dactylic hexameter for Virgilian epic have been made (Frederick Ahl’s Aeneid, for example), I’m afraid the only real competence, if any, available to me as an English poet lay in the ancient, timeworn (and yes, some would say shopworn) iambic. It is the way I hear English verse (and often, English prose), and is the register in which my mental Muse is always “running”—a little like Pope, one might say, who claimed to “lisp in numbers.” I am not at all averse to other meters in the English canon or in current poetry (who could not admire Byron’s Assyrian coming down like the wolf on the fold?5), but I knew when I began these versions of Ovid that I would be writing iambic hexameter first lines, rounded off with pentameters.
Still, the vexed question of rhyme: what possible defense could I adduce for rhymed couplets, when classical Latin almost never uses the device? (The very few instances in the work of Virgil and Ovid and Catullus only serve to prove the main point.) Latin poets make their music out of long and short syllables (their meters are quantitative), out of assonance and consonance and alliteration, and the wonderful play of broad, open vowels against short, forward ones, in patterns of contrast and balance and antithesis. Music is there.
The question that faced me was, could I possibly duplicate it? Well, Shakespeare could, and other practitioners of rich and sensuous blank verse (Wordsworth, Milton, Wallace Stevens), but it would have been a daunting task, far beyond my capabilities. I settled for the obvious expedient: my versions of Ovid would try for the snap and elegant closure of a finished-off, rhymed couplet, with whatever attendant graces could be added by my attempts at alliteration and assonance and syntactical play, as the opportunities presented themselves. And of course, I could always comfort myself with the observation that centuries of English poets have created their versions of classical poets in rhyme. To the objection that Dryden makes Virgil sound like Dryden and Pope makes Homer sound like Pope, I can only reply, “Would that I could enter such exalted company!” I fully realize that Latin scholars will object, and yes, there have indeed been attempts at exact, unrhymed, accentual-syllabic-equivalent translations of Latin’s quantitative meters. But the results have never given me much pleasure as poetry, and if poems are not to be translated into other poems, why bother at all? It is the totality of the poem—its sounds and syntax and tones, as well as its sense—that define it, and not just the sense. The very last thing I wanted was for readers unfamiliar with Ovid to finish my translations and ask, “So what’s the fuss? I thought Ovid was supposed to be a poet.” Readers still skeptical are invited to peruse these exact, unrhymed versions and judge of their aesthetic qualities.
Finally, some minor notes on my technical practice. In order to make my task easier, I have, in a number of instances, played fast and loose with certain features of metrical, rhymed English verse. I have, for example, availed myself, wherever necessary, of the convention of the floating possessive: sometimes my meter requires Venus’ and sometimes Venus’s son. Many of my lines are “headless,” by which I simply mean that the first syllable in a line otherwise iambic has been omitted. I have substituted an occasional trochaic first foot for an iambic, leading to what the ancients called a choriamb. I have also substituted an occasional trochee or spondee for an iambic foot at different positions in the metrical line. Readers who have been hearing my otherwise fairly regular meters in their heads will possibly notice these substitutions, but I doubt they will be overly discomfited by them.
In the matter of rhymes, I have on a very few occasions settled for what I hope are acceptably close near-rhymes or off-rhymes. The reader is assured that I did so only because I could find no alternative. (Some cruxes are never resolved.) So-called feminine end-rhymes occasionally appear (di-syllabic rhymes such as “making” and “taking”), followed at the start of new lines by an iamb or trochee, as the sense of the line seemed to require.
And with all these constraints in mind, I have tried to bring to the reader an English Ovid dealing with love in all its permutations.
Some translations of Ovid consulted:
Ovid: The Art of Love, trans. James Michie Ovid’s Amores, trans. Guy Lee Ovid: The Art of Love, trans. Rolfe Humphries Ovid: The Love Poems, trans. A. D. Melville Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. Peter Green Ovid: The Art of Love and Other Poems, trans. J. H. Mozley Ovid in English, ed. Christopher Martin
Amores
Epigram of the Poet Himself
Five little books of Naso’s once, now we are three—
The way the author wished his work to be.
So even if you don’t enjoy as you read on,
That reading should hurt less—with two books gone.
BOOK I
I.1
| Prepared for war, I set the weapon of my pen | |
| To paper, matching meter, arms, and men | |
| In six feet equal to the task. Then Cupid snatched | |
| A foot away, laughing at lines mis-matched. | |
| I asked him who had made him Master of My Song: | 5 |
| “Wild little boy, we poets all belong | |
| To the Muses. You don’t see Venus bear the shield | |
| Minerva wears, or blonde Minerva wield | |
| The lover’s torch. And who would want the woods to yield | |
| To Ceres, or Diana rule the field? | 10 |
| Is long-haired Phoebus meant to march on pike parade | |
| While Mars shows how the Aonian lyre’s played? | |
| Your power, boy, runs every single thing in sight, | |
| So why this all-devouring appetite | |
| For more? Or must your writ run clear to Helicon | 15 |
| And up each string Apollo plays upon? | |
| My first, fierce line: how well that virgin verse once served me— | |
| Until the simpering second one unnerved me! | |
| But I don’t have the matter for those lighter stresses— | |
| No girl—or boy—with long and comely tresses.” | 20 |
| Then I was done, and Cupid fetched an arrow fletched | |
| For me (since on its shaft my name was etched). | |
| He bent that reflex bow of his against one knee, | |
|
Saying what burden he had meant for me:
|
