[poetry] raise your hand if you thought latin poetry was stodgy (I know I did!)

[vanitashaze]

...But I was wrong! Grievously so! To wit: this hilarious Ovid poem, as (rather liberally) translated by Peter Green.

The Amores: Book One, Poem Three

Fair's fair now, Venus. This girl's got me hooked. All I'm asking from her
Is love - or at least some future hope for my own
Eternal devotion. No, even that's too much - hell, just let me love her!
(Listen, Venus: I've asked you so often now.)
Say yes, pet. I'd be your slave for years, for a lifetime.
Say yes - unswerving fidelity's my strong suit.
I may not have top-drawer connections, I can't produce blue-blooded
Ancestors to impress you, my father's plain middle-class,
And there aren't any squads of ploughmen to deal with my broad acres -
My parents are both pretty thrifty, and need to be.
What have I got on my side, then? Poetic genius, sweetheart,
Divine inspiration. And love. I'm yours to command -
Unswerving faithfulness, morals above suspicion
Naked simplicity, a born-to-the-purple blush.
I don't chase thousands of girls, I'm no sexual circus-rider;
Honestly, all I want is to look after you
Till death do us part, have the two of us living together
All my time, and know you'll cry for me when I'm gone.
Besides, when you give me yourself, what you'll be providing
Is creative material. My art will rise to the theme
And immortalise you. Look, why do you think we remember
The swan-upping of Leda, or Io's life as a cow,
Or poor virgin Europa whisked off overseas, clutching
That so-called bull by the - horn? Through poems, of course.
So you and I, love, will enjoy that same world-wide publicity,
And our names will be linked, forever, with the gods.


While I understand that the more academic translation is perhaps not quite as ribald, I quite prefer this one. People don't seem to understand poems in a historical context - witness the Canterbury Tales. It's hard to remember that most of the Classical poems we read today were written in a different language and then translated, into a language that barely resembles what we speak today; that the formality we associate with epic poems and "thee" and "thou" wasn't, at the time, particularly formal at all. I suppose I like this version of the Ovid poem because, had I been around in 20 or so BCE, this is pretty much how I would have understood it to be: a funny, light-hearted, occasionally rude ode to love, certainly not worth the pompousness it's given today.

Comments

[aestheticized.livejournal.com]

I read Ovid's Amores & Ars Amatoria for one of my classes this spring. Such a blast! And you're absolutely right about translations. Ovid is one of the best examples of this same; same goes for Aristophanes. The translations we read in my classics class were all pretty excellent for this very reason: the captured the feel of the texts, as well as the meaning.

[vanitashaze.livejournal.com]

Ah, college education. I keep forgetting it's so different from high school. To read a good translation of something right now would be absolutely heavenly, though of course I'd settle for people just understanding that a lot of the poems we plow through? There's actually some fertile ground there. I mean, Shakespeare. He's the scourge of middle- and high-school English classes across the country, but I just cannot understand why. He's witty! Hilarious! And sexual, which is always approved of by teenagers!

Methinks we should read more Ovid in class. That might liven up our Monday mornings a bit.