Blog

The accepted expectation for women is that they remain silent, and this can be seen especially, at its harshest, in ancient myth, where women are either silenced, never allowed to speak, or transformed into an object that is incapable of speech. And yet, I find myself looking for these silences and digging deeper to see what messages might be there, what these mythological women might be saying with or through their silences. 

The more that I’ve been reading some of these stories, the more that I am realizing that the women in these stories do have desires. But this feels like historically uncharted territory. We don’t have women’s voices because these are not stories that are told or written explicitly by women (although some have argued that Ovid is the Roman author who gets inside women’s heads the most, who shows us their perspectives). It’s the retellings that show us what women wanted instead of what they got in more explicit terms, however, there are seeds of these desires in the original texts themselves. 

Looking more closely at these stories and the vocabulary used in Latin and English is significant not just because I learn what really happens, but because it helps me listen to women better, it helps me hear the places where they are silent and where their voices need to be heard more loudly and more widely. Myth is important for this, particularly when a major way that women get to speak in these contexts is through retellings like Barker’s “Medusa.” 

Audience is hard for me to identify in my own writing and others’ writing. It is also a crucial part of rhetoric. Walter Ong reminds us that ancient rhetoricians, orators, saw an audience standing before them and “for the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both,” an imagined group (10). In this way, the audience is fictionalized, something that the writer imagines, instead of knowing the group of people that she will stand before when she gives a speech. When I imagine my audience, I always imagine someone like me.

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 first line of Vergil’s Aeneid, similar to Caesar’s “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…,” is a line constantly referenced throughout my time studying Latin. It’s a line that I don’t have to translate in order to understand because it is so prevalent, often discussed. Perhaps this level of familiarity is why it’s important to take another look at the line and what it means, especially the way that women present the line in their translations. Similar to Odysseus in Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, recent versions of Aeneas, those portrayed in women’s translations, complicate Aeneas in new ways. 

Like the orator, the translator must consider the audience before her and whether the audience will accept the translation as a reflection of the current belief system and values, or whether the audience will accept the translation as a reflection of values not included or recognized before.

I wonder what it would mean for women to translate the rhetorical texts. Like women have done with the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Metamorphoses, among others.... The word rhetoric today is so equated with politics and political speeches. Could retranslating the rhetorical texts and speeches of Cicero and Quintilian give any insight into our current political climate and our current problems with political rhetoric?

When I looked up the Psalm, having forgotten the meaning after more than a decade since graduating, I was startled to find a website that provided a list of different translations featured in different versions of the Bible, many more versions than I even realized existed. These different translations reflect different interpretations of the original text and even differing values within society.