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In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
174 pages
First published January 1, 1978
90 people are currently reading
2724 people want to read
About the author
David Malouf
85 books301 followersDavid Malouf is a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian and European influences in his work. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian and European influences in his work. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 304 reviews
June 14, 2022
An Imaginary Life is brief but it is profound, sad and wise.
Civilization and wild nature - are they in collision? May they be reconciled? Wise old poet Ovid and a wild child of nature in the end understand each other better than all the Roman nobles could understand the poet.
And the final metamorphosis is death.
Civilization and wild nature - are they in collision? May they be reconciled? Wise old poet Ovid and a wild child of nature in the end understand each other better than all the Roman nobles could understand the poet.
I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that which drives us on to what we must finally become… This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis.
And the final metamorphosis is death.
June 15, 2021
5★
“The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.”
This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known.
“I am describing a state of mind, no place. I am in exile here. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”
For man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody.
“But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”
As a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation.
“When I first saw the child I cannot say. I see myself — I might be three or four years old — playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.”
When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. His memories and his dreams and his very different life change him. He waits anxiously for the next hunting season so he can search for the elusive boy.
Ovid writes this as if it were a letter. Whether anyone ever reads it or not doesn’t matter. He must write. It’s what he does.
“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man's poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?”
Yes. For a couple of thousand years, in fact.
Gradually, Ovid comes to appreciate and respect the old people who keep the customs and traditions alive and who are kind to him while being very suspicious of his strangeness.
This is wonderful storytelling, like a poetic saga you might hear told at night by a fire. There are herbs and potions, fevers, a shaman, and the stuff of dreams or nightmares. Not a long book, but certainly a memorable one.
“The child is there. I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.”
This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known.
“I am describing a state of mind, no place. I am in exile here. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”
For man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody.
“But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”
As a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation.
“When I first saw the child I cannot say. I see myself — I might be three or four years old — playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.”
When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. His memories and his dreams and his very different life change him. He waits anxiously for the next hunting season so he can search for the elusive boy.
Ovid writes this as if it were a letter. Whether anyone ever reads it or not doesn’t matter. He must write. It’s what he does.
“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man's poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?”
Yes. For a couple of thousand years, in fact.
Gradually, Ovid comes to appreciate and respect the old people who keep the customs and traditions alive and who are kind to him while being very suspicious of his strangeness.
This is wonderful storytelling, like a poetic saga you might hear told at night by a fire. There are herbs and potions, fevers, a shaman, and the stuff of dreams or nightmares. Not a long book, but certainly a memorable one.
April 6, 2016
“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man’s poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?” (p.12)
"Statuia lui Ovidiu" by Ettore Ferrari
(Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 ro via Wikimedia Commons)
David Malouf’s prose deserves a 5 star rating. The Australian author is a true master when it comes to describe landscapes, scenery, nature, and human emotions. His writing style is beautiful, hypnotic, and at times simply breath-taking.
“Winter here is a time of slow-smoldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year’s darkness and the cold drives us closer together and further apart.” (p.96)
In his novel ‘An Imaginary Life’ Malouf sets out to share his ideas of what could have happened in Tomis, a place near the Black Sea at the edge of the Roman Empire, where the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17/18 AD) was exiled in 8 AD by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Very little is known about Ovid’s exile: our knowledge derives from Ovid’s writing such as ‘Epistulae ex Pontus’ and ‘Tristia’ ( The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters) and these sources are far from being reliable. In Malouf’s work Ovid himself undergoes a ‘Metamorphoses’ (*) in Tomis when he meets a wild uncivilized boy who grew up among animals. Here Malouf draws from the experience of J.M.G. Itard and his observations of Victor, which led to the publication of Wild Boy of Aveyron. In Malouf’s fictional story, however, the question arises as to whether Ovid is going to educate the child or vice versa…
In the story the urbane and sophisticated Ovid, who in real life wrote didactic poetry about “Cosmetics for the Female Face” (Medicamina faciei femineae), is utterly transformed by his encounter with the uncivilized, raw nature. For the reader who knows Ovid’s work this is hard to believe and, as even Malouf admits, “would have surprised the real poet.":
“But that is exactly the point” writes Malouf in his afterword: “My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display.” (p.156).
This sounds very challenging and I think it is – for both the writer and the reader. Even tough Malouf’s use of the English language has been a wonderful experience for me, he eventually looses one star and gets a solid four star rating from me: While reading Ovid’s transformation I could not overcome a growing ‘New Age’ feeling of the 80’s as, for example, in the following passage:
“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall to come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.” (p.134)
This feeling, of course, is my personal, subjective experience. Unfortunately, it prevents me from categorising his work as a “Modern Classic”, even though Malouf’s prose would absolutely deserve it.
“An Imaginary Life” has been my first reading experience of David Malouf and I am happy to have found another great contemporary author.
(*) Metamorphoses Ovid’s best-known poem on Greek Mythology
"Statuia lui Ovidiu" by Ettore Ferrari
(Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 ro via Wikimedia Commons)
David Malouf’s prose deserves a 5 star rating. The Australian author is a true master when it comes to describe landscapes, scenery, nature, and human emotions. His writing style is beautiful, hypnotic, and at times simply breath-taking.
“Winter here is a time of slow-smoldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year’s darkness and the cold drives us closer together and further apart.” (p.96)
In his novel ‘An Imaginary Life’ Malouf sets out to share his ideas of what could have happened in Tomis, a place near the Black Sea at the edge of the Roman Empire, where the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17/18 AD) was exiled in 8 AD by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Very little is known about Ovid’s exile: our knowledge derives from Ovid’s writing such as ‘Epistulae ex Pontus’ and ‘Tristia’ ( The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters) and these sources are far from being reliable. In Malouf’s work Ovid himself undergoes a ‘Metamorphoses’ (*) in Tomis when he meets a wild uncivilized boy who grew up among animals. Here Malouf draws from the experience of J.M.G. Itard and his observations of Victor, which led to the publication of Wild Boy of Aveyron. In Malouf’s fictional story, however, the question arises as to whether Ovid is going to educate the child or vice versa…
In the story the urbane and sophisticated Ovid, who in real life wrote didactic poetry about “Cosmetics for the Female Face” (Medicamina faciei femineae), is utterly transformed by his encounter with the uncivilized, raw nature. For the reader who knows Ovid’s work this is hard to believe and, as even Malouf admits, “would have surprised the real poet.":
“But that is exactly the point” writes Malouf in his afterword: “My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display.” (p.156).
This sounds very challenging and I think it is – for both the writer and the reader. Even tough Malouf’s use of the English language has been a wonderful experience for me, he eventually looses one star and gets a solid four star rating from me: While reading Ovid’s transformation I could not overcome a growing ‘New Age’ feeling of the 80’s as, for example, in the following passage:
“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall to come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us.” (p.134)
This feeling, of course, is my personal, subjective experience. Unfortunately, it prevents me from categorising his work as a “Modern Classic”, even though Malouf’s prose would absolutely deserve it.
“An Imaginary Life” has been my first reading experience of David Malouf and I am happy to have found another great contemporary author.
(*) Metamorphoses Ovid’s best-known poem on Greek Mythology
July 3, 2018
Malouf's language is that of a poet, fitting for a book whose narrator is exiled Roman poet and writer, Ovid.
The obvious themes are exile and the isolation that comes from effectively losing your own language, surrounded by people whose language and culture are vastly different from your own. He finds their customs and speech barbarous.
'I am in exile here.
I have …been cast out into what is yet another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human, who have not yet entered society and become Roman under the law.
But they are, even so, of our species’.
Although Ovid doesn’t understand thewords, he understands the ‘tunes’ – regret, anger, soothing a child, the patterns of a story he heard as a child, in another language.
He faces having to learn the world again, like a child, through the sense, with ‘all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue’.
Language and the nature of existence are also themes of the book. Malouf's language is often mystical, with meaning slightly out of reach, needing to be sought; the nature of existence unfixed and increasingly permeable .
Malouf is deeply interested in myth, here partly represented by the wild Child, partly in the narrator's dream sequences, and in the translations from one life form to another (metamorphoses) that occur throughout. Dreams take Ovid into mystical places, visited by gods in whom he doesn’t believe, greeted in an unknown language in which he speaks as he wakes.
Ovid slowly adapts to life in the village, learns to make nets, accompanies the men on hunting expeditions. On one of these he sees the wild Child, and is not content until he has persuaded the village men, perhaps three years later, to capture the boy, and bring him inside the village walls.
The Child lives in Ovid’s room, trussed at first, then gradually the physical restraints are released as the narrator believes that the strings of curiosity alone will hold him.
Always accompanying the narrative thread is what I think of as the metaphysics of metamorphosis. We are invited into deeply mysterious processes – through dreams and meditations such as this:
‘we are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet catured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, amongleaveswater, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.
‘I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail.’
Then Ovid realises that he must drive out his old self and let the universe in. The spirits of animals, plants, the earth, will migrate back into us, to make us whole. ‘Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men’ (pp 95-96)
Death is part of that process, and in turn will lead to further transformation.
Malouf says that he has attributed to Ovid ‘a capacity for belief that is nowhere to be found in his own writings. But that is exactly the point. My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of “the changes” live out in reality what has been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display’.
Some of the reviews from Australia that I've read have concentrated on the shift to accepting the people and environment of a place of exile/settlement, placing Australia at the centre of their interest.
To me, focusing on this aspect alone detracts from the book, renders it potentially prosaic, which it absolutely is not.
See, for instance
https://theconversation.com/the-case-... Dallas Baker
concentrates on the exile, and transition to acceptance of the people and environment of th new place. Comparison with Australia, at the edge of things, not quite belonging with the old world or the new.
The obvious themes are exile and the isolation that comes from effectively losing your own language, surrounded by people whose language and culture are vastly different from your own. He finds their customs and speech barbarous.
'I am in exile here.
I have …been cast out into what is yet another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human, who have not yet entered society and become Roman under the law.
But they are, even so, of our species’.
Although Ovid doesn’t understand thewords, he understands the ‘tunes’ – regret, anger, soothing a child, the patterns of a story he heard as a child, in another language.
He faces having to learn the world again, like a child, through the sense, with ‘all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue’.
Language and the nature of existence are also themes of the book. Malouf's language is often mystical, with meaning slightly out of reach, needing to be sought; the nature of existence unfixed and increasingly permeable .
