Too Horny for Hexameter: Ovid's Epic Fail
On metrical mimesis in Amores 1.1, and my two approaches to translating it
Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.Ovid, Amores 1.1.1-4 — see my two translations HERE
The young Ovid bends over his writing desk. First one bead of sweat, then another, sleds from the roots of his follicles grudgingly over the ridges of his forehead, then coasts down the famous schnoz—his cognomen, Naso, means “The Nose”—depending there for a beat before plopping, in wet anticlimax, onto the wax of his writing tablet. The poor poet is laboring over an epic poem on a martial theme cast in that noblest of measures, dactylic hexameter; but every time he manages a halfway decent line, as he’s scratching at the next a fair moon-face goes bobbing before his eyes, his concentration breaks, and his scansion (unlike his membrum virile) flops. Eventually, Ovid gives up and gives in to the meter and subject he couldn’t help gravitating towards; he forgets about his Theban cycle (or whatever he was trying to write), fixes his gaze on the moon-face, and lets the lines flow forth, which they do almost without effort and as it were unbidden. Whatever they may lack in dignity, they make up for in passion.
Of course, this is not exactly how Ovid tells it, though psychologically speaking it’s what he means. Ovid blames his epic fail not on his own refractory anatomy, but on the gods: it’s a prank played by a mischievous little putto, the son of Venus, Cupid himself, who titters as he whizzes by, stealing a metrical foot from every even-numbered line. Sonically, going from hexameter to this is like Menelaus stepping on a rake—so much for high seriousness. But the cleverness of Ovid’s conceit transcends the ‘psychological’ use of myth; he also invents an aition (just-so story) to account for the fixed association—which Ovid did not invent—between elegiac meter and amatory subject matter. Ovid and the other love elegists (Gallus, Propertius and Tibullus) were just too horny for hexameter.
In the Amores, Ovid is not so much writing about love as writing about writing about love. The game he is playing expects, indeed demands, the reader to connect the story he tells to the meter he tells it in—the elegiac couplet. In this meter the first line is a dactylic hexameter, consisting (as the name implies) of six feet, each of which is either a dactyl ( ¯ ˘˘) or a spondee (¯ ¯ ). Commonly, there is a caesura following the first syllable of the third foot. As Ovid implies, the couplet’s second line, the “elegiac pentameter,” does indeed start off indistinguishably from the hexameter, up until the third-foot caesura. Thereafter, the line concludes with a set rhythmical cadence, known as a dactylic hemiepes (‘half-line:’ ¯ ˘˘ ¯ ˘˘ ¯ ); it is called a “pentameter,” not because it sounds anything like an iambic pentameter or even contains five distinct feet, but rather because it breaks into two halves of two and a half feet each. It's sort of like a hexameter that has undergone an odd Procrustean operation. The following is (an attempt at) a typical schematization:
_ _ _ _
¯ ˘˘/ ¯ ˘˘/ ¯ | ˘˘/ ¯ ˘˘/ ¯ ˘˘ / ¯ ¯_ _
¯ ˘˘/ ¯ ˘˘/ ¯ | ¯ ˘˘ ¯ ˘˘ ¯
Samuel Taylor Coleridge helpfully illustrates the rhythm for English readers:
Īn thĕ hĕ / xāmĕtĕr / rīsĕs | thĕ / fo͞unta͞in’s / sīlvĕry̆ / cōlŭmn,
Īn thĕ pĕn / tāmĕtĕr / āye || fāllĭng ĭn mēlŏdy̆ bāck.1
Coleridge’s couplet, while perfectly correct, is notably dactyl-heavy, no doubt because dactyls are a bit easier to hear in English than spondees. Interestingly, Ovid’s first couplet is even more dactylic than Coleridge’s, insisting on its epic lope all the way up until the elegiac thump of conveniente modis:
Ārmă gră / vī nŭmĕ / rō | vĭŏl / ēntăquĕ / bēllă pă / rābām
ēdĕrĕ, / mātĕrĭ / ā || cōnvĕnĭēntĕ mŏdīs.
pār ĕrăt / īnfĕrĭ / ōr vēr / sūs—rī / sīssĕ Cŭ / pīdō
dīcĭtŭr / ātque ͞u / nūm || sūrrĭpŭīssĕ pĕdēm.Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound forth—in weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure. The second verse was equal to the first—but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot.
