Metamorphoses

A translation worthy of the name is as much the product of a literary epoch as it is of the brain and labor of a scholar, and Melmoth's version of the letters of Pliny the Younger, made, as it was, at a period when the art of English letter-writing had attained its highest excellence, may well be the despair of our twentieth-century apostles of specialization.

Who today could imbue a translation of the Golden Ass with the exquisite flavor of William Adlington's unscholarly version of that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hickey's masterly rendering of Lucian's True History? But eternal life means endless change, and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever-changing tissue of the living.

Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts had improved the text.

In the case of an author, whose characters speak in the argot proper of their surroundings, the necessity for revision is even more imperative.

For in the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion as matters of the public state and life economical.

Do you believe upon your conscience that Homer, while he was acouching his Iliads and Odysseys, had any thought upon those allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides, Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion, which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as the gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

Though a certain gully-gut friar, Frère Lubin Croque-Hardon, and true bacon-picker, would have undertaken to prove it, if perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, and as the proverb says, a lid worthy of such a kettle.

If you give no credit thereto, why do not you the same in these jovial new chronicles of mine? Albeit when I did dictate them, I thought upon no more than you, who possibly were drinking the whilst, as I was.

Yeah.

And, you know, De Ponte's drawing on things from Ovid's Metamorphoses and Orlando Furioso, and these are landmarks of that genre as well.

All of which kind of culminates in the next century with Rigoletto and the Duke of Mantua singing La Donna Immobile.

Yeah.

The first lines of Homer in his Iliad and his Odyssey, the first line of Musaeus in his song of Hero and Leander, the beginning of Hesiod in his poem of Works and Days, and several others furnish us with sufficient examples of this kind.

Nor does Ovid leave out this piece of devotion, as he begins his stories of the Metamorphoses.

Christianity so much the more obliges us, by the precepts of Scripture, to invoke the assistance of the true God in all our labors of the mind, for the improvement of ourselves and others.

Bishop Saunderson says that study without prayer is atheism, as well as that prayer without study is presumption.

And yeah, I think they all kind of, that is evil, right? What's more evil than that in given a certain social context of reality and how you put yourself within and how you place yourself, not only within your relations, you know, horizontally to other people, but how you see yourself in sort of a cosmic, role.

Yeah, just this week, Finch and I read an English-language retelling of Bacchus and Philemon, which comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is entirely about Jupiter and Mercury going to visit a town and being in disguise and being rejected by everybody until they meet this poor old couple who do actually give them everything that they've got.

And then, of course, Jupiter and Mercury reward them.

It's a is all about the importance of these hospitality laws.

He passes through caves and palaces of mottled ore, gold dome and crystal wall and turquoise floor, black polished porticos of awful shade and, at the last, a diamond balustrade.

Line 594 and the suggestion as before is that of a great and wonderful beauty but a beauty that is hard and cold and without life such as is usually felt to be the characteristic of the greater part of classical poetry the magic fountains but now endymion comes upon a new marvel the path which he is following brings him just above the silvery heads of a thousand fountains so that he could dash the waters with his spear but at the splash done heedlessly those spouting columns rose sudden a poplar's height and gan to enclose his diamond path with fretwork streaming round alive Line 603 endymion dwelt long on the strangeness of the scene and the detail with which it is described suggests that he gave to it the same close attention as he had previously devoted to the temple which he had reached in the earlier part of his wanderings the whole description may at first appear fantastic in the extreme but following the clue that has led us to this point we recognise that keats is telling us how after his study of virgil he went on to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the poems of ovid more especially with the metamorphoses every minute's space so the description runs the streams with changed magic interlace sometimes like delicatest lattices covered with crystal vines then weeping trees moving about as in a gentle wind which in a wink to watery gores refined poured into shapes of curtained canopies spangled and rich with liquid broideries of flowers peacocks swans and naiads fair swifter than lightning went these wonders rare and then the water into stubborn streams collecting mimicked the wrought oaken beams pillars and frieze and high fantastic roof of those dusk places in times far aloof cathedrals called line six hundred and thirteen oberts metamorphoses It was from Ovid's Metamorphoses, says Colvin, as Englished by that excellent Jacobean translator, George Sandys, that Keats, more than from any other source,

made himself familiar with the details of classic fable.

Evidences of this are strewn freely over the pages of Endymion.