Recently, I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses again. And I noticed something about Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, particularly his use of the word “consent” at the end of the myth of Daphne and Apollo.
Finierat Paean; factis modo laurea ramis
adnuit, utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen. (I.566-567)
“Apollo’s words were done. With new-made boughs
the laurel nodded; and she shook her crown,
as if her head had meant to show consent.”
Ovid uses two words that indicate movement: adnuit, which means to nod, to agree to, and agitasse, from agito, agitare, which has an array of meanings: to stir, drive, shake, move about; to live, control, ride; to consider, pursue. Agitate is an English derivative of agitare: to excite, to trouble the mind. Disturb is a synonym, which often has a negative connotation. While the translation of adnuit, to nod, does hold within it a connotation of consent (a nod usually provides an answer in the affirmative), agitasse is a little more unclear. Mandelbaum uses the word “shook,” and usually when we think of a shake of the head, it is the opposite of consent, it is an answer in the negative. Mandelbaum seems to go beyond the dictionary definition of agitasse and implies this further understanding of the word: “to show consent.”
Stephanie McCarter writes in her article “Rape, Lost in Translation,” “translation all too often replicates contemporary social attitudes regarding what constitutes seduction, rape, and consent – and the often problematically hazy lines we have drawn between them.” Throughout the entire story of Daphne and Apollo, from the beginning where Cupid hits her with an arrow that makes her uninterested in love, to Apollo’s speech convincing her to stop running from him, to the end where she prays to her father to be taken away from the situation, Daphne has given us no reason to believe that she would willingly give in to Apollo. And yet, here we are with the word “consent.” Consent is problematic for us today; we are constantly looking for some trace of consent, for some trace of agreement, ready to give the benefit of the doubt to any man while we disbelieve women.
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I read McCarter’s essay around the time that I finished reading Will Boast’s Daphne. Her essay articulated for me the things that had bothered me about Boast’s retelling of the Daphne and Apollo myth. I wondered if maybe the translation, the meanings that had been lost in translation, perhaps had resulted in this particular retelling. Like Boast’s novel, the myth of Daphne and Apollo is often labeled as a love story. What, in the myth, makes us interpret this as a love story? Is it Cupid? Our sorry understanding of Cupid’s childish envy? What makes us assume that she’s nodding consent at the end? What makes us think that Daphne is ok with becoming a tree, with losing all of her freedoms just to be sure that she does not become Apollo’s nymph? She nods, maybe, to understand her fate, but never, never does she consent to be Apollo’s. That’s why she’s running. She’d sooner become a tree than become Apollo’s. Indeed, at the end of Boast’s novel, Daphne remains rooted to San Francisco, just as Ovid’s Daphne becomes a tree with physical roots. And this is a largely positive realization in which this Daphne comes into herself. And that’s good. She grows up, stops pushing away the part of her that is her illness (she has cataplexy, which is a word that is never actually mentioned in the book). She is rooted, but not to a lover, Ollie (Apollo).
My issue with Boast’s retelling is that this is an Apollo’s retelling, despite being from Daphne’s POV. For Apollo, of course Daphne would find happiness in her roots. Of course she’d find purpose and embrace her life and its imperfections. Even if it meant embracing those very things that she tried so hard to be rid of. This story paints Ollie as a good guy, and Daphne as rather unlikeable. In this version, however, Daphne does give Ollie consent when they have sex.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that “…one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time…” While women, for some of history, were not able to provide their own voices in their own stories, men have used women as inspiration, have told their stories, have sought to immerse themselves, to gain some kind of understanding of what women think, believe, feel. And yet, I find, they still get it wrong. Even today. I mean, some of them get it right. But not all the time. I find myself skeptical, wary of stories that are written by men and from the woman’s POV. Sometimes, I wonder if this is a misplaced skepticism, and then I read A Room of One’s Own, and Stephanie McCarter’s essays and I think that maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s ok to want writers who look like me, think like me, love like me, who write stories about people like me.
Alexandra Sladky 