Malouf is deeply interested in myth, here partly represented by the wild Child, partly in the narrator's dream sequences, and in the translations from one life form to another (metamorphoses) that occur throughout. Dreams take Ovid into mystical places, visited by gods in whom he doesn’t believe, greeted in an unknown language in which he speaks as he wakes.
Ovid slowly adapts to life in the village, learns to make nets, accompanies the men on hunting expeditions. On one of these he sees the wild Child, and is not content until he has persuaded the village men, perhaps three years later, to capture the boy, and bring him inside the village walls.
The Child lives in Ovid’s room, trussed at first, then gradually the physical restraints are released as the narrator believes that the strings of curiosity alone will hold him.
Always accompanying the narrative thread is what I think of as the metaphysics of metamorphosis. We are invited into deeply mysterious processes – through dreams and meditations such as this:
‘we are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet catured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, amongleaveswater, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.
‘I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail.’
Then Ovid realises that he must drive out his old self and let the universe in. The spirits of animals, plants, the earth, will migrate back into us, to make us whole. ‘Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men’ (pp 95-96)
Death is part of that process, and in turn will lead to further transformation.
Malouf says that he has attributed to Ovid ‘a capacity for belief that is nowhere to be found in his own writings. But that is exactly the point. My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of “the changes” live out in reality what has been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display’.
Some of the reviews from Australia that I've read have concentrated on the shift to accepting the people and environment of a place of exile/settlement, placing Australia at the centre of their interest.
To me, focusing on this aspect alone detracts from the book, renders it potentially prosaic, which it absolutely is not.
See, for instance
https://theconversation.com/the-case-... Dallas Baker
concentrates on the exile, and transition to acceptance of the people and environment of th new place. Comparison with Australia, at the edge of things, not quite belonging with the old world or the new.
July 3, 2018
Lepo se dosetio Dejvid Maluf i fino realizovao svoju ideju.
Kad na sve dodamo posvećenost prevodioca Ivane Dutli, "Zamišljeni život" izlazi na prijatno čitanje, vredno pažnje i sa drugih razloga.
Zamisao počiva na činjenici da o Ovidijevoj smrti ne znamo ništa pouzdano, što je sasvim neočekivano, obzirom da je on i za života a i kroz potonju istoriju bio izuzetno popularan, i to toliko da mu na crtu čitanosti mogu izaći još možda Šekspir i Stari Zavet. Čak i kad imamo u vidu da je iz Rima bio prognan u neku rumunsku zabit, bogu (i božanskom caru) iza leđa - opet je gotovo neverovatno da se i dan danji, dve hiljade godina nakon njegove smrti (da, to je baš ove godine :)) nagađa da li mu je grob negde oko Konstance ili, pak, u Mađarskoj ili na nekom sasvim petom mestu. Ili ga uopšte i nema.
Maluf u "Zamišljenom životu" nudi svoju verziju, sasvim fiktivnu, ali isto toliko moguću: kako je, uopšte, to moglo da se desi da se jednoj takvoj osobi izgubi svaki trag.
Kad bih sad napisala kako je to rešio, teško bih vas razuverila da nije ispatetisao - a nije, verujte. Pametno je pretpostavio da je Ovidije, sve vreme se krijući iza laprdanja, lascivnosti i neverovatnosti, vapio za sopstvenim preobražajem, ali da, ušuškan u carsko bonvivanstvo s jedne i zablenut u fantastičnu realnost života obične raje s druge strane, to ni samome sebi nije smeo da prizna. No, tom skrivanju od sebe dolazi kraj kad se nađe među varvarskim Getima čiju jednu jedinu reč ne razume, a kamoli običaje, a kamoli, tek, kad se njima desi nešto sasvim neuobičajeno. Neka to, recimo, bude krupan plan, ali nikako jedino što se na ovih sto pedesetak strana može naći.
Ako izuzmemo onomadašnje Fon Trirovo persona-non-gratiranje iz Kana i slične politikanske igrarije koje se uglavnom ispostave većom koristi nego štetom za prognanika, današnji čovek zaista teško može da zamisli šta je Grku ili Rimljaninu izgnanstvo značilo. Štaviše, u poređenju sa sibirskim kazamatima, koncentracionim logorima, giljotinama i alkatrazima, ne liči nam da je neka greda živ i zdrav se preseliti koju hiljadu kilometara od kuće. A nije zezanje, i to Maluf sasvim dobro rasvetljava, iz prvog lica, kroz Ovidijeva usta. Neka to, eto, bude neki drugi sloj.
Najviše me je ipak obradovao stil i jezik: piščev ali i prevodiočev. Ne samo što je Ovidije Malufov narator, nego i priča onako kako je pisao - laganim stilom, više opažajno nego osećajno, precizno ali nesvakidašnjim rečima, gotovo razgovorno, a opet poetski, i nema nikakve sumnje da je pisac dobar poznavalac pesnikovog opusa. Ništa manje potkovana nije ni Ivana Dutli, koja je neretko uspevala da postigne ritmičnost heksametra i da me oduševi izborom reči (šestati, snatriti, njucati, lejka, šobot, ptilica).
Sve i da baš ništa ne znate o Ovidiju, ne mari. I ako nikad niste čitali antičke pesnike, ni to ne mari. Samo će vam isprva biti malo čudna interpunkcija, glagolska vremena, raspored reči u rečenici, namerno izbegavanje sinonima i slična poigravanja, ali ništa strašno i ni blizu fazona: "paljaše inoča zublje, hotijaše sprečit' predepsu" (izmislila sam da ilustrujem prevode kakve je sasvim normalno zafrljačiti, ne znači ništa... smisleno).
Koliko vidim, drugi naslovi Dejvida Malufa nisu prevođeni. Šteta - zanimljive su mu teme i fino piše.
Kad na sve dodamo posvećenost prevodioca Ivane Dutli, "Zamišljeni život" izlazi na prijatno čitanje, vredno pažnje i sa drugih razloga.
Zamisao počiva na činjenici da o Ovidijevoj smrti ne znamo ništa pouzdano, što je sasvim neočekivano, obzirom da je on i za života a i kroz potonju istoriju bio izuzetno popularan, i to toliko da mu na crtu čitanosti mogu izaći još možda Šekspir i Stari Zavet. Čak i kad imamo u vidu da je iz Rima bio prognan u neku rumunsku zabit, bogu (i božanskom caru) iza leđa - opet je gotovo neverovatno da se i dan danji, dve hiljade godina nakon njegove smrti (da, to je baš ove godine :)) nagađa da li mu je grob negde oko Konstance ili, pak, u Mađarskoj ili na nekom sasvim petom mestu. Ili ga uopšte i nema.
Maluf u "Zamišljenom životu" nudi svoju verziju, sasvim fiktivnu, ali isto toliko moguću: kako je, uopšte, to moglo da se desi da se jednoj takvoj osobi izgubi svaki trag.
Kad bih sad napisala kako je to rešio, teško bih vas razuverila da nije ispatetisao - a nije, verujte. Pametno je pretpostavio da je Ovidije, sve vreme se krijući iza laprdanja, lascivnosti i neverovatnosti, vapio za sopstvenim preobražajem, ali da, ušuškan u carsko bonvivanstvo s jedne i zablenut u fantastičnu realnost života obične raje s druge strane, to ni samome sebi nije smeo da prizna. No, tom skrivanju od sebe dolazi kraj kad se nađe među varvarskim Getima čiju jednu jedinu reč ne razume, a kamoli običaje, a kamoli, tek, kad se njima desi nešto sasvim neuobičajeno. Neka to, recimo, bude krupan plan, ali nikako jedino što se na ovih sto pedesetak strana može naći.
Ako izuzmemo onomadašnje Fon Trirovo persona-non-gratiranje iz Kana i slične politikanske igrarije koje se uglavnom ispostave većom koristi nego štetom za prognanika, današnji čovek zaista teško može da zamisli šta je Grku ili Rimljaninu izgnanstvo značilo. Štaviše, u poređenju sa sibirskim kazamatima, koncentracionim logorima, giljotinama i alkatrazima, ne liči nam da je neka greda živ i zdrav se preseliti koju hiljadu kilometara od kuće. A nije zezanje, i to Maluf sasvim dobro rasvetljava, iz prvog lica, kroz Ovidijeva usta. Neka to, eto, bude neki drugi sloj.
Najviše me je ipak obradovao stil i jezik: piščev ali i prevodiočev. Ne samo što je Ovidije Malufov narator, nego i priča onako kako je pisao - laganim stilom, više opažajno nego osećajno, precizno ali nesvakidašnjim rečima, gotovo razgovorno, a opet poetski, i nema nikakve sumnje da je pisac dobar poznavalac pesnikovog opusa. Ništa manje potkovana nije ni Ivana Dutli, koja je neretko uspevala da postigne ritmičnost heksametra i da me oduševi izborom reči (šestati, snatriti, njucati, lejka, šobot, ptilica).
Sve i da baš ništa ne znate o Ovidiju, ne mari. I ako nikad niste čitali antičke pesnike, ni to ne mari. Samo će vam isprva biti malo čudna interpunkcija, glagolska vremena, raspored reči u rečenici, namerno izbegavanje sinonima i slična poigravanja, ali ništa strašno i ni blizu fazona: "paljaše inoča zublje, hotijaše sprečit' predepsu" (izmislila sam da ilustrujem prevode kakve je sasvim normalno zafrljačiti, ne znači ništa... smisleno).
Koliko vidim, drugi naslovi Dejvida Malufa nisu prevođeni. Šteta - zanimljive su mu teme i fino piše.
August 7, 2012
“Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree.”
Journeys in the conventional sense take us from one physical point to the next. They are often very sensory experiences. We may sail day and night upon rough waters and taste the splayed salt on our lips. We may walk for many miles under an unforgiving sun and feel the dryness of our throats. We come in contact with others along the way who affirm, change, mold, teach, question. Through language we interact, we externalize, and we become a very small part of a tremendously greater whole.
What if that greater whole was suddenly unreachable and your former self so far from you it becomes almost a figment of your imagination?
