestseller list, and Disney announced a new television adaptation of Rick Riordan’s beloved Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, whose first installment I remember being read aloud by my fifth-grade teacher in a school district where no one taught Latin. Artists and writers as wide-ranging as Chris Ofili and Natalie Haynes continue to engage large audiences with their reimagined Ovidian myths, while the YouTube channel Overly Sarcastic Productions routinely uploads amusing analyses of Ovid’s storytelling in viral videos that have broken the top tier of the platform’s trending content. There can be no doubt that Greco-Roman mythology is enjoying renewed popularity on a massive scale, and particularly among the younger generation of which I happen to be a member.

It is not going too far to trace this phenomenon back to the Metamorphoses, for of all the source-texts for classical myth, Ovid’s epic is the primary wellspring of not only the stories themselves but also the adaptive spirit that is the heartbeat of modern retellings. The classical scholar, mythological anthologist, and popular novelist alike cannot grapple with the mythos anew without taking reams of pages from Ovid’s book. Consequently, when readers are drawn to mythology (and the above shows that they very frequently are), whether they come in pursuit of the original story or out of interest in its potential for revision and retelling, their paths will run through the Metamorphoses.

There they can find much that speaks to current concerns. Of the major ancient poets, Ovid is undoubtedly the most interested in women, the most egalitarian in his conception of human relationships, and the readiest to abandon traditional worldviews in favor of different perspectives—all with an impish smirk at the universe, all with incorrigible style. In giving modern context to the Metamorphoses, and especially in introductions like these, the normal thing is to compare Ovid to Vladimir Nabokov, another literary exile whose penchant for teasing, wordplay, and quasi-amoral aestheticism won his sportively inscrutable works admiration and condemnation in ample measure. The point is fairly taken, but I think we would do well to add in at least a dash of another famous writer: Oscar Wilde. Also appreciated in his own time for his genius rather than for his artistry, Wilde too was a moral adventurer who died in exile and disgrace, having good-naturedly gibed and mocked his way through a stringent society where he appeared to thrive, but that ultimately would not let him get away with it. Yet within that scaffolding of wit and subtle derision, his work hides an unexpected proximity to the darkness of the world, along with a profound sympathy for all that is essentially human. The cleverness, critique, and creativity are inextricably bound up in one another, as has been understood by a dedicated readership even in times of relative unpopularity. In a final resemblance, when once acquainted with his fate, it is hard not to see even his pre-downfall writings through the looking-glass of that knowledge.

There is one more reason I am comparing Ovid to a maligned gay playwright out of his time. While classical mythology is in the midst of a revival, the once-preeminent field of classics itself is now under unprecedented scrutiny for its discriminatory past and exclusionary scope, with many understandably wondering what such old and thoroughly gone-over works can still have to tell a modern audience. At the same time as these laudable, good-faith questions are being discussed, however, another segment of the population has proven all too ready to claim the classical heritage for its chauvinist self, cherry-picking the literary record to find justification for patriarchal and white supremacist prejudices in an imperial past they mangle into their own image (a phenomenon that received its first major treatment in 2018’s eye-opening Not All Dead White Men by Donna Zuckerberg). Through assumption and willful misrepresentation, such misreaders have convinced themselves and others that the legacy of Rome is a monolithic paean to male conquest, an early manifesting of the white West’s masculine destiny. But despite their assertions that Ovid, whose seduction advice in the Ars Amatoria they take seriously, is one of their number, few relics of classical culture should challenge their views so much as the Metamorphoses, read as it actually is. They would be disgusted that this foundational work of Western civilization contains a positive depiction of a trans man, confused by its inclusion of admirable Black African characters, and aghast at its panoply of same-sex couples, with whom Wilde himself once identified. Nothing good will come of yielding the floor to those who would pervert, mistake, and (above all) reduce the poem into a simple, evil, and hopelessly dated tract.

And the Metamorphoses still has many things to say, much of it unexpected and inimitable. There, in one of the loftiest works of Latin literature, lie investigations of identity, credibility, and power whose emotional immediacy and embrace of the inevitability of change pose a mighty challenge to the exclusive edifices of classical culture as conventionally conceived, the kind on whose justly immutable marble steps we are supposedly meant to worship the dour past without question. But the world of the Metamorphoses is not dour, conventional, exclusive, just, unquestioning, or immutable, but surprising, funny, and all-encompassing, rife with injustice yet perennially open to question and change. In translating Ovid’s epic, I have been awed by how easily the poem takes me along for the ride, jumbling the gamut from regular to revisionist as it transforms old into new. Translation, too, is itself a kind of transformation, predicated on changes in language and context; and, as much as anything, the welcoming force of the epic’s riveting fluidity is what has inspired me—queer, biracial, twentysomething as I am—to compose this new verse translation of a very old poem, the latest transformation in a long line of Ovid’s ever-renewable metamorphoses.

