After Ovid: New Metamorphoses

by Michael Hofmann (Editor), James Lasdun

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses.

Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

Genres: Poetry, Mythology, Classics, Literature, Anthologies

298 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently One Lark, One Horse. Among his translations are plays by Bertolt Brecht and Patrick Süskind; the selected poems of Durs Grünbein and Gottfried Benn; and novels and stories by, among others, Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage, and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front, Kurt Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm, and edited The Voyage That Never Ends, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida.

He is the son of German novelist Gert Hofmann (1931-1993).

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

 
The Power of Myth

Imagine this. You are a distinguished poet of an older generation, perhaps a poet laureate or tipped for the Nobel Prize. A couple of young colleagues ask you to write a poem, or two, or three, based on a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses that they will assign. Do you phone something in? Do you brush them off? Do you even answer? The fact that no less than 40 poets of the caliber of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Robert Pinsky, and Charles Simic turned in some 55 quality poems between them says much about the persuasive abilities of Michael Hoffmann and James Lasdun (who also contributed three very good poems each). But it says even more about the continuing power of Ovid's collection of myths to influence other writers, artists, and composers since the end of the Middle Ages. However reluctantly some of these people might have set to work, once they had opened their Ovid they were hooked.

Two Goodreads friends (Kalliope and Roman Clodia) and I are setting up a discussion group to read and discuss the Metamorphoses and all its subsequent metamorphoses, and I imagine that many of the interpretations here will crop up in their due course. So this is a placeholder, not a full review, just to get it on the map. But at least I indicate the scope of the collection, and perhaps give a few samples.

The range is deliberately wide. "We invited each contributor 'to translate, reinterpret, reflect on, or completely reimagine the narratives,' and got the full gamut" write the editors. We see this in the first four items in the book. Ted Hughes, at that time the Poet Laureate of England, contributes Creation / Four Ages / Flood, an enhanced translation of Ovid's first book—enhanced, in that Hughes incorporates passages that are entirely his—which would in turn become the opening section of his own Tales from Ovid; the link is to my review. The American poet Jorie Graham overlaps him with her version of Flood, clearly the poet's commentary and not at all a translation; it is printed in an unusual layout that unfortunately I can't reproduce. Then, still on the theme of the Flood, a brief poem Deucalion and Pyrrha by the English poet Christopher Reid; it is short enough to quote, if only to enjoy the delicious way the rhymes nudge, but do not stop, the run-on lines:

                Only
two survived the flood.
We are not of their blood,
springing instead from the bones
of the great mother: stones,
what have you—rocks, boulders—
hurled over their shoulders
by that pious pair
and becoming people, where
and as they hit the ground.
Since when, we have always found
something hard, ungracious
      obdurate in our natures,
a strain of the very earth
that gave us our abrupt birth;
but a pang, too, at the back
of the mind: a loss . . . a lack . . .

Then comes another American woman, Alice Fulton, with Give: Daphne and Apollo. This is a 31-page drama in nine scenes preceded by a "Foreplay" (the double entendre is hers and intended). The story, of course, is that of the nymph changed to a tree to escape the lustful advances of Apollo. Among other images, Fulton conjures up the old age of recording: "A voice changed to a vinyl disc, a black larynx | spun | on the hi-fi as we called it, before light was used to | amplify | and the laser's little wand got rid of hiss." I can't really quote more, because each of the ten sections has its own layout, the lines sometimes running from margin to margin, sometimes skittering all over the page like a jumping cricket.

There is nothing like a complete coverage of the Metamorphoses here; probably the majority of Ovid's subjects are omitted and, as we have seen with the Flood, there are several overlaps. But these duplications are useful, for they underline the vast range of stylistic response. Here, for example, is the first stanza of Thom Gunn's Arachne, who was turned into a spider by the jealous Minerva for besting her in a tapestry competition:

What is that bundle hanging from the ceiling
Unresting even now with constant slight
Drift in the breeze that breathes through rooms at night?
Can it be something, then, that once had feeling,
A girl, perhaps, whose skill and pride and hope
Strangled against each other in the rope?