This translation, from Grant Showerman’s 1914 Loeb edition, is perfectly serviceable, except in one respect: his prose renders Ovid’s metrical game unintelligible. No evidence of Cupid’s alleged theft has been permitted. The problem is not simply solved by a verse rendering: Kit Marlowe’s 1599 version of the Amores, the gold standard in many ways, also garbles Ovid’s jeu d’esprit and leaves it inaccessible:
With Muse prepared, I meant to sing of arms,
Choosing a subject fit for fierce alarms:
Both verses were alike till Love (men say)
Began to smile and took one foot away.
No feet have been stolen in the making of these couplets, nor do the verses appear unalike in any meaningful sense. Marlowe translates the meaning of Ovid’s Latin, but not the relationship of his meaning to his form; or I might say, his translation fails to ‘actualize’ Ovid’s ‘mimesis.’
In the Amores, Ovid is not so much writing about love as writing about writing about love.
“Actualized mimesis” is a term coined by Prof. Scheherazade Khan2, who applies it to everyday objects which, over the course of normal use, mimetically represent some other scene or process. So the 3D-printed Julius Caesar pencil-holders I wanted to give as prizes to Latin students, unbeknownst to me, are examples of actualized mimesis: by using them in the ordinary way (inserting pencils) you are stabbing Caesar in the back on the Ides of March. Or the silver Tantalus bowl, found in Vinkovci, Croatia, which furnishes the most elaborate example of an ancient ‘greedy cup’—fill it too full, and it drains out on the drinker, revealing a little statue of Tantalus in the center, perched on a rock, circumscribed by a quote from Phaedrus’ Fabulae: Avari describuntur quos circumfluit usus bonorum, sed nil possunt tangere (“Herein are depicted the Greedy, around whom flows the enjoyment of good things, none of which they can touch”). Ovid’s poem is obviously not an object of this sort, but it is mimetic: in conjunction with the story Ovid tells, the meter he tells it in, both visually and sonically, provides evidence of its truth, wherein the missing metrical foot suggests his passion-distracted state. Since Ovid’s poem is itself a mimetic object, any translation which does not “actualize” this mimesis in its own terms will miss out on the poem’s animating wit.
Amores 1.1 is not the only poem in which Ovid makes explicit / mimetic reference to his signature meter. Amores 3.1 depicts a contest between personifications of Elegy and Tragedy as each genre vies for the young prodigy’s attentions. Tragedy stalks out with a grim expression, stomping violently, brandishing a royal scepter and wearing the high-laced buskins which made dramatic actors look taller and more imposing. By contrast, Elegy smells nice and is far less intimidating, though she has a bit of a limp, since one of her legs is longer than the other:
venit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos,
et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat.
forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis,
et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat.[C]ame Elegy with coil of odorous locks, and, I think, one foot longer than its mate. She had a comely form, her robe was gauzy light, her face suffused with love, and the fault in her carriage added to her grace. [Showerman]
Elegia came with hairs perfumèd sweet,
And one, I think, was longer, of her feet:
A decent form, thin robe, a lover’s look,
By her foot’s blemish greater grace she took. [Marlowe]
I will quote the passage at a bit greater length in my own version, to hint at how I think a Marlovian translation needs to go about “actualizing” Ovid’s mimesis, to catch the winking metapoetry which is the passage’s essence:
I’m strolling there, in dappled shade, perplexed
about what work my Muse will ask for next,
when Elegy, with scented tresses tied,
approached me with short steps and rhyming stride—
lovely, her looks of love and gauzy dress,
her mince the essence of her loveliness. 10
And Tragedy came, long-legged and stalking starkly,
robes trailing on the ground, eyes scowling darkly,
her left hand brandishing a regal rod,
in thigh-high Lydian boots sublimely shod.
I confess that I left both Amores 1.1 and 3.1 out of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse because I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Like Marlowe, I was committed to translating elegiac couplets into heroic ones, a commitment which in that book went beyond the individual work of Ovid’s Amores, even beyond the genre of Latin love elegy, to encompass all the many kinds of poems written in elegiacs in both Greek and Latin. But in turning now to focus specifically on love elegy, why should I maintain this quasi-heroic commitment to rhyme, especially if it leads me to such anti-Procrustean measures as lengthening a leg, or changing a limp to a mince (a frog to a prince)? Unfortunately, I do not know how to answer this question epigrammatically. In what follows, I shall try to explain my thought process by taking you on a little journey down a road with three forks: the first fork forks between metrical and non-metrical translation; taking the metrical path, we are soon faced with a choice between foreignization (imitation of Ovid’s Latin meter) or domestication (use of a meter native to English); and having selected the latter path, we must still find our way onto the Heroic Couplet Turnpike Road.
