Amores E-Book

Ovid

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Ovid (c. 43 BC - AD 17), a daring, original and passionate poet, has been an enduring influence on later poets. Amores is the work that first made Ovid famous, and infamous. A scandal in its day, and probably in part responsible for Ovid's banishment from Rome, Amores lays bare the intrigues and appetites of high society in the imperial capital at the time of Caesar Augustus. Clandestine sex, orgies and entertainments, fashion and violence, are among the subjects Ovid explores: the surface dazzle and hidden depths, secret liaisons and their public postures. This new translation by Tom Bishop closely follows the movement and metre of Ovid's verse, rendering his world of love, licentiousness and conspiracy so as to catch Ovid's raciness. His introduction sets the work in historical context.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

OVID

Amores

Translated with an introduction by TOM BISHOP

for Gordon Kerry and Jeffrey Mueller

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Amores

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Ovid’s Amores: Masks of Love and Ambition

Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, has been for ten centuries the most influential poet in Western art. Aside from poets and novelists – to say nothing of painters, sculptors, film-makers and others – the catalogue of later writers who have mined him for their own purposes includes philosophers, theologians, erotic theorists, divine genealogists, moralists, emblematists, and anthropologists. Yet Ovid’s omnipresent influence has consistently been accompanied by reservations about both his work and life, the former vivid, daring and transformative, the latter blessed, blithe and finally blighted.

Ovid was born in the town of Sulmo, now Sulmona, on a small but fertile flood plain circled by mountains, some 75 miles east across the Apennines from Rome. Sulmo was a city of the Paeligni, a Sabellian people conquered and annexed by the Romans around 300 BC and admitted to Roman citizenship during the revolt of Italian allies (the so-called ‘Social War’) in 90 BC, only 47 years before the poet’s birth. The Ovidii, his father’s family, were well established and of ‘equestrian’ rank, in effect provincial gentry. He had a brother, Lucius, one year his elder, and through these two sons their father seems to have planned the family’s entrance into Roman high politics. He sent them both to Rome in their teens for instruction by famous tutors in rhetoric, the normal prelude to magisterial office and membership of the Senate.

Publius, however, had other ideas. From an early age he was attracted to poetry, despite his father’s disapproval, and, though he dutifully plied the career selected for him, he seems to have done so without great enthusiasm or notable success. The elder Seneca records hearing him deliver a school declamation, which he describes as more poetic than forensic. As a young and ambitious provincial writer, Ovid cultivated literary circles in the great metropolis, though its most famous lion, Virgil, was mostly absent at Naples working on his epic. He met Horace, in town from his Sabine farm, counted Propertius his friend, wrote an elegy for Tibullus, and presumably knew many others of whom we now have little or no notice. By day he was a student and, later, a minor magistrate serving on tribunals; by night and in his leisure time, an ephebe poet and a reveller in the urbane world of the Great City.

That city was itself learning a new role and status. Ovid was one year old when Horace threw away his shield at Philippi, and twelve when the Battle of Actium left Octavius Caesar (now ‘the August One’) sole master of the empire. Ovid’s generation had no direct memory of the civil wars that had decimated the years before them, and the central political institutions of the Republic were declining into irrelevance. Public service itself, once the quintessential arena of Roman liberty, was losing its allure. At the same time, Rome, the capital of the world, had never been so powerful, prosperous or exciting. Its change into marble, of which Augustus later boasted, was well underway. From the first, Ovid’s writing is full of his feeling for this city, the headquarters of imperial glamour. It was the life of high society – parties, affairs, intrigue, entertainment, fashion, literary and sexual sophistication – that fired his first imagination, and that he brought together with his larger poetic ambitions in his earliest work, the Amores.

When he was about nineteen, a family disaster freed Ovid to embrace his literary vocation: his brother Lucius died, leaving him sole heir, and his father resigned himself to seeing his son a poet rather than a senator. Ovid went to study in Athens, and then undertook a literary Grand Tour with his friend Pompeius Macer, visiting Asia Minor and Sicily. After returning to Rome and fulfilling some minor magistracies, Ovid declined further advancement and withdrew into private life. The career that followed made him the poet to watch in the Roman world. From early bravura performances in the Amores and Heroides, through his epic and kaleidoscopic Metamorphoses, to his unfinished poem on the religious calendar of Rome, Fasti, Ovid excelled in dramatising in smooth verse the clash of feelings, stories and voices. He worked in love-elegy, epistle, epic and drama (his tragedy of Medea does not survive). He was provocative, ironic, passionate and suave, with a brash inventiveness that remade established genres in original and daring ways, and challenged authorities of the past with a pose of easy, assured modernity.

