Ovid in Otherworld (2006)

[Statue of Ovid at Constantia]

The Latin poet Ovid – famous for such bestsellers as How to Pick Up Girls, How to Get Rid of Girls Once You’ve Picked Them Up, Love-letters of Famous Celebrities, not to mention his twin epic poems Feasts and Changes – was sent into exile in the year AD 8. He spent the last decade of his life in a tiny settlement called Tomis in the barbarous wolf-haunted forests around the Black Sea. Nobody knows why. He wrote begging letters to everyone he knew, in power or out of it, but something he’d either done or said (he speaks in one of the letters of “a poem and an error”) had angered the Emperor Augustus. The next Emperor, Tiberius, did not reverse the decision.

Augustus’s decision to exile the tender, fun-loving poet to the most distant regions of his empire has been debated, speculated about, and imaginatively recreated ever since. Poems, novels, dramas and films about it abound. In the latest of these, my own novel EMO (Titus Books, 2008), I translate (or rather adapt) a number of Ovid’s own poems from the Black Sea – known collectively as the Tristia, or Sad Poems – and parallel them with more modern experiences of exile.

In the end, who was victorious in this ideological struggle between Power and Poetry? Ovid’s letters from exile have been seen by many commentators as cowardly – unworthy of his role as anointed successor to the Imperial apologist Virgil. Others read his work as more subversive, the honestly-reported experiences of a city sophisticate faced with a reality unthinkable to his blasé audience back home. For Ovid read Pablo Neruda or Osip Mandelstam, for Augustus Stalin or General Pinochet, and I imagine his case may start to come into better focus.

Contents:

• Exul Ludens


• Tristia 3.2
• Tristia 3.3
• Tristia 3.8
• Tristia 3.10
• Tristia 3.12
• Tristia 3.13
• Tristia 5.7
• Tristia 5.10
• Tristia 5.12
• Epistulae 1.2
• Epistulae 4.7
• Epistulae 4.10
• Epistulae 4.14
• Fasti V: 421-44


• Sources

[Jack Ross: "Tower at Český Krumlov" (2004)]

Papyri (2007)

[Greek vase]

Love-poems & fragments
from Sappho & elsewhere

The Villa of the Papyri

Sappho to Anaktoria
Recipe for Making a Dadaist Poem
Ode to Aphrodite
Life among the Surrealists
Atthis
Mnasidika
Fragments
Fragments (2)
To a girl who doesn’t care for poetry
Juicy Root
Virgin
Sappho’s Epithalamion

Sources

[Girl at piano]

The Villa of the Papyri

[A Replica of the Villa of the Papyri]

The Villa of the Papyri is a house in Herculaneum, near Naples. Historians believe that it may once have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso. During the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 it was completely covered in lava. Parts of it were excavated in 1765 by Karl Weber, though many sections remain unexplored to the present day.

Piso was an historian and a philosopher, who owned an extensive library of papyrus scrolls. It is thought that some attempt was made during the eruption to evacuate these books by packing them into cases and carrying them out through an underground tunnel. The slaves deputed for the task were overtaken by poisonous fumes, however, leaving approximately 1800 papyri as carbonised spills in the lower levels of the villa.

Developments in multi-spectral imaging during the 1990s have made it possible to decipher the texts on these burnt scrolls, and a number of appeals have been made to the international scholarly community to expedite the recovery of this largely untouched library from ancient Rome. The treasures within it might include the lost books of Livy’s History of Rome, poems by Sappho and Anakreon, unknown plays by Sophocles and Euripides …

The Italian government’s official position is that even modern excavation techniques are not sufficiently advanced to guarantee the scrolls’ safety, and that they are therefore best left where they are at present. Other scholars fear that they are being gradually leached away and destroyed by the floods endemic to the region.

Why have these scrolls not yet been dug up and read? What is it the authorities fear about them? Which long-cherished theories and ponderous speculations would they give the lie to? This is possibly the greatest opportunity mankind will ever have to recover the lost literature of classical antiquity, the books and scrolls feared lost forever in the burning of the fabled Library of Alexandria (whose destruction began – coincidentally? – when Julius Caesar set fire to the city’s docks whilst defending his mistress Cleopatra, during a domestic dynastic struggle).

Up to now all we’ve been able to recover of Greek and Latin literature – besides the books copied and recopied by medieval monks, or translated into Arabic by Islamic scholars – has been a few fragments of papyri: mostly letters and accounts (with the occasional precious line or two of poetry) preserved in the sunbaked dryness of the Egyptian desert.

The treasures of Herculaneum must frighten someone, somewhere, very much indeed for them to have been left to rot in a waterlogged ditch for over two centuries ...

[A Reconstruction of the Villa of the Papyri]

Sappho, Anacreon et Anacreontiques

This is the cover of a book I bought in the Hard-to-Find bookshop at Devonport on the 30th of July, 2006.

It was published by Editions Bernard Grasset (61, Rue des Saints-Peres, VIe arondissement, Paris), and printed in Abbeville-sur-Somme in January, 1932.

The French translation is by Mario Meunier, who had previously published versions of Sophocles (1907), Sappho (1911), Nonnos of Panopolis (1911), Euripides (1923), Plutarch (1924), Pythagoras (1925), Plato (1926-27), Aristophanes (1928), and Sallust (1928).

He himself says of this new edition of his translation of Sappho:

Most French translations of Sappho, Anacreon, and the Anacreontics are in verse. For myself, judging (with Madame Dacier) that "verse translations are very unfaithful" and that the sense itself matters more than the words with which one dresses the sense, I've tried to translate them into prose, without paraphrase and without obscuring the intimate rhythms of their lyrical exuberance too much [15].

Not knowing any Greek myself, this literal translation of Meunier's has been indispensable to me in trying to get closer to what Sappho and the other Greek poets were actually trying to say.