The journey in An Imaginary Life is an internal one, full of so many wonderful discoveries of freedom that I am left typing this review through tears. I was incredibly moved by the transformation of Ovid throughout this book. In the beginning of his exile, Ovid seems almost child-like because he’s become so incredibly dependant on a life of comfort and knowledge. He’s a lost man, close to not even existing in his strange new home. His power (through word) has been taken from him. Ever so slowly, however, he begins to renounce his previous life (even going so far as to call it ‘frivolous’) as his personal transformation becomes more and more apparent. Through his later connection with a child of the wilderness, he is almost reborn. His ties to the Great Mother are cultivated, loved, nurtured. Ovid releases his prior notions of self and finds comfort, peace, and happiness from deep within. Quite unexpectedly, his exile provides him the very freedom he requires to find his true self.
This book is a simple one, and one without many twists and turns. Some will love it, some will hate it. I’ve read some reviews where people didn’t enjoy it because it wasn't very 'Ovidian’ in style. I agree with this statement – the lush poetics of the Ovid residing in Rome aren’t overly present here. What is present is a beautiful, simply-told struggle of a man’s life and it’s meaning. If this book were written in the style of Ovid, then I’d (obviously) have to question the transformation the author does such a splendid job of conveying. The point is that what was once Ovid’s center is beautifully and gently released into the wind as he reverts to what his true self very simply needed to be at peace.
Beautiful, philosophical, and poignant. One of the best books I’ve ever read, and one of the few that has left me in tears, wonder, and utter fulfillment.
Journeys in the conventional sense take us from one physical point to the next. They are often very sensory experiences. We may sail day and night upon rough waters and taste the splayed salt on our lips. We may walk for many miles under an unforgiving sun and feel the dryness of our throats. We come in contact with others along the way who affirm, change, mold, teach, question. Through language we interact, we externalize, and we become a very small part of a tremendously greater whole.
What if that greater whole was suddenly unreachable and your former self so far from you it becomes almost a figment of your imagination?
The journey in An Imaginary Life is an internal one, full of so many wonderful discoveries of freedom that I am left typing this review through tears. I was incredibly moved by the transformation of Ovid throughout this book. In the beginning of his exile, Ovid seems almost child-like because he’s become so incredibly dependant on a life of comfort and knowledge. He’s a lost man, close to not even existing in his strange new home. His power (through word) has been taken from him. Ever so slowly, however, he begins to renounce his previous life (even going so far as to call it ‘frivolous’) as his personal transformation becomes more and more apparent. Through his later connection with a child of the wilderness, he is almost reborn. His ties to the Great Mother are cultivated, loved, nurtured. Ovid releases his prior notions of self and finds comfort, peace, and happiness from deep within. Quite unexpectedly, his exile provides him the very freedom he requires to find his true self.
This book is a simple one, and one without many twists and turns. Some will love it, some will hate it. I’ve read some reviews where people didn’t enjoy it because it wasn't very 'Ovidian’ in style. I agree with this statement – the lush poetics of the Ovid residing in Rome aren’t overly present here. What is present is a beautiful, simply-told struggle of a man’s life and it’s meaning. If this book were written in the style of Ovid, then I’d (obviously) have to question the transformation the author does such a splendid job of conveying. The point is that what was once Ovid’s center is beautifully and gently released into the wind as he reverts to what his true self very simply needed to be at peace.
Beautiful, philosophical, and poignant. One of the best books I’ve ever read, and one of the few that has left me in tears, wonder, and utter fulfillment.
Read
May 15, 2023A Quadruple Allegory
An Imaginary Life (1978) is nominally the story of Ovid's exile and death. Ovid wrote two sets of poems from his exile in Tomis (in Pontus, a region of present-day Turkey on the Black Sea, and in Constanta, a Romanian city, also on the Black Sea), called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Malouf used Tristia for his picture of the nearly barbarian outpost Pontus, but other than that he invented his "imaginary life." It strikes me as a quadruple allegory:
1. It's an allegory of poetry, because Ovid is described as redicovering poetry in Pontus. First he finds it in the people there and their shaman, whose language is not as inflected as Latin (the narrator says this several times), but is more intimately attuned to nature. Then he finds it again in the "Child," a feral child the narrator takes in. The Child can mimic animal sounds, and the narrator realizes that is a deeper form of poetry, one that depends on empathy. (This is contrasted with the narrator's satiric and hypereloquent poetry.)
2. It's also an allegory of Australia. There are three worlds in the book: Ovid's scintillating life in Rome; his simple, superstitious life in Tomis; and "the last reality," his life in Asia, beyond the Ister (i.e., north of the Danube), with the feral child. I imagine I'm hardly the first one to say this, but Rome is like England, a distant dream of soft overfed, overindulgent people devoid of belief but rich in "dazzling lierary display"; Tomis is like Australia, a wholly new world, surrounded by nature, with only the faintest echoes of culture; and the child (and the Asian grasslands) is like an Aborigine, intimately at home in nature, naturally happy, fundamentally Other. The narrator has to cross painfully from Rome to Tomis, but he accepts it and learns its language. Later he crosses joyfully from Tomis to Asia. (If this seems unlikely, consider Malouf's Remembering Babylon, about a white boy taken in by Aborigines. The England/Australia/Aboriginal triad recurs there.)
In a brief note Malouf says he was interesed in how Ovid might have escaped "skepticisim" and found belief. So the book is an allegory of religion as well. And it's also a Bildungsroman, with a mystical circle of life built into it. That's four allegories, and the architecture is sturdy enough to accommodate more. It's a succinctly imagined, sincere, romantic book.
An Imaginary Life (1978) is nominally the story of Ovid's exile and death. Ovid wrote two sets of poems from his exile in Tomis (in Pontus, a region of present-day Turkey on the Black Sea, and in Constanta, a Romanian city, also on the Black Sea), called Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Malouf used Tristia for his picture of the nearly barbarian outpost Pontus, but other than that he invented his "imaginary life." It strikes me as a quadruple allegory:
1. It's an allegory of poetry, because Ovid is described as redicovering poetry in Pontus. First he finds it in the people there and their shaman, whose language is not as inflected as Latin (the narrator says this several times), but is more intimately attuned to nature. Then he finds it again in the "Child," a feral child the narrator takes in. The Child can mimic animal sounds, and the narrator realizes that is a deeper form of poetry, one that depends on empathy. (This is contrasted with the narrator's satiric and hypereloquent poetry.)
2. It's also an allegory of Australia. There are three worlds in the book: Ovid's scintillating life in Rome; his simple, superstitious life in Tomis; and "the last reality," his life in Asia, beyond the Ister (i.e., north of the Danube), with the feral child. I imagine I'm hardly the first one to say this, but Rome is like England, a distant dream of soft overfed, overindulgent people devoid of belief but rich in "dazzling lierary display"; Tomis is like Australia, a wholly new world, surrounded by nature, with only the faintest echoes of culture; and the child (and the Asian grasslands) is like an Aborigine, intimately at home in nature, naturally happy, fundamentally Other. The narrator has to cross painfully from Rome to Tomis, but he accepts it and learns its language. Later he crosses joyfully from Tomis to Asia. (If this seems unlikely, consider Malouf's Remembering Babylon, about a white boy taken in by Aborigines. The England/Australia/Aboriginal triad recurs there.)
In a brief note Malouf says he was interesed in how Ovid might have escaped "skepticisim" and found belief. So the book is an allegory of religion as well. And it's also a Bildungsroman, with a mystical circle of life built into it. That's four allegories, and the architecture is sturdy enough to accommodate more. It's a succinctly imagined, sincere, romantic book.
July 16, 2019
He begins his trek from the lap of comfort and luxury. Ovid’s poetry is lurid and he uses his fame to be a man about town. Stepping over a drawn line he is sequestered by the Roman authorities and banished to the farthermost point of civilization; to live amongst barbarians in a place of desolation, denuded of anything to grasp onto including time, space, and language. He is an afterthought to the tribe who do not speak his language nor he there’s. Their life of superstition and grave alliance with survival remains foreign to him. He is becoming foreign to himself; a self built upon the refracted costumery of the images reflected back by the society which is no more.
But an imagined feral friend, a container of his Self, through early years of childhood, now returns and is seen and brought back to the primitive village by Ovid. The others also see him thus bounding him in reality-an agreed upon reality? Ovid cares for and nurtures him, teaching him their ways. The Child is feral. He is born into his bones, the marrow of his existence. It is him who eventually needs to lead the poet beyond the farthest most point of the known world. A place explored through instinct and a oneness with nature. Borders and boundaries are smudged and erased. The Child imagines himself into the creatures of the soil, birds lofting overhead, the stalks and reeds.Therefore he becomes them, is them. They walk without an aim or goal, Ovid struggling the further they go. The Child now cares for him.
Malouf speaks this tale to us through Ovid’s haunting and mystical voice. A voice spare which permeates the reader’s mind lifting them through the traverses of Ovid’s trek always leading him beyond the refractions of the civilized world to where he may become the inevitability of himself.
But an imagined feral friend, a container of his Self, through early years of childhood, now returns and is seen and brought back to the primitive village by Ovid. The others also see him thus bounding him in reality-an agreed upon reality? Ovid cares for and nurtures him, teaching him their ways. The Child is feral. He is born into his bones, the marrow of his existence. It is him who eventually needs to lead the poet beyond the farthest most point of the known world. A place explored through instinct and a oneness with nature. Borders and boundaries are smudged and erased. The Child imagines himself into the creatures of the soil, birds lofting overhead, the stalks and reeds.Therefore he becomes them, is them. They walk without an aim or goal, Ovid struggling the further they go. The Child now cares for him.
Malouf speaks this tale to us through Ovid’s haunting and mystical voice. A voice spare which permeates the reader’s mind lifting them through the traverses of Ovid’s trek always leading him beyond the refractions of the civilized world to where he may become the inevitability of himself.
September 19, 2022
Pouco se sabe da vida de Ovídeo após Augustos o ter banido de Roma rumo ao exílio para os limites do mundo então conhecido. O que Malouf fez foi um exercício de pura imaginação onde usou os trunfos a que já nos habituou: uma narrativa repleta de sensibilidade e uma mestria nata no domínio das palavras.
O encontro com uma criança selvagem e a tentativa de humanizar este ser bravio, acaba dando uma reviravolta e despertando dúvidas no poeta quanto ao sentido da sua vida anterior numa sociedade culta e civilizada, assim como acorda um instinto primitivo de união com a natureza, não no sentido de simplesmente usufruir o que ela põe ao dispor do ser humano, mas de uma harmonia e comunhão totais, primitivas e recíprocas.