That daring and modernity may have been his undoing. While the poet embraced and championed the new, the Emperor, for all his own revolutionary changes to the Roman government, laboured to restore the façade of the old. If Rome could not have Republican liberty, she would at least have Republican morals. Around the turn of the Christian Era, Augustus attempted to legislate the defence of ‘traditional’ Roman morality, encouraging large families and making adultery a capital offence. His own family, however, scandalously refused to co-operate, and he was forced to exile first his daughter, and later his granddaughter, both named Julia, for sexual licence. In AD 8, for good measure, he also banished Ovid, the libertine poet and self-proclaimed trumpeter of his own vices, relegating him to the small town of Tomis on the Black Sea, the far border of the Roman world. The reasons for this abrupt move are only partly known. Augustus cited Ovid’s knowing manual The Art of Love, but Ovid, beseeching the Emperor for reprieve while conceding this charge, speaks also of some obscure ‘error’, to give details of which might have repeated the offence. Perhaps there was some political gaffe or misstep – there was much half-inchoate conspiracy around Augustus at this time, into which Ovid may somehow have stumbled. The mystery remains, and so did the poet. Tomis was bleak, dank, barbaric. Devastated by exile from his wife, friends and city, Ovid wrote a series of verse letters back to Rome – begging, lamenting, recalling, confessing, enlisting friends. But neither friends nor poems moved Augustus or Tiberius, his grim successor, to look his way. Ovid lived on in cold Tomis, drinking frozen wine, and died there ten years later, in AD 17, at the age of 60.

In many ways, we might think of Ovid as Augustan Rome’s Oscar Wilde. Like Wilde, he was a brilliant and ambitious provincial of prominent family though not of ruling stock. Both proceeded through their different educational systems with colourful success, but neither moved into the circles of public life for which their trainings prepared them. Instead, both became high-flying exponents of metropolitan urbanity. Extolling the goodness of pleasure and the cultivation of the self, both understood in a deep way the challenge these commitments threw out to an official world of sincerity, traditional sentiment, and imperial high seriousness. Both likewise, one suspects, understood the character, though perhaps not the ruthlessness, of official hypocrisy in such matters. Ovid’s compact and pointed style ironises sober moral precept in much the same way as Wilde’s famous epigrams, and the Roman poet would surely have relished the Irishman’s Importance of Being Earnest, with its elegantly subversive insistence that it is in our lying that we are most true to ourselves, whether we know it or not. And in the end, though in quite different ways, the scandalous performances of both artists in a climate of stiffening moral rigour cost them what they most loved and depended on. Both died in exile and disgrace. Imperial establishments need, above all, their sincerity; those who demystify it, do so at their peril.

That ambivalence envelops Ovid’s influence, then, is hardly surprising. Sober figures of a moral temper tend to find his fluidity and artful refusals of seriousness off-putting. Ovid clearly disliked and distrusted schemes of large historical destiny, and the dour fatalities they often underwrite. He took pains to flatter Augustus, but it seems that neither he nor the Emperor was taken in. One suspects he both admired and loathed Virgil’s Aeneid, and was appalled by such terrible sincerity as Aeneas’s farewell to Dido. His legacy of suspicion – both his own and others’ – and his willingness to challenge the official line have determined a large part of his legacy, and later poets have often used him to mark their own distance from high and serious hypocrisies. Marlowe, the first English translator of the Amores, would be one example, Rochester another. Spenser’s use of him always cuts powerfully athwart his panegyrics of Elizabethan rectitude and raison d’état; the Victorians disliked him and preferred Greek lyric; he was not included on the ‘five-foot shelf’ of Harvard Classics. More playful descendants have embraced him, making ambivalence itself one of his, and their, virtues. His influence has been especially strong among ironists and apostles of many-mindedness. Most deeply smitten of all was Shakespeare. The ‘little Western flower’ whose wayward potency disrupts so many settled schemes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is alike an Ovidian figure and a figure of Ovid.

The Amores were Ovid’s first work, his chosen starting-ground. Ovid tells us it was first issued in five ‘little books’, later revised and cut down to the three we have. It is in every way a strategic entrance. Ovid chose to begin with the modern and the Latin genre par excellence: the love elegy, prefigured by Catullus and greatly elaborated in the years of his own youth by Propertius and Tibullus. Cannily and hungrily, he takes over elegy’s established suite of lover roles and proceeds to play them off against one another and against his own senses of irony and mobility. Prominent throughout the poems is a deliberate sense of love and its poetry, for all their aching joys and dizzy raptures, as a game and a rehearsal. Ovid’s versions of romantic ecstasies and abasements are at once parody and more than parody. They embrace indulgence and its styles for their own sake, playing the game of love for the love of gaming and play, but, more deeply, they also ask about the mutual constitution of rhetoric and sincerity. They are masks, but masks that reveal what would otherwise stay hidden. They are masks about the uses of the mask. Critics have repeatedly felt that the poems lack sincerity, are merely parasitic. They are right, but they miss the point: Ovid is playing a game of postures, and inviting us to watch him doing so, because he knows that Rome is a city, and Latin a language, soaked in rhetorics, and that the self is an object composed of poses and decorums. Sincerity is as much a matter of style as of feeling, and can come in many costumes. One may discover one’s sincerities, like one’s pleasures, in unexpected places, if one is prepared to look. The Amores cultivate and run through the rhetorical styles of Latin love – passionate, sensual, promiscuous, faithful, debased, violent – in order to test them both as style and as feeling, as style suited for feeling. You never know one self, like one language, until you know two. Hence Ovid’s choice of love, the most powerful of personal metamorphoses, on which to stake his poetic claim. Hence the high praise given in the Amores to whatever is ‘cultus’ – suave, cultivated, poised. Hence the intensity over details such as hairstyle – the part of one’s own décor most open to theatre, to choice, to ‘cultus’.