Translator’s Note

The goal of this work is to provide an accurate, poetic, and open-minded translation of the Metamorphoses, the first to use the blank verse of English epic while keeping the same number of lines as the original. Since literary translation is a case-by-case affair in which consistency, though a virtue, comes second to poetry itself, my practices are most closely detailed in the appendix at the back of this volume, which addresses some of my specific choices in vaulting the text’s various rhetorical and grammatical hurdles. There are, however, a few broad strokes worth addressing on the topics of meter, wordplay, and the depiction of controversial themes, which together explain why a new translation is needed now.

First and foremost, my intent has been to translate the poetry as poetry: mine is a verse translation. More specifically, it is a blank verse translation equal in length to the Latin, meaning that for each unrhymed line of Ovid’s original epic, there appears in my version one line of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Since Ovid wrote in the standard meter of Latin epic poetry, iambic pentameter is the natural choice for analogous translation, being the traditional meter of English epic and therefore evoking much the same tonal register and cultural associations. However, because a line of iambic pentameter is several syllables shorter than the hexameter Ovid used, previous blank verse renderings have invariably swollen the poem’s length, often to a drastic degree—Charles Martin’s 2004 translation runs nearly five thousand lines longer than Ovid’s original twelve; Ian Johnston’s is even longer. In addition to making translated editions unwieldy for academic purposes since line numbers will not match, my opinion is that such expansive methods result in a flaccid, dispirited translation, prone to wild recalibrations of pace and emphasis that are particularly ill-suited to capturing Ovid’s engaging and unpredictable style. Worse still, it gives a false sense of fidelity, since the expanded translation is formatted with line breaks and spacing that in no way correspond with the verses composed by the poet.

By contrast, my work endeavors to show that equality in length not only preserves the feel of the poetry but need not come at the expense of accuracy in meaning. On the contrary, I have used the tight literary idiom necessitated by my approach as a means of restraining license. Where previous translators unmoored from Ovid’s line count were free at any time to slacken the beat in order to make a subtext explicit or untangle a knot better left to the endnotes, all while sacrificing momentum and balance, I found that sticking to the literal meaning kept the lines proportionate, lyrical, and relatively neutral for the reader’s interpretation. I have accordingly striven above all to tune my ear to Ovid’s diction, repeating words when (and only when) his Latin does and avoiding the filler phrases so common in classical translations. Deferring to his word choice gave my lines the desired succinctness, without letting fear of elevated language sacrifice the poetic in pursuit of the colloquial or vice versa.

The difference between approaches is evident even in very short excerpts. Consider, for instance, the description of the goddess Hunger in these three arresting, but fairly straightforward lines, printed here alongside both an academic prose translation and my own verse rendering:

ossa sub incuruis exstabant arida lumbis,

uentris erat pro uentre locus; pendere putares

pectus et a spinae tantummodo crate teneri

(8.804–6)

her skinny hip-bones bulged out beneath her hollow loins, and her belly was but a belly’s place; her breast seemed to be hanging free and just to be held by the framework of the spine

(Miller–Goold, p. 461)

Dry bones protruding from her crooked crotch,

Her paunch a paunch-shaped hole, you’d think her chest

Was dangling, scarce supported by her spine

(Soucy, 8.804–6)

Aside from Ovid’s constant sense of consonance, my translation is guided by what strike me as the two main points poetically at play here. First is the grippingly odd turn of phrase uentris erat pro uentre locus (literally, there was a stomach’s place instead of a stomach), which calls for similar pithiness in translation. This is followed by an abrupt second-person address, putares (you would think), which unexpectedly pulls the reader into the narration. Neither feature, however, is evident in the three most popular translations purported to be in pentameter:

The hip-bones bulging at the loins, the belly

Concave, only the place for a belly, really,

And the breasts seemed to dangle, held up, barely,

By a spine like a stick-figure’s

(Humphries, p. 206)

[. . .] beneath her hollow loins

Jutted her withered hips; her sagging breasts

Seemed hardly fastened to her ribs; her stomach

Only a void

(Melville, p. 195)

[. . .] hip bones protruded

from underneath her withered, sunken loins,

her belly, nothing more than an indication

of where a belly might be found; her breasts,

dependents of her spine

(Martin, 8.1128–32)

Of these editions, now in print through Indiana University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions, respectively, none recreate Ovid’s tidy series of three uniform lines, and only Melville keeps to the original length (he averages about an extra twenty verses per hundred). Yet in doing so, he jettisons Ovid’s pointed repetition of uenter (stomach) and switches the order of images—not a cardinal sin, but committed here without clear payoff. For their parts, Martin and Humphries do replicate Ovid’s odd phrasing, but they overexplain it, fleshing out with a whole extra line the fleshless stomach that takes only two-thirds of one to describe in the original. And nobody keeps the second-person address, opting instead to flatten the dynamism of the Latin into, at most, a mere seeming. Finally, although it is a matter of taste, all three translations evince a far looser handling of the meter than mine.

Admittedly, in any work as long as the Metamorphoses, excerption makes easy targets of translations, and it is not my intention to proffer these comparisons as some kind of triumphal display. Each version has its own rationale, and it is not as if my edition captures every poetic device or never spends an extra half-line on a sentence (though I always get it back!) This example, however, is