POETS Day! Ovid’s The Amores

My beach book choices tend towards mystery or comedy. I see a lot of thrillers on condo rental shelves and a few romances. People hide romances though, so I’m sure what I’ve seen is not representative. Elmore Leonard deserves a category of his own unless he wants to share it with Carl Hiaasen. Whatever gets sold in an airport likely fits the beach book bill. That and Ovid.

Romance readers are voracious. My wife’s in publishing so I pick up tidbits here and there I can repeat with an unearned air of authority. Romance is the highest earning genre. 2022: 33% of books sold in mass market paper back have Fabio ripping someone’s bodice featured on the cover. Formats that don’t require readers to tear off or otherwise hide from judging eyes Fabio’s rippled abs and radiant pecs account for 60% of all the genre’s sales. E-books let Romance fans read while hanging out by the pool without a miscued cabana boy thinking the lady needs comforting or raised brows from fellow vacationers or worse (in-laws.)

With no burly-esque cover art, e-readers are free to move about the country. Perception matters. People don’t want to have to explain themselves or be thought of as lesser. A kindle denies any stigma apportioning, but that’s all it does. In the big ledger of literary respect from strangers, staying out of the red is important, but what if you want racy tales that put you in the black?

Nobody knows a damn thing about Ovid anymore. Back in the incunabular internet days I roamed AOL chat rooms under the name Ovid567 (or whatever the number.) I had no idea what he wrote about. I thought it sounded cool and Publius was taken more times than my apparent originality limit of 566. Ovid is of “Classical” and to too many that means staid and boring, appropriate to church, hearth, and starched speeches that can be called oratory. Read Ovid in public and everyone assumes you’re tied to academia.

My copy of his collected erotic poems is unfortunately titled The Erotic Poems, but it’s a miniscule presence on the spine and placed low enough on the front cover that normal holding position lets the left hand obscure it. The cover photo of two lithe naked statue ladies lightly brushing up against one another isn’t a sticking point either. Marble fondlers are museum things. Nobody leers at rocks anymore. The important thing about the cover is the name “Ovid,” striking orange writ modestly but larger than the finger screened front title. Reading this book about adultery and puerile gratification makes you appear as a role model for all those wayward Bourne Identitarians sneaking sunglass covered peeks at bronzed (not statues) co-eds wearing less than expected while sporting well considered and tasteful tattoos.

It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and enjoy a Friday afternoon by the pool with a good book that makes you look even better. Spring Break is winding up and I know this would have done more good a week ago. Sorry for that. I thought about it when I thought about it. Summer beach time is coming. Keep it in your pocket for later.

***

Christopher Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s The Amores is fantastic. I think you have to say that, or no one will take you seriously. His is wonderful poetry, as would be expected, but it’s wonderful poetry at the expense of conspiracy. Worth the price, but notable.

Penguin Classic put out a translation by Peter Green. I’m usually wary of anything that I’ve known as dense presented as relatable. I watch out for too relatable. As a kid, I read early stuff by P.J. O’Rourke about the Heritage USA gift shop and The Bible in English Just Like Jesus Talked. Tongue in cheek, but that stuck with me. I’ve come across some pretty bad Ovid translations. J.J. Howard’s bowdlerized take on The Metamorphoses hogs that spotlight, hand shot skyward yelling “Me! Ooh! Ooh! Pick Me!” Green’s is immensely relatable and not as inspired as Marlowe’s but I’m right there with Ovid; part his enabler, part his shocked confessor, practically his lookout – even when you want to look away.

My problem with Marlowe’s translation stems from my perception (this is as good a time as any to remind everybody – if it isn’t apparent enough – that I’m by no means an academic and my approach is as a fan, a consumer of poetry) that in many cases meter held supremacy over custom to a degree that pronunciations would be warped to synch with rhythm. I’ve written about this here before: Spenser requires the word to be pronounced “QUICK- sand” and “quick-SAND” in the same poem, “-ed” is treated as a separate syllable where it would normally not be, and Gabriel Harvey refusing “car-PEN-ter” as a bridge to far. Marlowe isn’t quite as doctrinaire as Spenser, but he has a crowbar.

Marlowe fixed the The Amores in iambic pentameter. That’s his right as an American (please clap) and it was his forte. If the author of Tamburlaine wants to press his preferred poetics on a classical work to bring it forth for a new audience, there’s hardly room to object. It is beyond me, and I mean that in the literal sense where I expect there’s a reasonable answer that’s teasingly out of my breadth, why the man Swinburne called “the creator of English blank verse” would impose rhyming couplets on a work that never rhymed in the first place. He clearly knew his audience and what mattered to them because here I am nitpicking what I wouldn’t have read had he not made something endurable.

Ovid wrote The Amores in elegiac couplets; alternating lines of hexameter and pentameter, meaning first a line of six stresses and then five. It shouldn’t make a lot of sense when Marlowe translates lines of Ovid making self-referential light of his 6/5 format.

from Green, book 1, elegy 1, lines 1-6 (1.1.1-6)

Arms, warfare, violence – I was winding up to produce a
Regular epic, with verse-form to match –
Hexameter, naturally. But Cupid (they say) with a snicker
Lopped off one foot from each alternate line.
‘Nasty young brat,’ I told him, ‘who made you Inspector of meters?’
We poets come under the Muses, we’re not in your mob.

That would seem a trap for Marlowe and his strict pentameter, but he artfully avoids a trap and makes of it what I think one of the most cleverly conceived bits of his version.

from Marlowe, 1.1.5-10

With Muse upreard I meant to sing of armes,
Choosing a subject fit for feirse alarmes:
Both verses were alike till Love (men say)
Began to smile and tooke one foote away.
Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line?
We are the Muses prophets, none of thine.