"De pulvere venimus, in pulverem revertemur."
Génesis 3:19
O encontro com uma criança selvagem e a tentativa de humanizar este ser bravio, acaba dando uma reviravolta e despertando dúvidas no poeta quanto ao sentido da sua vida anterior numa sociedade culta e civilizada, assim como acorda um instinto primitivo de união com a natureza, não no sentido de simplesmente usufruir o que ela põe ao dispor do ser humano, mas de uma harmonia e comunhão totais, primitivas e recíprocas.
"De pulvere venimus, in pulverem revertemur."
Génesis 3:19
September 15, 2018
Baseado em duas pessoas reais (Ovídio e Victor de Aveyron), David Malouf cria um diário imaginário, no qual o poeta relata os últimos anos da sua vida junto de pessoas cuja linguagem e tradições lhe são estranhas. Neste meio agreste - quer em termos de natureza, quer humana - encontra um menino selvagem que tenta educar.
Mais do que uma história, este livro é uma reflexão sobre a natureza e a civilização; talvez sobre onde reside a Felicidade: em qualquer lugar, em qualquer idade - desde que sejamos livres, genuínos...
"É Verão. É Primavera. Estou incomensuravelmente, insuportavelmente, feliz. Tenho três anos. Tenho sessenta. Tenho seis.
Estou lá."
---------------------
Ovídio (43AC-17/18DC) no ano 8DC foi banido de Roma, pelo imperador Augusto, e desterrado para Tomis, onde viveu até à sua morte.
Victor de Aveyron (1788-1828) foi um menino selvagem encontrado num bosque no sul de França. Teria cerca de doze anos e, embora andasse em posição erecta, apenas emitia sons incompreensíveis, rasgava as roupas que lhe vestiam e fugia constantemente. Foi adoptado por um educador (J.M.G.Itard) que tentou civilizá-lo mas com pouco êxito, apesar de os exames psiquiátricos não revelarem qualquer anomalia mental. Só quando foi entregue à governanta - que o tratou com carinho - conseguiram algum desenvolvimento no seu comportamento; aprendeu algumas palavras e a cuidar da sua higiene mas não se interessou por jogos e brincadeiras. Nunca perceberam se ele não queria, ou não conseguia, adoptar o comportamento humano normal.
=================================
"Que mais devem ser as nossas vidas senão uma contínua série de começos, de dolorosas incursões no desconhecido, saindo das margens da consciência para o mistério daquilo em que ainda não nos transformámos..." (Uma Vida Imaginária)
— David Malouf
David Malouf nasceu em Brisbane, Austrália, no dia 20 de Março de 1934.
Mais do que uma história, este livro é uma reflexão sobre a natureza e a civilização; talvez sobre onde reside a Felicidade: em qualquer lugar, em qualquer idade - desde que sejamos livres, genuínos...
"É Verão. É Primavera. Estou incomensuravelmente, insuportavelmente, feliz. Tenho três anos. Tenho sessenta. Tenho seis.
Estou lá."
---------------------
Ovídio (43AC-17/18DC) no ano 8DC foi banido de Roma, pelo imperador Augusto, e desterrado para Tomis, onde viveu até à sua morte.
Victor de Aveyron (1788-1828) foi um menino selvagem encontrado num bosque no sul de França. Teria cerca de doze anos e, embora andasse em posição erecta, apenas emitia sons incompreensíveis, rasgava as roupas que lhe vestiam e fugia constantemente. Foi adoptado por um educador (J.M.G.Itard) que tentou civilizá-lo mas com pouco êxito, apesar de os exames psiquiátricos não revelarem qualquer anomalia mental. Só quando foi entregue à governanta - que o tratou com carinho - conseguiram algum desenvolvimento no seu comportamento; aprendeu algumas palavras e a cuidar da sua higiene mas não se interessou por jogos e brincadeiras. Nunca perceberam se ele não queria, ou não conseguia, adoptar o comportamento humano normal.
=================================
"Que mais devem ser as nossas vidas senão uma contínua série de começos, de dolorosas incursões no desconhecido, saindo das margens da consciência para o mistério daquilo em que ainda não nos transformámos..." (Uma Vida Imaginária)
— David Malouf
David Malouf nasceu em Brisbane, Austrália, no dia 20 de Março de 1934.
July 17, 2017
Tristia and Metamorphosis
In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life—a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his Tristia (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the Metamorphoses. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.
"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."
Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's transformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of Death in Venice.
I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by The Great World and Fly Away Peter, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls—a colonial experience reflected in books like Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in The Lieutenant. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's Voss, the greatest of all Australian novels?
I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room—even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, Ransom —but An Imaginary Life will certainly be on it.
In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life—a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his Tristia (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the Metamorphoses. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.
"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."
Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's transformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of Death in Venice.
I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by The Great World and Fly Away Peter, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls—a colonial experience reflected in books like Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in The Lieutenant. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's Voss, the greatest of all Australian novels?
I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room—even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, Ransom —but An Imaginary Life will certainly be on it.
December 14, 2024
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...
“I speak to you, reader, as one who lives in another century, since this is the letter I will never send. It is addressed neither to my wife nor to my lawyer at Rome, nor even to the emperor; but to you, unknown friend, who do not exist at this time of my writing and whose face, whose form even, I cannot imagine.”
Confieso que aunque he leído libros geniales este año, pocos han podido emocionarme como esta “Una vida imaginaria”, de David Malouf, que se va a quedar ya grabada en mi memoria por la belleza de la prosa poética de Malouf, aunque no menos hermoso es el tema de fondo que toca y la forma en que lo aborda. Pero he leído que Una vida imaginaria fue su segunda novela (1978) después de que Malouf se hubiera dedicado en general a la poesía, y de verdad que se nota esta vena poética en este texto de los más exquisitos que han podido llegarme. Una vida imaginaria es uno de estos textos atemporales que hay que ir leyendo lentamente regodeándose en lo que consigue evocar Malouf, hechiza casi desde la primera linea “When I first saw the child I cannot say I see myself…” hasta la última en la que se aborda toda una vida desde la mente de un personaje, el poeta Ovidio, enfrentado al exilio en una tierra extraña, helada, agreste, una vida imaginaria en el sentido de que está inventada por Malouf con los pocos datos que se conservan de un poeta esquivo. Un destierro al que es condenado por el emperador Augusto en un castigo por sus poemas irreverentes, así que Ovidio, exiliado, y desterrado de su entorno, se ve de repente en una tierra extraña y de alguna forma tiene que aprender a vivir de cero.
“All lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings.
But I am describing a state of mind, no place.
I am in exile here.”
Lo que viene a relatar aquí Malouf sobre el poeta Ovidio no deja de ser un relato ficticio, porque poco se sabe de la vida de Ovidio independientemente de sus cartas, ni siquiera cómo murió ni dónde puede estar su tumba. Pero Ovidio es sobradamente conocido por su irreverencia en su época y por sus poemas escandalosos. “In the open I go about shouting, talking to myself simply to keep the words in my head, or to drive them out of it. My days in this place, my nights, are terrible beyond description. All day I wander in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species”. Malouf imagina esta vida de exilio de un poeta hedonista y urbano que se vio obligado a vivir fuera de su zona de confort, en una aldea llamada Tomis, de inviernos helados y salvajes que duraban hasta nueve meses. Lo que resulta aquí fascinante, independientemente de la historia de Ovidio con el niño, que es la base de la construcción del relato, es el cambio que se produce en el poeta una vez alejado de su vida sofisticada y cómoda en Roma. En varios momentos, durante el largo monólogo interior, Ovidio reconoce que en la cima de su éxito sentía ansiedad y no era totalmente feliz, porque tenía la impresión de una identidad perdida hasta llegar al exilio: un exilio que parece más una metáfora hacia la conciencia de uno mismo, hacia una vida interior.
“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred of false roles, a hundred of false indentities fior yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.“
En Tomis, Ovidio vive totalmente aislado de su propia cultura a excepción de su relación con un niño salvaje que encuentra en el bosque y que la superstición de los aldeanos creen que porta el demonio. Durante los primeros años de su exilio verá al niño aparecer y desaparecer en el bosque y se le aparecerá en sueños, hasta que llegado un punto el niño es apresado por los aldeanos y Ovidio lo acoge, estableciendo un vínculo. Ovidio que vivía totalmente perdido en si mismo, parece empezar a encontrarse y a tomar conciencia de lo que le rodea una vez que el niño llega a su vida. Ovidio se ha visto obligado a abandonar el latin y aprender un idioma nuevo que le abre una ventana al mundo: “Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation”. Y este es otro de los temas fundamentales que aborda aquí Malouf, porque no solo ha tenido que aprender la lengua de su nueva tierra, sino además aprende a establecer un nuevo lenguaje con un niño que apenas sabía hablar, un lenguaje que le reconcilia con esa vida de la que venía el niño, la naturaleza: “But he, in fact, he is the more patient teacher. He shows me the bird whose cry I am trying to imitate. He makes me hold it, trembling in my hands. I know what he intends. I am to imagine myself into its life”. Malouf hace a Ovidio proyectarse en este niño salvaje que poco a poco le irá evocando su infancia y una identidad que se perdió en el camino con su angustia y su infelicidad. Ya digo que es un relato ficticio pero es fácil involucrarse en la vida que ha conseguido crear aquí Malouf, y con la que podemos sentirnos fácilmente identificados. En este exilio iniciático, Malouf sienta las bases de ciertos cambios que acaban moldeando a un ser humano: un nuevo lenguaje, que no tiene que ser el de las palabras sino el de las nuevas sensaciones, y la percepción de uno mismo a través de la naturaleza a la que nunca habrá que perder de vista porque es a través de ella gracias a la que construirá Malouf su relato esencial. Con la llegada a Tomis, a Ovidio no le queda otra que ser muy consciente del paso de las estaciones y del entorno que marcarán la conciencia de sí mismo: “The season begins to change. Already when we go out these days, to our island in the swamp, I have to wrap up against the wind…”
“So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clerarer form, as it really was, which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. If it as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.”
