[Glenn Wright]

I re-accomplished this translation, rendering it in elegiac couplets.

Amores I.1

P. Ovidius Nasonis

Ready to write in grave meters, I celebrate violent battles,
xxxxxlegends from so long ago,. told in a form apropos
Each couplet line was the same in its length as its twin—Cupid chuckled,
Xxxxxso it is said, and he took . one foot from each in my book.
“Who gave to you, rowdy boy, such control of poetic creations?
Xxxx Know it’s the Muses who guard . all who affect the name, ‘Bard.’
What if the goddess of love snatched the weapons of fair-haired Minerva?
xxxxxWhat if Minerva would scorchxxx wedding guests fanning a torch,
if in the woods and the hills Mother Ceres would hold sovereign power,
Xxxxxif the plowed fields would all rollxxxunder Diana’s control,
who would approve? And should curly-haired Phoebus be given sharp spearpoints?
xxxxxMars, I suppose, we’ll admire xxx playing some songs on a lyre.
You, little boy, have a surplus of great and important commissions.
XxxxxWhy, you self-serving young jerk, xxx covet additional work?
What? You are taking it all? Now you’re claiming Mount Helicon’s valleys?
XxxxxPhoebus can scarcely protectxxx lyres from your theft, I suspect.
When a new verse on a new piece of parchment appears strong and manly,
xxxxxalways the next one is weak, xxxshowing defective technique;
Nor are my subjects appropriate for the less serious meters,
Xxxxxbetter for boys or sweet girls, xxxbeautifully coifed in tight curls.”
Just as I finished complaining, at once he unfastened his quiver.
xxxxxFrom it he picked out a dart xxxmade to transfix my poor heart.
Bending the wood of the intricate bow with his knee like a strongman,
Xxxxx”Bard,” he said, “since you must sing, xxxtake for your prize love’s best thing!”
Wretchedness! Oh, but that boy has sure arrows that all find their victim.
xxxxxBurning me deep in my soul, xxxLove now has total control.
Sextuple meter enlarges my work, then quintuple deflates it:
Xxxxx’Bye iron war with your rules. xxxSix-footed lines are for fools!
Circle, my Muse, your fair brows with fresh garlands of Venus’s myrtle.
xxxxxCouplets eleven feet long xxxmeasure our passionate song.

———————————
Edits:
L1: Ready to praise arms and violent wars in the gravest of meters, > Ready to write in grave meters, I celebrate violent battles,
L2: à propos > apropos (Julie)
L7: Venus, is snatching away all the weapons of fair-haired Minerva, > What if the goddess of love snatched the weapons of fair-haired Minerva? (Julie)
L8: If blonde Minerva would scorch wedding guests with a fanned torch > What if Minerva would scorch wedding guests fanning a torch, (Julie)
L11: spears > spearpoints
L15: What? Because you claim it all, do you own, too, Mount Helicon’s valleys? > What? You are taking it all? Now you’re claiming Mount Helicon’s valleys? (Carl)
L20: better a boy or a girl, beautiful tresses in curls. > better for boys or sweet girls, beautifully coifed in tight curls.





—————————-
I taught Latin for many years, and Ovid was always a favorite of my students. This ditty is the introductory poem to his three books of humorous love poems. In Latin poetry, long, serious poems—epics and such, even Ovid’s Metamorphoses— were written in dactylic hexameter, each line having six feet. Less serious, humorous, or romantic poems were often written in elegiac couplets, in which the top line (odd-numbered line) of the couplet is in dactylic hexameter, but the lower (even-numbered line) replaced the third and sixth feet with single long syllables, like half-feet. This line, consisting of four complete feet and two half-feet was called the “pentameter” line, and thus an elegiac couplet had eleven feet. I include these rather tedious prosodic details because an understanding of them is necessary to understand this poem. The Latin text I used was from Richard A. LaFleur’s 2nd edition of Love and Transformation: An Ovid Reader. Longman’s Latin Series, 1999.
——————————————

