Transforming ourselves into beasts
Peter Levi
TALES FROM OVID by Ted Hughes Faber, £14.99, £7.99, pp. 256 It must be 100 years since Maurice Baring remembered in print how an Eton master, enquiring what class he was waiting for, commented 'Oh, that hog Ovid!' But Ovid, as the young Baring remarked later, Is not a hog. All the same, it has taken a century or more to make him one of the most appetising to us of all Roman writers. How has the trick been achieved, if not by following him backwards from his influence on Shakespeare and on his translations from Marlowe onwards? Yet his poetry, modestly sharpened in sex and violence, admittedly, by the Poet Laureate, reads like something from the folldore move- ment, that might have been admired by Yeats and William Morris. Indeed, it seems a pity that these selections have missed their ideal illustrations which might have been by Arthur Rackham. I have always liked the Metamorphoses, and these transla- tions are perfect for the 1990s.
You cannot have everything, of course. References to the Caesars and to amber created for Roman women inject a note of bathos, and the whole idea of a continuous history of transformations down to the apothesis of Aeneas, and the catastasis of Julius Caesar as a comet, has to be swept under the carpet. I was personally grieved by the loss of Cerambus, who was turned into a stag-beetle for offending the nymphs by refusing to observe the set times for moving flocks down from the mountains. Why a stag-beetle I cannot imagine, but difficulties of scale make many transfigura- tions all the more terrifying. Ascalaphus turning into an owl is measured and terrify- ing, yet Narcissus is far more convincing as a flower than he was as a boy. I fear from this last case and that of Salmacis and the composition of the first Hermaphrodite, that Ted Hughes cannot summon up the homosexual lechery which is available to the best Ovidian poets.
Nor are his gods perfectly convincing, but then neither are Ovid's, and he is excel- lent with Ceres as a witch, and the oak that dooms Erisychthon. Ovid did, after all, have a strain of vulgarity that one might call hoggish, and Ted Hughes does not like to follow that. He is not addicted to Ovid's rhetoric, which had become second nature to the ancient world, though the Laureate retains more appetite for paradoxes than most poets of his age. His treatment of Pyramus and Thisbe, a story Shakespeare mocks, and of Venus and Adonis, which Shakespeare treated with an astonishing freshness, is evenly brilliant and makes one think again twice. There is a certain grandiosity, a long- windedness about Ovid that can curl around every subject like an octopus and never tire between heaven and earth, which is beyond the range of any selection. or adaptation. The verse has a laureate solidi- ty, and now and again pleasantly recalls the iambic pentameter, so that it would be hard to parody. Has anything much been lost by abandoning old-fashioned English metres and old-fashioned linguistic restraint and severity? Not as much as you might darkly expect. Ovid, as he is treated here, is fresh and shocking in the precision of his cruelty, the sensuous pushing of his lechery, which was remarkable even in his Roman heyday. One can see through the translation that he took a lot from Virgil, but only like a dog tugging pieces from a carcass: Virgil as a living animal is too great a poet for his comprehension, yet it may be from just such lesser poets as Ovid, with his more obvious insights, that we should seek to learn, because we have become, in a way, barbarians.
We need some notes, which we do not get, about the Corinthian Bacchiae and Eymanthis, let along `Harmonia', if we are not to have recourse to long, full commen- taries. The introduction is one of those admirably written short essays for which the Laureate is famous, but it could be lengthened with no harm done. Some of the geography in the translation comes out extremely queerly, let alone the names of persons, which are queer enough in Ovid: Pandion, King of Athens, for example, who was only the personification of the Pandia, the feast of Zeus. 'King Pandion he is dead, and all his minions lapped in lead': that is all the old-fashioned reader of poetry ever called to mind about him. There are many more exciting phrases in Ted Hughes, but none more oddly memo- rable.
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