And as a contrast, here is the complete poem Spiderwoman by Michael Longley*:

Arachne starts with Ovid and finishes with me.

Her hair falls out and the ears and nostrils disappear
From her contracting face, her body minuscule, thin
Fingers clinging to her sides by way of legs, the rest
All stomach, from which she manufactures gossamer
And so keeps up her former trade, weaver, spider

Enticing the eight eyes of my imagination
To make love on her lethal doily, to dangle sperm
Like teardrops from an eyelash, massage it into her
While I avoid the spinnerets—navel, vulva, bum—
And the widening smile behind her embroidery.

She wears our babies like brooches on her abdomen.

Wonderfully eerie, isn't it? Is he writing about the spider or his wife? It is the ambiguity and above all the personal element that makes this so effective. There are certainly a few straight translations here, but many of the most interesting poems shift Ovid forward by two milennia, bringing him down to earth, owning his archetypes in a personal way. Here, for example, is the opening of Mrs Midas by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, a housewife seeing her husband approaching down the kitchen garden:

It was late September. I'd just poured a glass of wine, begun
to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen
filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath
gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,
then with my fingers wiped the other's glass like a brow.
He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.

Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way
the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,
but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from the branch, we grew Fondante d'Automne,
and it sat in his palm like a lightbulb. On.
I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy-lights in the tree?

Probably the poem I like the best is by another Irish writer, Eavan Boland. Called The Pomegranate, it refers to the legend of Persephone who, while being brought back from the underworld after her abduction by Pluto, thoughtlessly plucked a pomegranate and ate the seeds, meaning that she would forever have to spend the winter months underground. "The only legend I have ever loved is | The story of a daughter lost in hell," Boland begins; "…And the best thing about the legend is | I can enter it anywhere. And have." And so, as she becomes Ceres and watches her daughter make that fatal mistake, you feel that this is the poet with her own daughter, and a chain of mothers and daughters stretching down the centuries, past and present: a sadness but also a wisdom, stretching through time. Here's how it ends:

She could have come home and been safe
And ended the story and all
Our heartbroken searching but she reached
Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
The French sound for apple and
The noise of stone and the proof
That even in the place of death,
At the heart of legend, in the midst
Of rocks full of unshed tears
Ready to be diamonds by the time
The story was told, a child can be
Hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-colored.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are aboveground.
It is another world. But what else
Can a mother give her daughter but such
Beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
The papery, flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

======

*Longley, incidentally, is one of no less than five poets born in Northern Ireland, with an additional three from the South; did they enlist Seamus Heaney as a recruiter, I wonder? No matter; Heaney's own two poems on the Orpheus legend are among the highlights of the collection.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Some are fairly dutiful translations, some are loose interpretations. Unfortunately they vary a lot in quality. The high point for me was "Mrs. Midas," by Carol Ann Duffy, the current British poet laureate. (According to Wikipedia she is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay person to hold the position.) "Mrs. Midas" has virtually nothing to do with Ovid's telling of the story--but it is perfectly Ovidian in tone and wit.
"He was standing under the pear tree snapping a twig.
Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way
the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,
but the twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from a branch, we grew Fondante d'Automne,
and it sat in his hand like a lightbulb. On.
I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy-lights in the tree?
He came into the house. The doorknob glowed...
I made him sit
on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.
I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.
The toilet I didn't mind. I couldn't believe my ears:
how he'd had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted.
But who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold?
It feeds no-one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes
no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette...At least,
I said, you'll be able to give up smoking for good."

Ovid would have loved it.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these poems were good, and some of them were by Ted Hughes. (Kidding.) (Sort of.) The more straightforward ones seemed a little unmotivated, especially since the Ovid project is already so weird--why not go further in his direction? (Carol Ann Duffy's "Mrs. Midas" was an especially good example of this type, as was Frederick Seidel's about Myrrha. Of course Frederick Seidel wrote about Myrrha. Guess what--it's gross!). Anyway if you want to read several hundred pages of Ovidian style Greek mythology, read the Metamorphoses. If you want to read another few hundred pages after that this is not bad. Send me an email to learn more of which are the good ones if you wind up reading, this if you would like. If I have already given the book back to the library (likely) I might not remember a lot of them but I will do my best.