Marlowe winks at his audience and pulls a slight where it’s him rather than Cupid who’s a “Rash boy” rather than a “Nasty young brat” robbing lines of syllables. Instead of pulling the syllable from the second paired line of a heroic couplet, he assumes Ovid’s set and pulls it from the first leaving a pentameter pair. I really like that and disagree with anyone who points out that smarty pants “Actually… see what I did there?” maneuvers lead to getting eye stabbed.

That Marlowe addressed the issue in the beginning should be enough, but for whatever reason, when he doesn’t mock his own choice to match Ovid’s self-mockery, I’m bothered.

from Green, 1.1.27-28

So let my verse with six stresses, drop to five on the downbeat –
Goodbye to martial epic, and epic metre too!

from Marlowe, 1.1.27-28

Let my first verse be sixe, my last five feete,
Fare well sterne warre, for blunter Poets meete.

That ends the section introduced by the first quotes just twenty lines earlier and so is more than explained by the first wink, but it bothers me.

I much prefer when Marlowe deflects.

from Green, 2.17.17-23

A sea-nymph (the story goes) bedded down with Pelius, Egregia
Made it with Numa the Just,
And Vulcan has rights over Venus, despite his smithy
And that shameful twisted limp.
Well, look at the metre I’m using – that limps. But together
Long and short lines combine
In a heroic couplet.

from Marlowe, 2.17.17-22

Who doubts, with Pelius, Thetis did consort,
Egeria with just Numa had good sport,
Venus with Vulcan, though smiths tooles laide by,
With his stumpe-foote he halts ill-favouredly.
This kinde of verse is not alike, yet fit,
With shorter numbers the heroicke sit.

Marlowe saddle “yet fit” with a burden, but it works.

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Peter Green explains his metric choices. I understand one of the issues of translation from Latin to English (again, fan) as matching pace and tone when adapting the Latin stress-based measurements for English stress/syllable ones. He built on the work of others.

“The problem of the hexameter had already been tackled, with some success, by Cecil Day Lewis [LINK] and Richard Lattimore… [They] went for the beat, the ictus, and let the metre take care of itself… It was the late Gilbert Highet… who first extended these ideas to the elegiac couplet… representing the pentameter by a variable short-stopped line with anything from five to two main stresses.”

Green’s poetry is impressive, but his telling seems geared towards story telling where Marlowe’s does the inverse. My thought is Ovid’s practiced poetry was put to service his higher goal of titillation and narrative. I find myself referring to Green for simple enjoyment – that’s what Ovid’s for. He’s not as polished as Marlowe and so for my money, truer to the purpose of the poem. “It’s just us guys here.”

from Green, 2.7

Am I always to be on trial against new accusations?
Pleading my case so often, win or lose, is a bore.
Suppose we’re at the theatre: one backward glance , and your jealous
Eye will deduce a mistress up in the gods.
Any good-looking woman need only quiz me – at once you’re
Convinced it’s a put-up job.
If I say a girl’s nice, you try to tear my hair out;
If I damn her, you think I’m covering up.
If my complexion is healthy, that means I’ve gone off you:
If pale, then I’m dying of love for someone else.
How I wish I’d some genuine infidelity on my conscience –
The guilty find punishment easier to take.
But by such wild accusations and false assumptions
You devalue your rage. Don’t forget
How the wretched long-eared ass, when too heavily beaten,
Gets stubborn, goes slow.
And now this fresh ‘crime’ – I’ve been having an affair with
Cypassis, your lady’s-maid!
If I really wanted some fun on the side, I ask you, would I
Pick a lower-class drudge? God forbid –
What gentleman would fancy making love to a servant,
Embracing that lash-scarred back?
Besides, she’s an expert coiffeuse, her skilful styling
Has made her your favorite. What?
Proposition a maid so devoted to her mistress?
Not likely. She’d turn me down – and blab.
By Venus and the bow of her winged offspring,
I protest my innocence!

from Green, 2.8.1-8

O expert in creating a thousand hairstyles, worthy
To have none but goddesses form your clientele,
Cypassis! – and (as far as I know from our stolen pleasures)
No country beginner: just right
For your mistress, but righter for me – what malicious gossip
About our sleeping together? I didn’t blush, did I,
Or blurt out some telltale phrase?

At 2.13.25-26, the poet identifies himself as the poetic persona: “With a label reading ‘From Ovid, in grateful thanks for Corinna’s / Recovery…” At least it seems so. If true, he deserved his exile. The moments of lovable rogue are left mumbling in the corner about the weather, pretending to pick at something under a fingernail. What’s autobiography? What’s fiction? No idea.

from Green, 2.8.9-28

I’m sorry I told her no man in his proper sense
Could go overboard for a maid –
Achilles fell madly in love with his maid, Briseis,
Agamemnon was besotted by the slave –
Priestess Cassandra. I can’t pretend to be socially up on
Those two – then why should I despise
What’s endorsed by royalty? Anyway, when Corinna
Shot you a dirty look, you blushed right up.
It was my presence of mind, if you remember, that saved us.
When I swore that convincing oath –
(Venus, goddess, please make the warm siroccos
Blow my innocent perjury out to sea!)
I did you a good turn. Now it’s time for repayment.
Dusky Cypassis, I want to sleep with you. Today.
Don’t shake your head and play scared, you ungrateful creature,
You’re under a condominium of two
And only one’s satisfied. If you’re silly enough to refuse, I’ll
Reveal all we’ve done in the past, betray my own
Betrayal. I’ll tell your mistress just where we met, and how often,
And how many times we did it, and in what ways!