Con este exilio, Ovidio se da cuenta de que Roma no es el centro del universo y que para más inri él tampoco lo es. David Malouf es australiano y aunque aquí en ningún momento nombre la palabra Australia, puede que haya algo de ella en este texto en el sentido de que Malouf esté usando Tomis como una metáfora del aislamiento físico de su tierra y por supuesto pueda estar evocando esa vida aborigen que la colonización defenestró y arrasó. En este aspecto, Una vida imaginaria ha podido recordarme a esa novela italiana “El desierto de los tártaros”, en la evocación casi sonámbula de una tierra atemporal suspendida entre el especio y el tiempo pero que lo está diciendo todo sobre la naturaleza humana pero también me ha recordado muchísimo a "El derviche y la muerte" de Selimovic en la reflexión que Malouf hace del exilio, de la tierra y de las raíces.
“We move about it in a dream, as if our wits had turned to sharp little crystals in our head. As if, like bears and other such creatures, we had crawled deep into some cave in ourselves and fallen asleep, moving about only as dream figures, stiff, unseeing, as we pass in and out of each other's lives.”
Una vida imaginaria es un relato hermosísimo sobre el viaje íntimo y personal de una persona que vive aislada mental y fisicamente de lo que le rodeaba, de su entorno, para encontrar una liberación. Y Malouf ha usado a un poeta cosmopolita y muy centrado en sí mismo, egocéntrico y consciente la importancia de su estatus como ejemplo de que la liberación de estas ataduras artificiales pueden ser posibles con la vuelta a los orígenes. Esta es la vida de Ovidio imaginada por Malouf, y sin embargo, extrapolada a la vida que tenemos ahora, no parece que hayan pasado siglos porque el fondo del relato sigue vigente, seguimos más esclavos que nunca de la civilización en la que vivimos. Uno de los textos más hermoso que he tenido la suerte leer. Maravilla.
“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved It, or commited It to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth. Have I survived?"
♫♫♫ Händel Suite No. 7 in G Minor: No. 6, Passacaglia ♫♫♫
“I speak to you, reader, as one who lives in another century, since this is the letter I will never send. It is addressed neither to my wife nor to my lawyer at Rome, nor even to the emperor; but to you, unknown friend, who do not exist at this time of my writing and whose face, whose form even, I cannot imagine.”
Confieso que aunque he leído libros geniales este año, pocos han podido emocionarme como esta “Una vida imaginaria”, de David Malouf, que se va a quedar ya grabada en mi memoria por la belleza de la prosa poética de Malouf, aunque no menos hermoso es el tema de fondo que toca y la forma en que lo aborda. Pero he leído que Una vida imaginaria fue su segunda novela (1978) después de que Malouf se hubiera dedicado en general a la poesía, y de verdad que se nota esta vena poética en este texto de los más exquisitos que han podido llegarme. Una vida imaginaria es uno de estos textos atemporales que hay que ir leyendo lentamente regodeándose en lo que consigue evocar Malouf, hechiza casi desde la primera linea “When I first saw the child I cannot say I see myself…” hasta la última en la que se aborda toda una vida desde la mente de un personaje, el poeta Ovidio, enfrentado al exilio en una tierra extraña, helada, agreste, una vida imaginaria en el sentido de que está inventada por Malouf con los pocos datos que se conservan de un poeta esquivo. Un destierro al que es condenado por el emperador Augusto en un castigo por sus poemas irreverentes, así que Ovidio, exiliado, y desterrado de su entorno, se ve de repente en una tierra extraña y de alguna forma tiene que aprender a vivir de cero.
“All lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings.
But I am describing a state of mind, no place.
I am in exile here.”
Lo que viene a relatar aquí Malouf sobre el poeta Ovidio no deja de ser un relato ficticio, porque poco se sabe de la vida de Ovidio independientemente de sus cartas, ni siquiera cómo murió ni dónde puede estar su tumba. Pero Ovidio es sobradamente conocido por su irreverencia en su época y por sus poemas escandalosos. “In the open I go about shouting, talking to myself simply to keep the words in my head, or to drive them out of it. My days in this place, my nights, are terrible beyond description. All day I wander in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species”. Malouf imagina esta vida de exilio de un poeta hedonista y urbano que se vio obligado a vivir fuera de su zona de confort, en una aldea llamada Tomis, de inviernos helados y salvajes que duraban hasta nueve meses. Lo que resulta aquí fascinante, independientemente de la historia de Ovidio con el niño, que es la base de la construcción del relato, es el cambio que se produce en el poeta una vez alejado de su vida sofisticada y cómoda en Roma. En varios momentos, durante el largo monólogo interior, Ovidio reconoce que en la cima de su éxito sentía ansiedad y no era totalmente feliz, porque tenía la impresión de una identidad perdida hasta llegar al exilio: un exilio que parece más una metáfora hacia la conciencia de uno mismo, hacia una vida interior.
“Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred of false roles, a hundred of false indentities fior yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.“
En Tomis, Ovidio vive totalmente aislado de su propia cultura a excepción de su relación con un niño salvaje que encuentra en el bosque y que la superstición de los aldeanos creen que porta el demonio. Durante los primeros años de su exilio verá al niño aparecer y desaparecer en el bosque y se le aparecerá en sueños, hasta que llegado un punto el niño es apresado por los aldeanos y Ovidio lo acoge, estableciendo un vínculo. Ovidio que vivía totalmente perdido en si mismo, parece empezar a encontrarse y a tomar conciencia de lo que le rodea una vez que el niño llega a su vida. Ovidio se ha visto obligado a abandonar el latin y aprender un idioma nuevo que le abre una ventana al mundo: “Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation”. Y este es otro de los temas fundamentales que aborda aquí Malouf, porque no solo ha tenido que aprender la lengua de su nueva tierra, sino además aprende a establecer un nuevo lenguaje con un niño que apenas sabía hablar, un lenguaje que le reconcilia con esa vida de la que venía el niño, la naturaleza: “But he, in fact, he is the more patient teacher. He shows me the bird whose cry I am trying to imitate. He makes me hold it, trembling in my hands. I know what he intends. I am to imagine myself into its life”. Malouf hace a Ovidio proyectarse en este niño salvaje que poco a poco le irá evocando su infancia y una identidad que se perdió en el camino con su angustia y su infelicidad. Ya digo que es un relato ficticio pero es fácil involucrarse en la vida que ha conseguido crear aquí Malouf, y con la que podemos sentirnos fácilmente identificados. En este exilio iniciático, Malouf sienta las bases de ciertos cambios que acaban moldeando a un ser humano: un nuevo lenguaje, que no tiene que ser el de las palabras sino el de las nuevas sensaciones, y la percepción de uno mismo a través de la naturaleza a la que nunca habrá que perder de vista porque es a través de ella gracias a la que construirá Malouf su relato esencial. Con la llegada a Tomis, a Ovidio no le queda otra que ser muy consciente del paso de las estaciones y del entorno que marcarán la conciencia de sí mismo: “The season begins to change. Already when we go out these days, to our island in the swamp, I have to wrap up against the wind…”
“So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clerarer form, as it really was, which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. If it as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.”
Con este exilio, Ovidio se da cuenta de que Roma no es el centro del universo y que para más inri él tampoco lo es. David Malouf es australiano y aunque aquí en ningún momento nombre la palabra Australia, puede que haya algo de ella en este texto en el sentido de que Malouf esté usando Tomis como una metáfora del aislamiento físico de su tierra y por supuesto pueda estar evocando esa vida aborigen que la colonización defenestró y arrasó. En este aspecto, Una vida imaginaria ha podido recordarme a esa novela italiana “El desierto de los tártaros”, en la evocación casi sonámbula de una tierra atemporal suspendida entre el especio y el tiempo pero que lo está diciendo todo sobre la naturaleza humana pero también me ha recordado muchísimo a "El derviche y la muerte" de Selimovic en la reflexión que Malouf hace del exilio, de la tierra y de las raíces.
“We move about it in a dream, as if our wits had turned to sharp little crystals in our head. As if, like bears and other such creatures, we had crawled deep into some cave in ourselves and fallen asleep, moving about only as dream figures, stiff, unseeing, as we pass in and out of each other's lives.”
Una vida imaginaria es un relato hermosísimo sobre el viaje íntimo y personal de una persona que vive aislada mental y fisicamente de lo que le rodeaba, de su entorno, para encontrar una liberación. Y Malouf ha usado a un poeta cosmopolita y muy centrado en sí mismo, egocéntrico y consciente la importancia de su estatus como ejemplo de que la liberación de estas ataduras artificiales pueden ser posibles con la vuelta a los orígenes. Esta es la vida de Ovidio imaginada por Malouf, y sin embargo, extrapolada a la vida que tenemos ahora, no parece que hayan pasado siglos porque el fondo del relato sigue vigente, seguimos más esclavos que nunca de la civilización en la que vivimos. Uno de los textos más hermoso que he tenido la suerte leer. Maravilla.
“Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved It, or commited It to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth. Have I survived?"
♫♫♫ Händel Suite No. 7 in G Minor: No. 6, Passacaglia ♫♫♫
February 22, 2011
For me, it is sad that sometimes the sequence in our reading affects our appreciation of some books. For example, this beautiful book,
An Imaginary Life
, first published in 1978, has a wonderful poetic prose and it is about the last Roman poet, Ovid. However, my reading of this was “eclipsed” by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden that both use straight, brutal storytelling that keeps you leafing from one page to the next. I mean, I had a hard time appreciating what David Malouf (born 1934), an acclaimed Australian writer, was trying to send as a message, as in this book, he tries to fill in the blank about the unknown part of Ovid’s life: his exile in Tomis. This is in the same fashion as how Anne Rice imagined how the child Jesus lived in Nazareth prior to his baptism in Jordan River in her books, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Well, the other problem is that I don’t know anything about Ovid so I had to consult Wiki. I saw Metamorphoses and I thought it was written by Franz Kafka about the big bug. Oh well, my pardon my untrained literary brain. While writing this review, I have 5 Wiki screens already open so I do not create a mistake. The Metamorphosis (1951) is a novella by Franz Fafka about a monstrous insect and Vladimir Nabokov has a lecture on this that can be downloaded while Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem in 15 books by the Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from creation to deification of Julius Caesar. Maybe, I have to read both of this book and they seem to be both interesting.