Amores I.1
by Publius Ovidius Naso

Of weapons and fierce wars I would declaim,
with meter as solemn as the serious theme,
all couplets with equal lines, when Cupid came,
and, chuckling, swiped a foot from each. His scheme
enraged me. “Punk! Who gave our poems to you?
Our sacred band of bards obeys the Muses.
If Venus steals Minerva’s weapons—who
would think that right, or if Minerva uses
a wedding torch to warm up? What if Ceres
rules wild woods, or Diana, the huntress, runs
plowed fields, or curly-haired Apollo carries
a spear, and Mars plays lute-songs just for fun?
You have great kingdoms, boy, and too much power.
Why, hustler, do you want more work to do?
You’re everywhere, even in the Muses’ bower,
Apollo can scarcely guard his lyre from you.
On a new page a first line swells with promise,
the next line shrinks my manliness to nothing.
Light-hearted music mocks my warlike dramas,
more apt for boys, for well-coifed girls, and loving.”
I stopped complaining. He untied his quiver,
and chose a dart made just for my demise.
He flexed his bow and knelt down to deliver
the missile: “Because you’d sing, bard, here’s your prize!”
Poor me! That boy’s sure arrow burns me alive.
In my once loveless, flaming heart, Love rules.
My work rises in six, falls limp in five.
Farewell, iron wars! Hexameter’s for fools.
With Venus’ myrtle, circle your golden brows,
my Muse, with eleven feet you’ll sing our vows.

—————————-
Crib:

In dignified meter I prepared to tell of arms and violent war,
the subject matter appropriate to the prosody.
The even-numbered verses were equal [to the odd]—Cupid laughed,
it is said, and spirited away one [metrical] foot.
“Who gave to you, savage boy, this rule over poems/songs?
We are bards of the Muses, not your crowd.
What if Venus snatched the weapons of blonde Minerva?
(or) if blonde Minerva fanned the kindled [wedding] torches?
Who would approve of Ceres reigning in the hilly woods,
[or] the plowed fields to be ruled by the law of the quiver-bearing virgin [Diana]?
Who would teach Phoebus [Apollo], remarkable for his curly hair, about the sharp spear-point,
[or] the playing of the Aonian [from an area sacred to the Muses around Mt. Helicon] lyre to Mars?
You have great kingdoms, boy, and too much power;
why do you affect a new responsibility, ambitious one?
[whether] because everywhere is yours, are the valleys of Mt. Helicon yours?
His lyre now is scarcely even safe for Phoebus [Apollo].
When at first/in the first line a verse rises well on a new page,
in the next it shrinks my manliness;
I have no subject matter appropriate for the light\trivial meters,
either a boy or a girl with long hair carefully combed/arranged.”
I had complained, when immediately he untied his quiver
and chose a dart made for my destruction,
He bent the intricately curved bow strongly with his knee,
and said, “Because you would sing, bard, receive the prize/work/masterpiece!”
Poor me! That boy had sure-fire arrows.
I burn, and in my empty/carefree/uncommitted heart, Love rules.
For me the work rises in six feet; it falls/ebbs/becomes limp in five:
farewell, iron wars with your meters!
Surround your blonde temples with Myrtle from the seashore,
Muse, with eleven feet you must tune your song.

—————————-

Original

Amores I.1
P. Ovidi Nasonis

Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
xxx edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
xxx dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.
‘Quis tibi, saeve puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris?
Xxx Pieridum vates, non tua turba sumus.
quid, si praeripiat flavae Venus arma Minervae
Xxx ventilet accensas flava Minerva faces?
quis probet in silvis Cererem regnare iugosis,
Xxx lege pharetratae Virginis arva coli?
crinibus insignem quis acuta cuspide Phoebum
Xxx instruat, Aoniam Marte movente lyram?
sunt tibi magna, puer, nimiumque potentia regna;
Xxx cur opus adfectas, ambitiose, novum?
an, quod ubique, tuum est? tua sunt Heliconia tempe?
Xxx vix etiam Phoebo iam lyra tuta sua est?
cum bene surrexit versu nova pagina primo,
Xxx attenuat nervos proximus ille meos;
nec mihi materia est numeris levioribus apta,
Xxx aut puer aut longas compta puella comas.’
Questus eram, pharetra cum protinus ille soluta
Xxx legit in exitium spicula facta meum,
lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum,
Xxx ‘quod’que ‘canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus!’
Me miserum! certas habuit puer ille sagittas.
Xxx uror, es in vacuo pectore regnat Amor.
Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat:
Xxx ferrea cum vestris bella valete modis!
cingere litorea flaventia tempora myrto,
Xxx Musa, per undenos emodulanda pedes!

———————————————
Edits
L1: proclaim > declaim
L3: of equal measure > with equal lines
L5: enraged me. “Punk! Who gave control to you > enraged me. “Punk! Who gave our poems to you?
L6: honors > obeys > of poems? our band of bards obeys the Muses. > Our sacred band of bards obeys the Muses.
L7: steals > grabs > If Venus steals Minerva’s weapons—who
L10: rules hilly woods, or if Diana runs > rules wild woods, or Diana, the huntress, runs
L14: Why, envious one, do you want more work to do? > Why, hustler, do you want more work to do?
L15: You sneak everywhere, even in the Muses’ bower, > You’re everywhere, even in the Muses’ bower,

[Carl Copeland]

This is skillfully done, Glenn, and I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but all the inversions and old-fashioned diction (including the anachronistic “lute”), and even the insistence on rhyme where the original had none, give it a rather stiff, century-before-last feel for me. Some of my translations of nineteenth-century Russian poets sound like this, and I go back and forth with myself: How modern should or can an archaic poem sound? Should it or can it sound the way it did to the first readers? (“Punk” is probably getting there.)