At the first fork, where one road was marked “With Meter” and the other “Without Meter,” I didn’t dither long. For me, it was a non-choice. A metrical poet myself, I can’t see why I should translate metrical poetry without it; I don’t grudge anyone else their preferences but, like Bartleby, I prefer not to. It seems to me that poems do not get themselves written in meter by accident; even if we read a finished poem with more interest in the writer’s sensibility than her scansion, we’d be wrong to think of meter as a restraint inhibiting free expression rather than a heuristic facilitating it. A professor of mine once opined to the effect that “Meter gives the conscious mind something to do while you write down what you didn’t know you knew,”3 and this is my feeling as well. For what it’s worth, I suspect that in the absence of its elegiac meter the Amores, far from being an even greater work, would likely not exist at all. But no contrafactuals are needed to say that meter is integral to my experience in reading the Amores and Ovid’s in writing it, and so I feel fully justified employing meter in my translation.
The second fork needs more lingering. It involves a choice between imitating Ovid’s Latin elegiacs or adopting a meter native to English. This choice falls on the continuum famously established by Friedrich Schleiermacher between “foreignizing” and “domesticating” translation. Schleiermacher clarifies his dichotomy as follows: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader.” Imitating Ovid’s elegiacs therefore falls under the rubric of “foreignizing” (moving the reader towards the writer), while using a native English form is “domesticating” (moving the writer toward the reader). The broad-minded Schleiermacher throws his own considerable weight onto the side of “foreignizing.” Indeed, poems 1.1 and 3.1 are themselves among the best arguments for a foreignizing or imitative approach to translating Ovid’s Amores. Another good one is the sort of thing I imagine might by said by Ezra Pound, whose Cantos contain extended passages imitating Greek choral meters,4 and who played modernist mystagogue to a variety of then-underread poetic traditions: this argument has to do with the siren song of strangeness. Readers of such metrically imitative translations may not know quite what is going on metrically, but in the unusual rhythms they hear an enlivening tautness and zing which zaps them out of their iambic stupor. Verse forms borrowed from another language can release new energies into any poetic tradition, including English, expanding the possibilities of the language, as in the case of the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum and ghazal.
Against this Poundian pontification (which, for the record, I am quite sympathetic to) I must set my conviction that meter is more than sound: it also carries meaning, but only when grasped by the mind as well as the ear. As a Latin teacher, I am content to bring the people to the poet (or, in the case of my middle school charges, to drag them there, sometimes kicking and screaming); but my responsibility as a translator points the other way. It is generally too much to expect our Saxon Shakespeares with “little Latin and less Greek” to intuit the principles, much less the historical associations, of even a well-executed English elegiac; and if they first have to digest a disquisition like this one, well, Roman readers didn’t usually put on a hardhat and boots when they picked up a poetry book, and we shouldn’t have to either. Poetry reading for pleasure may be dead, but I hope to translate as if it isn’t.
We have come to the final fork, which perhaps resembles more of a river delta, since from the road labeled Domestic Meter we can see more paths branching out than the Nile has mouths. Why do I think that, of all the options available in English, heroic couplets make the best analogue for elegiacs? Naturally, it is an approach with a long historical precedent—the first heroic couplets to appear in English, in Tottel's Miscellany, were devised specifically as a vehicle for translating Latin elegiacs—but I should not hope blindly to follow tradition just because it’s there. Happily, a number of other parallels strengthen the analogy. In both Latin and English, the heroic and elegiac constitute the second most ubiquitous metrical form (following dactylic hexameter and unrhymed iambic pentameter, aka blank verse, respectively), and both can be understood as variations of (or grafts onto) the dominant strain: just as in the elegiac couplet a standard hexameter is followed by a surgically shortened version of the same meter, in a heroic couplet (as in blank verse) a second line of iambic pentameter follows the first—only, in the couplet, with a rhyme. Sonically, at least, each alteration reveals itself late—not until the middle of the elegiac pentameter or the last word of the heroic couplet. Both forms, too, are rather more frivolous than their parental units: while it is true that the associations of heroic couplets as compared with elegiacs are more, well, heroic, they are also a lighter, wittier medium than blank verse. Most importantly, both forms are couplets, or distichs: groups of two lines, each sonically linked to the other. That the link is not merely visual (say, as when free verse lines are arranged in pairs on the page) but baked into the language clears it of arbitrariness and gratifies the sort of listening (rather than reading) public that would have flocked to Ovid’s recitationes. In any poetic form, the unit of composition—whether a stich, distich, or stanza—is also the unit of thought; it provides a channel for the poet’s mind to move through and, occasionally, resist or overflow. From my perspective, then, it is as undesirable to translate Homer or Virgil into couplets, imposing an alien ‘two-ness’ which ties the thought into a bow every other line, as it would be to translate love elegy into stichs or stanzas.