Back to Imaginary, this also reminded me of a recent read, Bernard Malamud’s (1914-1986) God’s Grace, the narrator, Calvin also tries to teach a monkey on how to communicate using English. In Imaginary, Ovid is teaching a Tarzan-like child, i.e., born and reared by wolves, on how to speak Latin. The comparison stops there though. Malouf goes a step further, The Child also tries to teach Ovid of his “language” and their roles were reversed in the end as The Child becomes Ovid’s protector. How, Malouf tries to show how powerful language can be if you are suddenly thrown into a place where no one can understand you.
Don’t be misled by my 2-star rating. This is a beautiful book that just came to me at a wrong time. After all, this won a national award in Australia in 1958 and it is said to have a deeper meaning: about Australia White Policy and the treatment of the indigenous people in that country. Strong positive message. I hope I will have another a chance to re-read this book someday. Maybe when I am reading an equally poetic book similar to Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces.
Back to Imaginary, this also reminded me of a recent read, Bernard Malamud’s (1914-1986) God’s Grace, the narrator, Calvin also tries to teach a monkey on how to communicate using English. In Imaginary, Ovid is teaching a Tarzan-like child, i.e., born and reared by wolves, on how to speak Latin. The comparison stops there though. Malouf goes a step further, The Child also tries to teach Ovid of his “language” and their roles were reversed in the end as The Child becomes Ovid’s protector. How, Malouf tries to show how powerful language can be if you are suddenly thrown into a place where no one can understand you.
Don’t be misled by my 2-star rating. This is a beautiful book that just came to me at a wrong time. After all, this won a national award in Australia in 1958 and it is said to have a deeper meaning: about Australia White Policy and the treatment of the indigenous people in that country. Strong positive message. I hope I will have another a chance to re-read this book someday. Maybe when I am reading an equally poetic book similar to Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces.
April 18, 2021
"I have stopped finding fault with creation and have learned to accept it. We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree."
An Imaginary Life talks about the everyday life and times in the remotest village among tribal folks away from the ancient Roman Empire after the exile of Poet Ovid in his own voice and narration.
Poignantly struck with the ponderings of the poet with his initial inability, frustrations and attempts to connect with people, the feral lone child in the forest, even with the reticent spiders and other creatures, the story takes on a journey of experiencing mix of the otherness and inebriated oneness in a more spiritual way than previously imagined possible.
It was so beautiful, philosophical and poetic. Wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it's one of the best books I've read in a long time and I could only wish that I had read this for the first time in a relatively more relaxed composure considering the crazy times we happen to live lately. Yet nevertheless grateful and glad about reading it.
"It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six... I am there."
An Imaginary Life talks about the everyday life and times in the remotest village among tribal folks away from the ancient Roman Empire after the exile of Poet Ovid in his own voice and narration.
Poignantly struck with the ponderings of the poet with his initial inability, frustrations and attempts to connect with people, the feral lone child in the forest, even with the reticent spiders and other creatures, the story takes on a journey of experiencing mix of the otherness and inebriated oneness in a more spiritual way than previously imagined possible.
It was so beautiful, philosophical and poetic. Wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it's one of the best books I've read in a long time and I could only wish that I had read this for the first time in a relatively more relaxed composure considering the crazy times we happen to live lately. Yet nevertheless grateful and glad about reading it.
"It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six... I am there."
August 17, 2014
Started and dropped it. I didn't like it at all. He's writing about Ovid, but his voice sounds as if he's never read a line of Latin. Sounds like a fake....
June 29, 2022
Dazzling. It raises questions about humanity,language and much more,all immersed in a prose that absolutely,beautifully sings.
July 20, 2018
The imaginary life Malouf writes is that of Ovid, the Roman poet who wrote during the beginnings of the empire. Malouf explains in his "Afterword: A Note on Sources": "We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event."
Though we don't know why, Ovid the poet was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to live out his days in Tomis on the northern shore of the Black Sea, the margins of the empire and imagination. Just before his exile he'd written the work for which he's best known, Metamorphoses, in which he'd imagined humans subsumed into the natural world of animals and plants. Such transformations continue to be a focus for Ovid as he struggles to come to terms with losing a life in comfortable, cultured Rome and taking up a new one among a rustic people he barely understands. He recognizes this as a metamorphosis itself but becomes caught up in one more explicit, that of a young boy in the area who's been raised in the wild, seemingly by wolves. Ovid's attempts to civilize this Child while he himself is being immersed into a natural order of the world unknowable to him before is the story, one of 2 polarities moving toward each other to forge some unity at which the natural world and the human can be whole. Some of that is captured in a passage reflecting Ovid's imagined possibilities but also triggering the reader's appreciation of the transformations taking place in the novel. "Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back--not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole."
I've read this is considered a novel that's very Australian in its address of the ways civilization connects with the natural world, and in particular with the ways in which the Child can be thought to correlate with Australia's indigenous people. I feel like these things must've been on Malouf's mind, but they're ways of thinking I can relate to only in the most general way. Knowing this as I began the book, I was reminded at times of a couple of books of the pseudonymous James Vance Marshall and the wonderful film made of the 1st of them, Walkabout.
What I know for sure is that this novel has let me taste some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a while. Particularly as the novel's winding down and Ovid marvels at the steppe landscape he's come to feel a part of. Malouf imagines the sensitive poet interiorly charged by what his senses take in just as he also portrays him panoramically trudging the vast grasslands under the high blue dome of sky in his new country. Ovid's transformation into new ways of being in and seeing the world, his mental and physical journey far from Rome, are passages of great beauty.
Though we don't know why, Ovid the poet was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to live out his days in Tomis on the northern shore of the Black Sea, the margins of the empire and imagination. Just before his exile he'd written the work for which he's best known, Metamorphoses, in which he'd imagined humans subsumed into the natural world of animals and plants. Such transformations continue to be a focus for Ovid as he struggles to come to terms with losing a life in comfortable, cultured Rome and taking up a new one among a rustic people he barely understands. He recognizes this as a metamorphosis itself but becomes caught up in one more explicit, that of a young boy in the area who's been raised in the wild, seemingly by wolves. Ovid's attempts to civilize this Child while he himself is being immersed into a natural order of the world unknowable to him before is the story, one of 2 polarities moving toward each other to forge some unity at which the natural world and the human can be whole. Some of that is captured in a passage reflecting Ovid's imagined possibilities but also triggering the reader's appreciation of the transformations taking place in the novel. "Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back--not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole."
I've read this is considered a novel that's very Australian in its address of the ways civilization connects with the natural world, and in particular with the ways in which the Child can be thought to correlate with Australia's indigenous people. I feel like these things must've been on Malouf's mind, but they're ways of thinking I can relate to only in the most general way. Knowing this as I began the book, I was reminded at times of a couple of books of the pseudonymous James Vance Marshall and the wonderful film made of the 1st of them, Walkabout.
What I know for sure is that this novel has let me taste some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a while. Particularly as the novel's winding down and Ovid marvels at the steppe landscape he's come to feel a part of. Malouf imagines the sensitive poet interiorly charged by what his senses take in just as he also portrays him panoramically trudging the vast grasslands under the high blue dome of sky in his new country. Ovid's transformation into new ways of being in and seeing the world, his mental and physical journey far from Rome, are passages of great beauty.
Read
December 5, 2016Very strange book, hard to read and follow. Took me over a year as I much preferred the 50 other books I read in the past 11 months, mostly non-fiction.
I'm sure Malouf's other fiction is much more readable.
I'm sure Malouf's other fiction is much more readable.
June 15, 2022
Este é um livro para ler á sombra de uma árvore, ouvindo o cantar dos pássaros e saboreando cada palavra. Pois "Uma vida imaginária" é uma verdadeira pérola literária, uma fábula sobre a comunhão do Homem com a natureza.
Através do diário ficionado de Ovídio, acompanhamos o poeta latino nos últimos dias, exilado numa pequena aldeia, e como o aparecimento de uma criança selvagem é capaz de transformar sua vida. Esta é uma obra feita de profundas reflexões sobre a fragilidade humana, a infancia, a brevidade do tempo, a memória, o sonho. Uma obra que nos faz regressar á um tempo que o Homem vive em harmonia com a natureza, e vivia feliz observando as suas várias metamorfoses.
"Papoila, papoila escarlate, flor da minha infancia longínqua e das searas á volta da nossa quinta de Sulmo, voltei a dar-te á luz, ergui-te das minhas mais remotas memórias, do meu sangue, para por-te no vento."
Através do diário ficionado de Ovídio, acompanhamos o poeta latino nos últimos dias, exilado numa pequena aldeia, e como o aparecimento de uma criança selvagem é capaz de transformar sua vida. Esta é uma obra feita de profundas reflexões sobre a fragilidade humana, a infancia, a brevidade do tempo, a memória, o sonho. Uma obra que nos faz regressar á um tempo que o Homem vive em harmonia com a natureza, e vivia feliz observando as suas várias metamorfoses.
"Papoila, papoila escarlate, flor da minha infancia longínqua e das searas á volta da nossa quinta de Sulmo, voltei a dar-te á luz, ergui-te das minhas mais remotas memórias, do meu sangue, para por-te no vento."
October 29, 2017
Strange and stunning.
August 4, 2019
Beautiful lyric prose but a bit shallow and the character development needed work. In this story Ovid feels like a draft rather than a finished work. In my view, having Ovid as the protagonist of this story was unnecessary because it rises expectations that are not fulfilled. The main character of the book could have been a nameless character or could have been named ‘X’ and the effect and message of the story would have been the same or similar. Is this story a parable? Perhaps that is what it intends to be. Some readers have attempted to find similarities between An Imaginary Life and The Alchemist; frankly, I don’t see many similarities between those two books. An Imaginary Life and The Alchemist are very different but I find The Alchemist to be far more engaging for in The Alchemist all characters are interesting and have depth; hence they feel real; on the other hand, in An Imaginary life, David Malouf’s characters and narrative had potential, alas they were underdeveloped.
Moreover, while reading An Imaginary Life I never felt transported to the place and historical time in which this story takes place; in my opinion, this was one of the main issues I found with this book.
I have one additional observation: there were entire paragraphs filled with questions, rhetorical questions that Ovid asks himself, one question after the other; that was completely unnecessary. The reflections could have been there in a more direct and elaborate way.