Another criticism—too obvious to need mentioning and even less useful—is that Ovid’s very clever introduction of his metrical form is undermined by the very different form of the translation. I personally like imitations of ancient meters, but they can be no more than imitations, of course, and who knows whether readers will take to them.

Maybe you’ll find something more useful among these random thoughts:

… Who gave control to you. / of poems? Our band of bards obeys the Muses.

There’s a stray period after “you,” and the inversion here is stretching things. As much as I like the alliterative “band of bards obeys,” you may need to drop “of bards” to make room for “control” in that line.

… What if Ceres / rules hilly woods, or if Diana runs / plowed fields, …

I should have taken the cue from “rules,” but I still thought it more likely that Diana was running across the fields than running them in the sense of managing them.

You sneak everywhere, even to the Muses’ bower,

This is one of several metrically ambiguous lines. I can think of at least three different ways of scanning it, but I suppose it reads well enough, however you cut it.

He flexed his bow and knelt down to deliver
the missile, “Because you’d sing, bard, here’s your prize!”

You could do me a favor by putting a colon after “missile.” I keep ignoring the quotation marks and trying to read “because” as grammatically linked to what comes before.

With Venus’s myrtle circle your golden brows,

You need a comma to stop me wondering what a “myrtle circle” is. You could also regularize that line a little with “Venus’ myrtle.” Such singular possessives are acceptable, I believe, for classical and biblical names.

[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Glenn!

Carl said most of what I was going to say, but I might as well send this anyway, as endorsement if nothing else.

Ordinarily, I would applaud such fun and surprising rhymes as "promise" and "dramas," but here they feel like an inadequate consolation prize for not being able to experience any of the metrical effects that Ovid is talking about. The subject of this passage is, quite literally, the form, so I found it disconcertingly ironic to read about matching a poet's form and subject (L2, "materia conveniente modis") in a translation that divorces the form from the subject so utterly. ABAB-rhymed quatrains of five-beat lines bear no relationship to the unequal couplets totaling eleven feet that Ovid is discussing in such technical detail.

When the poem says that the even-numbered lines are missing a foot—going so far as to say that the first line of each couplet swells, and the second shrinks, the narrator's "manliness" (!)—of course the reader is eager to see how the translator is going to an equivalent effect in the English version. (Well, er, maybe not genitally, but certainly metrically.)

I agree with Carl that the inversions and diction give a rather Victorian feel to parts of this (although, unlike Carl, I have no problem with calling a lute a lute). Whenever I'm in the mood for a Victorian vibe, I can easily look up any number of versions by authentic Victorians—I don't need to accept an imitation. But you have an advantage they didn't. You can touch my soul in my own idiom, if you so choose.

Sorry I can't be more positive about this one, especially since I am happy to have a Latinist here.

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl and Julie—

Thanks so much for your comments! I respect both of you and appreciate the time and consideration that you are both so generous with.
I set out to have some fun with this, and I agree that there is always going to be a Drydenesque anachronism in any attempt to render elegiac couplets as IP.
My thinking on the awkward enjambments and inversions in lines 5-12 was to try to capture the spluttering anger of the speaker and the ridiculous incongruity of the gods swapping duties and attributes. I thought that the ABAB ballad in IP would most closely approximate the spirit of the Latin elegiac couplet. I see upon reflection, and thanks to your guidance, that this was a doomed mission.

Carl, your eagle eye caught some punctuation errors, which I have fixed. I thought “Punk” might have been a bit OTT, and I had some qualms about “runs,” too. I thought about replacing “plowed” in the next line with “in,” and just presenting the image of Diana running (which, in representations of her, she is almost always doing), but decided that the speaker’s point was to focus on the gods’ areas of control.
You are right about “lute” being an anachronism. I wanted to amplify the humor by styling Mars as a troubadour. More literal alternatives are “lyre” or “harp.” I tried researching what an Aonian lyre was, to see if it was somehow different from the kind of lyre we see represented above piano keyboards, but came up empty.

