Lately, I’ve been struggling to articulate just why Ovid’s Metamorphoses speaks to me, why I think it’s important to study, even though, like every other text written in antiquity, it’s written by a man for an audience of men. Here are a few reasons, in no particular order:
- The Metamorphoses is a text that queers the genre. It is an epic in length and subject matter. However, Ovid doesn’t follow the same formula as other epic poets of the time. Vergil and Homer created texts that progressed through time chronologically, and followed a single hero on his journey. Ovid’s text progresses through time chronologically, but doesn’t follow a single hero, doesn’t even stick to a single group of characters. The subversion of the genre presents at least one place of intersection between Ovid’s ancient text and some contemporary literature. As a text that queers the genre, there is also a great deal of other queerings that happen within the text, with characters, with language, with meter.
- Audience in antiquity was definitely not women (who wrote or spoke to women?). And it’s impossible not to be aware of this, even reading the text in translation. Ovid does something different. He, more than any other Latin poet, presents women and their internal thoughts. I come back to Daphne because the myth speaks to me on so many different levels. In Daphne’s story, we actually learn what she wants. She wants never to marry, and to be like Diana. While this might seem simple, it is an instance of Ovid conveying Daphne’s desires, and it is also an instance of where she voices those desires into the world.
- Ovid’s stories can be interpreted and retold, and they apply surprisingly well to current scenarios. Maybe this is why so many moral texts came out of the Metamorphoses. Which brings me back to the idea of audience. A famous translation of the Metamorphoses into French during the Middle Ages, the Ovide Moralise, turns the epic into a loosely translated compilation of stories with morals, similar to what we might consider a fable. Not long after that, men start translating the Metamorphoses into English for women. Like the anonymous translation entitled: Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Epitomized in an English Poetical Style for the Use and Entertainment of the Ladies of Great Britain. What is it that women are supposed to take away from these stories?
- Ovid, despite not being a woman himself, somehow accurately captures the experiences of women. Even rape. Rather than ignoring stories about rape, or pretending that they don’t exist, there’s value in drawing connections, making sure that there’s no question around what’s happening. Rape meant something different for the Romans than it does for us. For the Romans, rape was a scenario to write about, especially in rhetorical exercises. These connections make visible women’s experiences rather than erasing them or sweeping them under the rug. Drawing connections between contemporary culture and ancient might, in this instance, show some of the ways that women’s experiences have not changed as drastically as we’ve hoped. And then once we realize that (again), we begin to enact that change.
- It is not just the Metamorphoses that focuses so much on women and their points of view. A lot of Ovid’s poetry is like that, from the Ars Amatoria to the Remedia Amoris and the Heroides. They all feature women and women’s voices from goddesses to nymphs to mere humans.
Why still study Ovid? Is it even still appropriate?
- There are many retellings and other writings that women have published and that reference Ovid or other myths, and these retellings are where readers might see connections between the contemporary world and Ovid most clearly.
- Like learning Latin (and Ovid really is part of learning Latin!), it’s not necessarily every declension ending or verb conjugation that sticks, but rather the stories. These stories become something that we’ve heard of before and we might recognize changes or where there need to be changes, updates, reinterpretations.
- This is also why new translations are important. These new translations show that change, even incremental and even with respect to ancient texts, even trying to stick to the original, change is possible and necessary.
And then a few (more) thoughts on Ovid in the contemporary world…
Because of women’s experiences in the margins, their different perspectives, they create translations that feel more real, more genuine, because they see things differently and have experienced the world differently. And particularly with respect to the stories about women and slaves and other minorities, they’re able to translate stories in ways that expose those different experiences. We need this precisely because we don’t live in a post-gender world, like we also don’t live in a post-feminism or post-racism world (no matter how much some of us would like to think so).
And then there’s Florida’s Don’t Say Gay (or Trans). Just as women translators are exposting these experiences of rape, sexuality, and slavery in terms that we understand, that make these stories relevant and that expose the experiences, there are places which are trying to keep us from talking about these stories as well as our own experiences with our own stories that echo these stories in the Metamorphoses. To see my own experiences reflected back at me in a text written thousands of years ago has the effect of letting me know that I’m not alone. As women translate these stories, I feel this sensation even more strongly. This is the power of reading, of books.
I encountered Ovid for the first time in translation when I was 13 or 14, and then translated his Latin for the first time when I was 16. Those stories spoke to me so clearly even then. It wasn’t until I was in college that I found other women with experiences like mine (wanting to say no to boys/men, but not saying it because I was worried about the consequences). It wasn’t until I was 25 that I came out and found a community of other queer women in the form of a rugby club that my wife was on. It wasn’t until I moved to Atlanta a few years ago that I had to really go out and do the work of finding a community of other queer women – finding friends in your 30s isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have kids. What I mean to say in all of this is that we should read and talk about our experiences as queer people at all points in our lives, and even as they relate (or don’t) to ancient texts. If we engage in these conversations often and early, there may be chances for young people to find communities long before me and many others. Articulating what you want and what you believe is power. It also often comes from reading, from talking with others in school. That is how and where we learn to articulate our ideas, form our beliefs. There’s more to these stories than Latin grammar and a translation exercise. We need to talk about those things, and we need to talk about them in the context of our contemporary world.
Alexandra Sladky 