Finally, I want to be honest here. I am an avid reader and I read good, serious literature not just best-sellers and in my opinion, An Imaginary Life is a nice little book filled with good intentions but it is ultimately an average book. Having said that, it is short, the story has some ‘peaks’, and David Malouf is a wonderful poet and this is reflected in the prose of this book; so even if as a whole the book didn’t work for me some parts of this story are a delight to read. We must also remember that often a book that doesn’t speak to some people speaks profoundly to others 😊😀😊 If you read it I hope you enjoy it more than I did. 😀😊😀
Moreover, while reading An Imaginary Life I never felt transported to the place and historical time in which this story takes place; in my opinion, this was one of the main issues I found with this book.
I have one additional observation: there were entire paragraphs filled with questions, rhetorical questions that Ovid asks himself, one question after the other; that was completely unnecessary. The reflections could have been there in a more direct and elaborate way.
Finally, I want to be honest here. I am an avid reader and I read good, serious literature not just best-sellers and in my opinion, An Imaginary Life is a nice little book filled with good intentions but it is ultimately an average book. Having said that, it is short, the story has some ‘peaks’, and David Malouf is a wonderful poet and this is reflected in the prose of this book; so even if as a whole the book didn’t work for me some parts of this story are a delight to read. We must also remember that often a book that doesn’t speak to some people speaks profoundly to others 😊😀😊 If you read it I hope you enjoy it more than I did. 😀😊😀
June 2, 2013
What else is death than the refusal to any longer grow and suffer change?
This fiction is more like the journey of Publius Ovidius Naso to he's death. It may sound morbid but it is in fact an utterly fascinating view of life.
I remember reading this and thinking what an attractive mind David Malouf has. The philosophy and beliefs he wrote, though some i may not agree too or even try to entertain, makes you think. This is one of the most original and unique books i have ever read, or if there are other books like this out there, this is the first i have tried.
It tells the story of Naso, a Roman poet- who i didn't know exist until today- when he was sent to exile and thorn from he's frivolous and wealthy lifestyle and thrown in a life of barbarians and savages; where everything is simply done out of need, where they barely understand each other.
It is tells he's struggles, he's belief, how he found himself in the midst of a strangers land and the Child. It tells the story of a poet silenced- but not stilled.
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like a disaster but is is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasion through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
This is the kind of book you keep in your shelves, with bookmarks and underlines, the kind of books you should read at least once in your life. I like to think of this as a kind of intriguing and definitely life changing- even in the smallest, simplest way possible- philosophical book.
This fiction is more like the journey of Publius Ovidius Naso to he's death. It may sound morbid but it is in fact an utterly fascinating view of life.
I remember reading this and thinking what an attractive mind David Malouf has. The philosophy and beliefs he wrote, though some i may not agree too or even try to entertain, makes you think. This is one of the most original and unique books i have ever read, or if there are other books like this out there, this is the first i have tried.
It tells the story of Naso, a Roman poet- who i didn't know exist until today- when he was sent to exile and thorn from he's frivolous and wealthy lifestyle and thrown in a life of barbarians and savages; where everything is simply done out of need, where they barely understand each other.
It is tells he's struggles, he's belief, how he found himself in the midst of a strangers land and the Child. It tells the story of a poet silenced- but not stilled.
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like a disaster but is is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasion through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
This is the kind of book you keep in your shelves, with bookmarks and underlines, the kind of books you should read at least once in your life. I like to think of this as a kind of intriguing and definitely life changing- even in the smallest, simplest way possible- philosophical book.
April 11, 2019
More novella than novel, and it definitely requires some quiet, uninterrupted, focused reading (or at least I did) this is a classic, literary award winning tale by Australian author David Malouf, it is also one of the more challenging reads I’ve had in a long time.
Based on the life of Roman poet Ovid, this esoteric read will not be for many. At times sheer concentration is required (and I admit Google as I had forgotten some of the Ovid references).
If you’re not a buff of historical/classic poetry, the value of the references and allusions may not work work or you may not want to bother.
It lost one star for some of the vulgarity, which of course is the author’s license, but certainly not what you’d expect from the time period 8AD or Ovid (1AD).
Based on the life of Roman poet Ovid, this esoteric read will not be for many. At times sheer concentration is required (and I admit Google as I had forgotten some of the Ovid references).
If you’re not a buff of historical/classic poetry, the value of the references and allusions may not work work or you may not want to bother.
It lost one star for some of the vulgarity, which of course is the author’s license, but certainly not what you’d expect from the time period 8AD or Ovid (1AD).
October 30, 2010
I’ve been going through books read years ago with the intention of keeping a few and taking the rest to our local used book store. So far, it’s been a losing battle—I keep finding ones I want to read again like this book where the author places the poet Ovid in a hostile land after he is exiled from Rome by the emperor Augustus and finds a feral child living there among the deer.
July 22, 2022
Em sentido figurado diria que este pequeno livro começa por flutuar num curso de rio plácido, corriqueiro, mas a dado momento as correntes provocam uma agitação tamanha que o percurso deixa de ser linear e a navegação prossegue ao sabor de factores externos, sem controlo.
A partir de duas personagens reais, Ovídio – poeta, e Victor - o menino selvagem, David Malouf imagina esta expedição surpreendente.
"Fui por obra da mais alta autoridade conhecida, atirado para o que na verdade é outra ordem de seres, esses que ainda não saltaram sobre um buraco na sua cabeça e se tornaram totalmente humanos, que ainda não entraram naquilo que chamamos sociedade e se tornaram romanos à luz da lei.
(…) Oiço-os falar. Os sons são bárbaros, e a minha alma sofre pelo refinamento da nossa língua, o latim, essa língua perfeita através da qual todas as coisas podem ser ditas, mesmo os pronunciamentos do exílio." Pág. 26
Ovídio, em exílio num lugar remoto, acaba por ter uma jornada até ao mais fundo de si próprio, o seu eu em toda a sua dimensão.
E nós, somos igualmente convidados a reflectir.
"A sua vida, ano após ano, deve ter sido apenas aquilo que agora vejo, trabalho, sono, trabalho. E no entanto parece-me estranho, com a sua dignidade que me faz sentir tolo e aturdido. A minha vida tem sido tão frívola. Criado para acreditar nos meus nervos, inquietação, diversidade, mudança; completamente educado pelos livros, vivendo sempre num estado de suave segurança, capaz de mimar-me a mim próprio, de vaguear numa nuvem de ternas sensações, e com confortáveis noções de inteligência, sociabilidade, gentileza, educação; movido por tudo a que posso dar nome, não acreditando em nada que não possa ver; nem por um momento desafiado por nada que um rapaz não consiga suportar, tendo aprendido cedo a tornear todas as questões com elegância e estilo – que posso conhecer das forças que moldaram este homem domador de cavalos, cuja natureza animal de certo modo ele contém em si e amansa?" Pág. 39
A descoberta deste mundo diferente, mais genuíno, mais próximo dos primórdios da criação, é descrita de uma forma extraordinária.
"Cada vez mais, nestas últimas semanas, comecei a compreender que este lugar é o verdadeiro destino de que tenho andado à procura, e que a minha vida aqui, ainda que dolorosa, é o meu verdadeiro destino, do qual passei toda a vida a tentar fugir. «Eis a vida que tentaste atirar fora. Eis a tua segunda oportunidade. Eis o destino que tentaste rejeitar inventando uma centena de falsos papéis, uma centena de falsas identidades para ti próprio. Inicialmente parecerá um desastre, mas é realmente a boa sorte disfarçada, uma vez que o destino também sabe como seguir as tuas evasões sob uma centena de formas da sua própria autoria. Agora, finalmente, poderás tornar-te aquele que pretendias ser.»
Assim acabei por admitir abertamente o que há muito sabia no meu coração. Agora pertenço a este lugar. Tornei-o meu. Estou a entrar nas dimensões do meu eu." Pág. 86
Fiquei cativada pelo cuidado estilístico e pela subtil erudição do autor com que sustenta a sua arquitectura narrativa, que tem como pano de fundo a problemática das relações do homem com a Natureza.
A partir de duas personagens reais, Ovídio – poeta, e Victor - o menino selvagem, David Malouf imagina esta expedição surpreendente.
"Fui por obra da mais alta autoridade conhecida, atirado para o que na verdade é outra ordem de seres, esses que ainda não saltaram sobre um buraco na sua cabeça e se tornaram totalmente humanos, que ainda não entraram naquilo que chamamos sociedade e se tornaram romanos à luz da lei.
(…) Oiço-os falar. Os sons são bárbaros, e a minha alma sofre pelo refinamento da nossa língua, o latim, essa língua perfeita através da qual todas as coisas podem ser ditas, mesmo os pronunciamentos do exílio." Pág. 26
Ovídio, em exílio num lugar remoto, acaba por ter uma jornada até ao mais fundo de si próprio, o seu eu em toda a sua dimensão.
E nós, somos igualmente convidados a reflectir.
"A sua vida, ano após ano, deve ter sido apenas aquilo que agora vejo, trabalho, sono, trabalho. E no entanto parece-me estranho, com a sua dignidade que me faz sentir tolo e aturdido. A minha vida tem sido tão frívola. Criado para acreditar nos meus nervos, inquietação, diversidade, mudança; completamente educado pelos livros, vivendo sempre num estado de suave segurança, capaz de mimar-me a mim próprio, de vaguear numa nuvem de ternas sensações, e com confortáveis noções de inteligência, sociabilidade, gentileza, educação; movido por tudo a que posso dar nome, não acreditando em nada que não possa ver; nem por um momento desafiado por nada que um rapaz não consiga suportar, tendo aprendido cedo a tornear todas as questões com elegância e estilo – que posso conhecer das forças que moldaram este homem domador de cavalos, cuja natureza animal de certo modo ele contém em si e amansa?" Pág. 39
A descoberta deste mundo diferente, mais genuíno, mais próximo dos primórdios da criação, é descrita de uma forma extraordinária.
"Cada vez mais, nestas últimas semanas, comecei a compreender que este lugar é o verdadeiro destino de que tenho andado à procura, e que a minha vida aqui, ainda que dolorosa, é o meu verdadeiro destino, do qual passei toda a vida a tentar fugir. «Eis a vida que tentaste atirar fora. Eis a tua segunda oportunidade. Eis o destino que tentaste rejeitar inventando uma centena de falsos papéis, uma centena de falsas identidades para ti próprio. Inicialmente parecerá um desastre, mas é realmente a boa sorte disfarçada, uma vez que o destino também sabe como seguir as tuas evasões sob uma centena de formas da sua própria autoria. Agora, finalmente, poderás tornar-te aquele que pretendias ser.»