[row row · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the Metamorphoses as told by a handful of different poets who were given different sections of the work to translate. As a result it’s a mix of different styles and voices, so it got jumbled for me. There were a few poets I really liked and some lines that stood out to me, but I definitely prefer a more straightforward translation by a single voice.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the most part all of these poems are excellent. Bringing them together as if they formed a natural collection was a great idea. None were translated for this volume, but were already published and brought to the collection. Many have great ways of retelling the myths.

[Marie Wynhoff-Naramore]

This was a really interesting poetic project and I definitely enjoyed the variety of interpretations and approaches.
And yet, I probably still enjoy reading Metamorphoses the most.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

James Lasdun has a magical touch, in that everything he touches turns to shit.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of 60 poems based on passages from the Metamorphoses contains a huge spectrum of poetic recreation of Ovid's work, and the result is, perhaps inevitably, one of varied success and interest: there are as many misses as there are hits. There are some polished pieces that stick closer to the original tales - J. D. McClatchy's "The Grip of Envy" for example, or James Lasdun's "The Plague at Aegina"; Michael Longley's "Baucis and Philemon", or Derek Mahon's "Pygmalion and Galatea" - but there are also some that have a rather perfunctory feel to them, such as Amy Clampitt's "Medea" and Seamus Heaney's two Orpheus poems. Some of the contributors use Ovid's characters or scenarios as a springboard for their own particular and sometimes very serious poetic concerns: I found myself foundering in a fog of obscurity with Tom Paulin's "Cadmus and the Dragon" and Ciaran Carson's "Down Under". Just a few, most notably Kenneth Koch's "Io", which is written in (intentionally corny?) fifteen syllable couplets, dare to push Ovid to, or even beyond, the border of absurdity: is there not something intrinsically ridiculous about tales of people being transformed into cows, or stones, or fountains? But most of the poets accept Ovid on his own terms, and alongside the brilliant contributions of Ted Hughes, the most successful and enjoyable poems are those that enable new perspectives on a tale, either by radical experiments with the form of its telling (as in the documentary fragments of Glyn Maxwell's "Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun"), by consciously shifting viewpoints (as in C. K. Williams's "Hercules, Deianira, Nessus"), or by giving voices to new narrators, often characters from the tales themselves, like Carol Ann Duffy's "Mrs Midas" and Vicki Feaver's "Circe".

If there is one dominant impression that emerges with consistent clarity from After Ovid, it is that, stripped in many cases of their pastoral or heroic settings, and removed both from the genial voice of their narrator, and from the vision of a world unified by the transformations of one story into the next, the Metamorphoses are, more often than not, tales of violence and even brutality. This is achieved sometimes by a translation into a modern setting, as in the gangster-crude central section of Robin Robertson's "The Flaying of Marsyas" or William Logan's Massachusetts-mountain "Niobe", and sometimes by the injection of modern idioms into the familiar classical frame, as in David Wheatley and Justin Quinn's "Tereus, Procne, Philomela". It is a powerful realisation, but ultimately an exhausting rather than an invigorating one when spread over nearly 300 pages of poetry. Half as much would have been twice as enjoyable; or the vision of a single poet. Fortunately, Ted Hughes gave us that a few years later, in Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses.

[Marie-Therese · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uneven and rather disappointing collection. While there are a few stunning poems (I particularly liked those by Alice Fulton and Eavan Boland) the majority are average (even Ted Hughes is not at his best here) and frequently seem laboured or dutiful, as if the myth chosen did not truly inspire the poet but was merely a commission to complete on time. An excessive overlap in theme among the poems doesn't help (so much to choose from in the Metamorphoses, and yet so little done with it here); the book becomes a monotonous read well before the halfway point and I was genuinely relieved to be moving onto something else when I turned the last page-a feeling I've certainly never had when reading Ovid himself!

[Tracy]

A reactionary book of poetry inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. Pretty cool.

[Giorgio Verola · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful and rich.