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Tales from Ovid

1998; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/25304286

2327-5804

W. R. Johnson, Ted Hughes,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Ted Hughes. Tales from Ovid. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. It has taken the last half century, but finally we see completed the hard labor of summoning Ovid back from the nurseries and the kindergartens where Romantic Hellenism had banished him. An impressive witness to the success of this revision of the traditional Western canon is Ted Hughes's timely transformations of Latin's most influential poet and his most intricate poem, The Metamorphoses, into powerful and contemporary English verse. That England's Poet Laureate should have taken notice of this massive reappraisal and set his seal on it makes for happy irony that Ovid would doubtless appreciate: it is he, after all, who shaped the definitive version of the story of how Daphne became the tree that furnishes laurel crowns for triumphant kings and triumphant poets. This story, however, is not one of the stories Hughes chose for his volume. Though it is idle to try to guess what principle guides this process of selection, I'm struck by the fact that, true to his own muse, Hughes tends in this volume to favor tales that represent a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque (viii). (The word extreme is used four times in the brief Introduction, and it functions as sort of marker for the acute sense of ubiquitous cataclysm, of loves hoplessley besotted and doomed, and of violent Weltwende that selects these tales and finds in English answering forms for them.) There is no question but that the tales Hughes emphasizes are as dark and as violent as he claims they are, or that this penchant for depicting explosions and mayhem is near the core of Ovid's genius. But also near its core, and this tension is nearer still to its secret, is the urbane, cavalier lightness of touch of the sophisticated entertainer (ix, x), that aspect of his artistry that the Romantics hated in him and that Hughes himself trivializes in his Introduction and tries, probably unconsciously, to efface in his translations. This huge chunk of Ovid's gifts and vision is prominently on display in the story of how Daphne becomes laurel tree, telling of the tale in which delicate lyricism and subtle feel for what the injured feel and suffer at once adumbrate and ironically mask the brutalities that the poem will steadily generate. This story and numerous others like it jibe poorly with Hughes's tastes and talents; wisely therefore he avoided mistranslating Daphne (it would be like Schumann rewriting Mozart) and turned his attention to the tales that suited his talents. My caveat lector is issued only because Hughes's own Introduction and many of his reviewers may give new readers of The Metamorphoses the impression that his translation seizes the essence of an epic-counterepic that is far more complicated, various, and dialectical than they take it to be. Hughes's concentration on the poem's sinister baroque at the expense of its witty empathies is matched by his refusal, again understandable in the light of his temperament and his aims, to engage with the poem's political framework. When he translates the passage in which Jupiter summons all the gods to council, he leaves untranslated crucial joke: Where the chief gods / Are housed in the precincts of Jove's palace / At the very summit of heaven (13). Allen Mandelbaum, in his 1993 translation, supplies what Hughes omits: And if this not be too audacious, I / should call this site high heaven's Palatine. This campily fawning compliment to the Emperor Augustus (Your home, sire, is like God's palace on Olympus, which means, sire, you are like unto God), which links the living god of contemporary Rome with the brutal lunatic who is Heaven's King and who rampages through much of the poem, is echoed at the poem's end when once again, Augustus, Savior of Rome and Emperor of the World, is (ironically) praised as being the end of history, the purpose and goal toward which history and all the suffering creatures of the poem had been yearning and striving. …