Yet interwoven with this flâneur insouciance, and the ludic philosophy it masks, is an ambition so shockingly naked that it is obliged repeatedly to mock itself. Ovid’s opening joke goes straight to the heart: epic is what the true Roman poet aims for – ‘arma… violentaque bella’ in his weak parody of Virgil. Its weakness is precisely the point – Ovid does not aspire to compete with Virgil on that ground. And Cupid points the moral of its weakness at once by troping love elegy as, after all, a matter of not ‘measuring up’ to epic: it comes one foot too short. Elegy is, as a later joke makes explicit, a sort of ‘lame’ epic. The joke strikes at the epic ethos of Augustan Rome, at its high Virgilian pathos. But it also conceals, only barely, a desire for epic that knows itself not yet ripe, rising up only to fall back into parody and dissatisfaction with parody, into the ‘lesser’ matter of love – and equal dissatisfaction with that. Hence the tergiversations, the self-criticism, the fancy footwork with his own desire for ‘something major’ that erupt repeatedly in these poems. Elegy, for Ovid, is always only the beginning. He wants so much more, but can as yet manage only this. Propertius, the local object of imitation and parody, screens the deeper rival, Virgil – the only poet mentioned but not named in the catalogue of immortals that ends Book One.

Brashness of manner, allusiveness of texture, and bravura of style in the Amores are thus at once demonstrations of skill and acknowledgements of immaturity, indices of a performance anxiety staged otherwise, comically, in the ‘impotence’ poem of Book Three. Performance is always on display: the verses are perfectly polished, the mythic exemplars and extended conceits frequent, learned, and complex. Borrowings, echoes, and reminiscences of poets in Latin and Greek, in elegy and other genres, both known and, no doubt, unknown, abound. They are poems that demand to be noticed, like the lover locked out at the gate, serenading the porter for admission. They are letters to the reader that demand an assignation.

A Note on the Translation

The Latin elegiac was Ovid’s preferred metre for most of his career, including all his erotic poetry. Only for the Metamorphoses did he adopt the epic hexameter. ‘Elegiac’ is a technical name derived from the metre’s origins in epitaph and inscription and has little to do with its later applications. It consists of pairs of lines, one hexameter, of the sort used for epic (and, since Theocritus, for bucolic), and one pentameter. The hexameter has a great deal of flexibility in rhythm and division, with a mobile caesura pause. The pentameter that follows it is much less malleable, and has a strong and fixed medial caesura. (Curiously, just the opposite is true in English: hexameter always threatens to fall into two equal parts, while pentameter exhibits more variability.) In Ovid’s hands, the pentameter line always ends in an ‘iambic’ disyllable word that lightens and counterpoints the underlying metrical division. Ovid’s elegiac couplets also tend to be syntactically closed, and hence rather pointed, sometimes even epigrammatic.

Rhymed pentameter (‘heroic’) couplets have been a standard English version of Latin elegiacs since Marlowe’s translation. They provide point, pleasing balance and closure, but they have the disadvantage of obscuring the original asymmetry of the metre, and of collapsing its distinction from epic metre, for which the same couplet has regularly been used. For this translation, I have sought as close a rendering of the movement of the elegiac as I could manage, since Ovid insists on its un-epic ‘imperfection’ as a central element of his meaning. Hence I have used unrhymed accentual couplets of hexameter and pentameter.

Ovid’s tone in these poems is very difficult to catch in contemporary English, being at once elegant, racy and fluent, without being highly colloquial. I have translated couplet for couplet, and often line for line, but felt free to substitute an English idiom or a modern image where one appealed and seemed effective. There are vividnesses in Latin that cannot be rendered where we would like them, so I have taken the chance on English ones where they presented themselves. With the same end in sight I have translated some of the names of incidental characters in the poems. Ovid’s names are often specifically allusive or evocative. Bagoas, for instance, the eunuch slave of 2.2, bears a Persian name and may be a sort of Eastern houseboy (Alexander the Great inherited a eunuch Bagoas from King Darius, as Ovid may have recalled). I have called him Sabu to try to locate him similarly. Likewise, the slave hairdresser with whom Ovid is having an affair in 2.6 and 2.7 has a Greek name that denotes a short dress, surely not an overtone one would want to miss. I have called her Culotta. And so forth. Latin names, however, I have generally left alone.

Lastly, where Ovid scatters allusions whose effect we cannot recapture, not knowing well enough the poems of his climate, I have from time to time grafted in echoes of English poets, hoping to catch something of Ovid’s texture, and to register how important these poems have been in lending a voice to many in our own language.

Author’s Epigram

Five booklets that Ovid first penned

now are three; he preferred to emend.

So if we don’t please you, at least we can ease you

presenting two less to offend.