Julie, your point is well-taken. What I set out to do has already been done. I suppose I might try to create an even more contemporary 21st Century rendering, but that task would probably be better left to younger Classics scholars who actually talk that way among their friends. I did try to think of a way of rendering the mildly bawdy humor while demonstrating the metrical wit, but couldn't come up with a way to do it. If “promise” ended with a stressed syllable, the contrast of masculine and feminine rhymes in lines 17 and 18 might serve to suggest Ovid’s point about the martial manliness of the hexameter line contrasting with the simpering effeminacy of the pentameter. Unfortunately, if I replaced “promise” with a word that is a spondee or iamb, I would lose my “promise/dramas” rhyme—a price I’m not willing to pay.

It will probably just be us, so thanks again! I always enjoy and appreciate your company.
Glenn

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl and Julie—
I worked out a new translation of Amores I.1 in elegiac couplets.
Glenn

[Julie Steiner]

Bravo! Not only is the contrast that Ovid's content was drawing between the original's dactylic hexameter and the 2.5 + 2.5 lines preserved, the use of rhyme really conveys the lighter feel of the latter—and are just a lot of fun, starting with "ago/ apropos" (correct spelling). The horizontal spacing at the caesura, à la Anglo-Saxon, also works well, in my opinion, to make an obvious visual difference between the lines.

(By the way, if you use the tags [ L ][ /L ] to add horizontal spaces, rather than using white xxxxx, you can avoid having all those xxxxx's become visible again when quoted or downloaded.)


Nits:


The meter of L1 is a bit hard to find, in part because "arms" sets off such a a tingle of recognition from the first line of Virgil's Aeneid that I have difficulty demoting it:

     READ-y to PRAISE ARMS and VI-o-lent WARS in the GRAV-est of ME-ters,

I'm not sure this would be better, but:

     PRIMED to PRAISE WEA-pons and VI-o-lent WARS in the GRAV-est of ME-ters,


The Venus line doesn't seem to have an active verb in it. The meter is also hard to find in the "if blonde Minerva" line that follows it. I have trouble not promoting "blonde," which draws attention to itself because Minerva had been "fair-haired" a nanosecond before, at the end of the previous line. I would suggest something like:

     Picture if Venus had taken the weapons of fair-haired Minerva.
          What if Minerva should scorch     wedding guests, using a torch?


In this bit:

     Nor are my subjects appropriate for the less serious meters,
          better a boy or a girl,     beautiful tresses in curls.”

I take the original to mean that Ovid does not have a lover at the moment, so that's why he lacks subject matter for "less serious meters." I don't think "better" adequately conveys that. Perhaps "lacking" instead? I also wonder if you could arrange to get rid of the "s" in "girl/curls."


Sorry for all this pickiness. I'm really very excited about the revision!

[Carl Copeland]

A radical transformation, Glenn, and much to consider, so I’ll stick to meter for now.

I like both of Julie’s metrical fixes. In the Venus line, part of what makes it hard not to stress “blonde” is that it’s hard not to destress “If.” The following two ifs are more easily promoted because they’re not followed by words that naturally want a stress. Julie also smooths over the unruly dactyl “with a fanned.”

Two other dactyls that jarred me were “one foot from” and “own, too, Mount.” I don’t have a ready fix for the first, but the second could be:

What? You are claiming it all, and now you own Helicon’s valleys? (“You claim it” also seemed a little uneasy in the dactyl slot.)

“Sextuple” is stressed wrong, but I get into the elegiac groove and ride over it without even noticing. I always wonder in these cases, though, how much readers can be counted on to finesse the meter and how much they need to be forced.

BTW, I agree with Julie that the rhymes suit the lightness of the verse, and I liked them in her Posidippus and Ausonius, but this piece is long enough that they verge on cloying by the end. Maybe that’s just me, but I suggest that in the remaining 2,000-plus lines you use rhyme more sparingly!

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Carl and Julie—

I’m glad you both found this attempt an improvement over the IP version. I appreciate the time and thought you both put into your comments. You are both so generous in helping me to learn this craft.

Julie, Thanks for the useful tip on spacing. I’m still exploring all the bells and whistles built into this platform. I incorporated most of your suggestions and feel that they made real improvements. Ovid definitely is riffing on “Arma virumque . . . cano” in his opening line. I had a slightly different take on lines 19 and 20. I thought the speaker still wanted to write a martial epic, but was unable to do so because Cupid keeps changing his verse into elegiac couplets, thus the materia that he wants to discuss is not apta for the levioribus numeris, but would instead be apta for discussing a boy or a long-haired girl, well coifed. It’s not that he lacks one of these, but rather that he doesn’t want to write about them. This, of course, changes a few lines later when he’s hit by Cupid’s arrow.

Carl, you have a sensitive ear. Your notes on meter were very helpful. I revisited the lines you highlighted and made some tweaks.

Thanks so much to both of you.
Glenn