Let this much stand in favor of the Heroic Couplet Turnpike. To be completely thorough, however, I should also speak against the other obvious routes (like alternating six and five beat lines, say, without or with rhyme, or alternations of fives and fours, as in “The Mower Against Gardens” by Andrew Marvell). I have no desire to try your patience and mine by commenting on every possibility. I will only say that without rhyme, there is not enough pressure on the language and nothing to bind the couplets together; that it seems structurally important to me that each even line rhyme with each preceding odd one; and that staggered rhyme (rhyming lines of uneven lengths) feels unsatisfying and resistant to resolution in a way classical elegiac couplets, to my ear, do not. Per contra, elegiac couplets in Latin and heroic couplets in English do feel similar to me, and gratify my ear and mind in similar ways; I do not find most other English options similarly enjoyable. Luckily for those who have grown bone-weary of rhyming couplets in classical translations, there are plenty of rhymeless versions available. Which is why every translation, and every translator, should take Virgil’s tag as a personal motto: Non omnia possumus omnes.
Poetry reading for pleasure may be dead, but I hope to translate as if it isn’t.
This reflection brings me back around to Amores 1.1. The opening four lines of the poem are not the only place where Ovid refers explicitly to his meter of choice; he returns to the subject in the last four lines:
Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat:
ferrea cum vestris bella valete modis!
cingere litorea flaventia tempora myrto,
Musa, per undenos emodulanda pedes!In six numbers let my work rise, and sink again in five. Ye iron wars, with your measures, fare ye well! Gird with the myrtle that loves the shore the golden locks on thy temples, O Muse to be sung to the lyre in elevens! [Showerman]
Let my first verse be six, my last five feet:
Farewell stern war, for blunter poets meet!
Elegian muse, that warblest amorous lays,
Girt my shine brow with seabank myrtle sprays. [Marlowe]
It would be tough to be much more explicit than this about metrical matters. What is the poor heroic coupleteer to do? How can one ‘actualize Ovid’s mimesis’ while leveling the lines in the Marlovian manner? In the end, I did two things. First, the solution given in 3.1 above, in which elegy’s limp is transformed into a mince, suggests the kind of alteration I felt was justified. In my translation, Cupid does not steal a foot, he slips in a rhyme, and the “Elegian muse” is not “sung to the lyre in elevens,” she is “woo[ed] in rhyming pairs.” As I said above, Ovid’s wit is underscored by a long association of elegiac couplets and love poetry, which I’ve tried to echo in my own version by conjuring the natural association between couplets and coupling. However, the fastidious Latin student in me, dreading the red slash marks of a disappointed professor, felt that to get a fuller sense of this poem in particular, a “foreignizing” version, imitating Ovid’s elegiacs as in the Coleridge squib, might be useful. In an eventual translation of the Amores, I hope to include the heroic couplet version in the text, and the elegiac version either in notes or an appendix—a solution which satisfies my conscience even as it points out a road not taken in the book as a whole.
Read my translations HERE.
The persnickety reader will forgive my use of macrons, which mark syllable quantity as in Latin, rather than the more accurate slash (/) usual for noting stress (a syllable quality) in English verse.
“Actualized Mimesis and the Processual Animation of Greco-Roman Objects.” Summary here. I met Prof. Khan recently following a talk I gave at Penn, on “Voice [in Translation] as a Problem of Technique,” which I’m going to be portioning out here over the coming weeks. She kindly sent me the first chapter of her dissertation along with many images of relevant objects, for which, much thanks!
James Merrill attributes this idea to W.H. Auden in a letter to Torren Blair in January 1995 (with thanks to Austin Allen for unearthing it): “Auden’s rationale for formal “constraints”—which ideally set free more than they constrain—was that your conscious mind would be so occupied with finding a rhyme or an amphibrach (look it up) that your subconscious filled enough of the gap to supply things you could never have come up with on your own.”
I *believe* that the brilliant Jim Powell demonstrates this feature of the Cantos at length in an article called “The Light of Vers Libre,” published in the Spring 1979 issue of Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. But I am not sure because I read the article a long time ago and at present lack the wherewithal to go dig it up.