Assim acabei por admitir abertamente o que há muito sabia no meu coração. Agora pertenço a este lugar. Tornei-o meu. Estou a entrar nas dimensões do meu eu." Pág. 86
Fiquei cativada pelo cuidado estilístico e pela subtil erudição do autor com que sustenta a sua arquitectura narrativa, que tem como pano de fundo a problemática das relações do homem com a Natureza.
November 19, 2014
This is not an historical novel. Not in the way Wolf Hall is an historical novel. It is, of course, set in history and even has as its protagonist a man who actually existed, the Roman poet Ovid, but it deals with a period—his exile at the end of his life—of which little is known. But there are a few verifiable facts. In 8 CE, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, by the exclusive intervention of the Emperor Augustus, and this is where he died some eight years later. Whilst there, at first at least, he continues to write and ended up producing three major works, Ibis, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he bemoans his exile but in these he also includes a few facts about his own life which find their way into Malouf’s novel. That said he does manipulate the facts to suit himself. The Tomis of the first century was a thriving stone-built port with an agora and Greek amenities; it certainly was not “a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud” housing 300 people. This is history reimagined so if you’re a purist or a Roman scholar there’s a lot here to pick holes in. Peter Morton’s essay ‘Evasive Precision: Problems of Historicity in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life’ is worth a read in this regard.
The book really comes to life, however, during what turns out to be the last two or three years of his life, once he’s become reconciled to his fate and comfortable with his new home. At first he’s very much the fish out of water, a civilised (even privileged) man forced to live with primitives nine days' riding distance from anyone who knows the Roman tongue. Gradually he learns their language and their ways and even becomes a useful member of society taking his turn on watch and learning how to weave nets. But he’s still not one of them.
While out on his first hunting trip—an annual event which takes place every autumn as the men stock up in preparation for the long winter months ahead—he encounters the Child. This is pure fiction as the author explains in the book’s afterword:
That an Australian wrote this book should come as no surprise. Their mistreatment of the indigenous population is well-known, so-called civilised white men taking over their country and imposing their way of life on them assuming it was better. Different is not better and this is a lesson that Ovid learns through his dealings with the Child who, over time once trust has been established, begins to teach the old man a thing or two about his world. The main problem they have is the lack of a common tongue. With the villagers he picked up their language easily enough but in doing so realised the limitations of Latin:
Ovid wasn’t a nature poet…
There was a time where Australia was very much a land of myth to us here in the UK. We knew of Ned Kelly, barbies and kangaroos and that was about it. Then we saw Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max and suddenly started to realise there was more to place. Much more. Because of its subject and setting it’s easy to not think of An Imaginary Life as a great Australian novel but in a recent article in The Conversation Dallas J. Baker comes to the book’s defence.
Me? I’m not a spiritual man. I’ve tried to be and gave it up as a bad job. I’m also about the farthest thing from a nature poet as you could get. So I empathised with the Ovid at the start of this book. I genuinely felt for the man. I wonder though about his transformation. I actually think Malouf’s novel might have quite a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden but not having read the book I can’t say for sure. I may not be a spiritual man but I do have an imagination and I can imagine a life without computers or even books or a like mind to share things with. Robinson Crusoe this is not. This is a far more realistic tackling of the subject and a book I enjoyed far more than I expected I would. I’m a writer and words are my tools. They are far from being precision instruments but they’re all I have and I do my best. But what if they were taken away from me? What then? The writer-in-crisis was what really caught my attention here.
The book really comes to life, however, during what turns out to be the last two or three years of his life, once he’s become reconciled to his fate and comfortable with his new home. At first he’s very much the fish out of water, a civilised (even privileged) man forced to live with primitives nine days' riding distance from anyone who knows the Roman tongue. Gradually he learns their language and their ways and even becomes a useful member of society taking his turn on watch and learning how to weave nets. But he’s still not one of them.
While out on his first hunting trip—an annual event which takes place every autumn as the men stock up in preparation for the long winter months ahead—he encounters the Child. This is pure fiction as the author explains in the book’s afterword:
The encounter with the Child, which makes up the main part of this book, has no basis in fact, but I have verified my description from the best account we have of such a phenomenon, J.M.G. Itard’s painstaking observations of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, which no writer on the subject can ignore.If the locals are at one with nature the Child is Nature. He resembles a human, a child of humans, but other than that they have nothing in common. Ovid makes it his goal to civilise the boy, a task easier said than done. Catching him is easy enough—the men of the village have been hunting faster and wilder beasts than him all their lives—but after that he’s left to the poet who soon realises what an enormous gulf exists between the two of them.
That an Australian wrote this book should come as no surprise. Their mistreatment of the indigenous population is well-known, so-called civilised white men taking over their country and imposing their way of life on them assuming it was better. Different is not better and this is a lesson that Ovid learns through his dealings with the Child who, over time once trust has been established, begins to teach the old man a thing or two about his world. The main problem they have is the lack of a common tongue. With the villagers he picked up their language easily enough but in doing so realised the limitations of Latin:
When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.His time in the village prior to having to deal with the Child is of vital importance. It’s a halfway house. How much more he would’ve struggled had he still been living in Rome and the Child arrived at his front door one day. He tries to teach the Child the language of the locals but the boy struggles; it’s too big a leap. The Child, however, teaches Ovid about the sounds of the animals and how to reproduce them.
Ovid wasn’t a nature poet…
I know the names of seeds, of course, from having used them for the beauty of the sound itself in poems I have written: coriander, cardamom. But I have no idea what any but the commonest of them look like…but here all there is in nature and so he begins to learn to look at the world anew. He discovers a poppy one day and the shock of seeing it results in an epiphany:
We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of minds, they move forth to act in the world beyond, changing us and it. So it is that the beings we are in the process of becoming will be drawn out of us. We have only to find the name and let its illumination fill us. Beginning, as always, with what is simple. Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring.This is early in the book and we can see too that Ovid is not a religious man—“ the gods (who do not exist)”—but what we have here is more of a spiritual awakening and the eventual encounter with the Child is its catalyst: he is about to metamorphose. But into what?
It is about to begin. All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life.
There was a time where Australia was very much a land of myth to us here in the UK. We knew of Ned Kelly, barbies and kangaroos and that was about it. Then we saw Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max and suddenly started to realise there was more to place. Much more. Because of its subject and setting it’s easy to not think of An Imaginary Life as a great Australian novel but in a recent article in The Conversation Dallas J. Baker comes to the book’s defence.
Me? I’m not a spiritual man. I’ve tried to be and gave it up as a bad job. I’m also about the farthest thing from a nature poet as you could get. So I empathised with the Ovid at the start of this book. I genuinely felt for the man. I wonder though about his transformation. I actually think Malouf’s novel might have quite a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden but not having read the book I can’t say for sure. I may not be a spiritual man but I do have an imagination and I can imagine a life without computers or even books or a like mind to share things with. Robinson Crusoe this is not. This is a far more realistic tackling of the subject and a book I enjoyed far more than I expected I would. I’m a writer and words are my tools. They are far from being precision instruments but they’re all I have and I do my best. But what if they were taken away from me? What then? The writer-in-crisis was what really caught my attention here.
October 31, 2024
Sure, I picked it up and the thrift store as it was a reputable publisher and the blurb describing it as about Ovid's exile on the Black Sea seemed like an interesting topic for a historical novel. Well, surprise, that's not at all the point of this really interesting novel about a cultured man encountering first a more primitive culture, and then a feral child. Thus the real point of the thing is a narrative journey along the borderland between culture and nature, pampered city dwelling humans, the barbarians at the edge of nature, and a lone creature raised, it would seem, by wolves.
The prose is quite lovely and the narrative voice mostly exquisitely complex and eloquent as he charts his journey beyond the social Roman world toward the unknown lands that perhaps lie more in humankind's past than either its present or future. Only once in a while there was a word or phrase that struck me as anachronistic, but they were quickly forgiven as the whole thing was just wonderfully engrossing. I read almost all of it in a single commute to and from work, utterly entranced. I will keep an eye out for Malouf's other books now for sure.
The prose is quite lovely and the narrative voice mostly exquisitely complex and eloquent as he charts his journey beyond the social Roman world toward the unknown lands that perhaps lie more in humankind's past than either its present or future. Only once in a while there was a word or phrase that struck me as anachronistic, but they were quickly forgiven as the whole thing was just wonderfully engrossing. I read almost all of it in a single commute to and from work, utterly entranced. I will keep an eye out for Malouf's other books now for sure.
March 23, 2011
It is always a joy to read Malouf's work, but there's a special frisson about reading very early novels. This one from 1978 is exquisite.
To see my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
To see my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...
October 2, 2014
An Imaginary Life is an apt title. Malouf's prose has a life flowing through it. Cold winters, autumnal wilds, burial rituals, and shaman magic combine to create an eerie and uncomfortable atmosphere that surrounds Ovid's exile in Tomis. Rough characters rub on him, and a life away from the Epicureanism of Rome rekindles him. Spirits that Ovid doesn't believe in drive the actions of the superstitious people and the Child, a confusing and distant (human?) being who ends up teaching Ovid more than Ovid teaches him. The journey of mind, language, and seasons has a natural progression that gives a sense of cyclical time, giving the minute details the importance that they deserve. Malouf's plot works so well that the protagonist didn't need to be Ovid or be set in the ancient world. I have read most of the Metamorphoses and Amores in Latin, and while Ovid grows and learns, without the necessary background I know I wouldn't have enjoyed the story as much. Minor gripes aside, Malouf does great work writing about what makes a human a human. Maybe there is more truth in simplicity than in complexity. I wouldn't have a problem subscribing to that idea.
May 28, 2012
A lyrical metaphorical work about the emptying of the self and the quest for the completion of a life. The feted frivolous Roman poet Ovid displeases his Emperor Augustus and is revealed to us in exil, a man without language or kin. Without words or society he gradually finds a simpler more visceral meaning to life through the tongue of his captors. He chooses to tame a Child produced by the cruel landscape, and is so distrusted by the superstitious villagers who believe that this young boy embodies the spirits of the wild. Ovid's flight into the vast empty landscape brings him to a new connection with all elements of nature, to which he prepares his return.
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