Ovid's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing: Strange Monsters (Classical Presences) 9780198779889, 0198779887

Table of contents :
Cover
Ovid’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Copyright and Permissions
Translations
Contents
Introduction
1: Ali Smith
2: Marina Warner
3: Yoko Tawada
4: Alice Oswald
5: Mary Zimmerman
6: Saviana Stanescu
7: Jo Shapcott
8: Marie Darrieussecq
9: Josephine Balmer and Averill Curdy
10: Michèle Roberts and Clare Pollard
11: Jane Alison
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

JAMES I . PORTER

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Ovid’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing Strange Monsters

Fiona Cox

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Fiona Cox 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935712 ISBN 978–0–19–877988–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Jan Cowton

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Acknowledgements I am immensely grateful to the University of Exeter for two periods of research leave in 2013 and in 2017, which enabled me to plan and then to finish this book. I owe a considerable debt of thanks to those who have overseen the project at Oxford University Press, notably Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton and the series editors, Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. Lorna Hardwick has, in addition, been hugely generous in supporting my research in various ways and in several different fora over a number of years. My thanks go to Ingalo Thomson for her keen eye and many sensitive suggestions. I am also very grateful to the external readers of the manuscript for helpful and timely guidance. I have benefited enormously from the insights and lively discussions that have come from students with whom I have discussed these texts and authors. Especial mention must be made here of Catherine Burke, Sandra Daroczi, and Kathleen Hamel. I have never failed to learn from stimulating conversations with other colleagues and practitioners including Josephine Balmer, Genevieve Liveley, Susanna MoretonBraund, Sarah Annes Brown, Holly Ranger, Dorota Rzycka, Mathilde Skoie, Helena Taylor, Zara Torlone, Vanda Zajko, and (above all) Elena Theodorakopoulos. My husband Dick Collins has, as always, offered generous and unfailing support and wise counsel, while my sons Peter and Paul Collins provided much-needed entertainment and relief. Some debts last a lifetime. I remain enormously grateful to my parents for their constant support and encouragement. I also owe a special debt to Jan Cowton, who taught me French at school, somehow not only ensuring that we emerged with a solid grounding in and love for the French language, but also opening up the subject so that there was ‘world enough and time’ to explore a wealth of different literary texts and films, and to think about the connections between them. That comparative thinking has been invaluable to my later work and it is to her that this book is dedicated.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright and Permissions I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to cite: Ali Smith, Artful (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), a series of short extracts from pages 27, 31, 32, 65, 69, 73, 74, 107, 139, 140, 188. Ali Smith, Public Library (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015) a series of short extracts from pages 10, 21, 47, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 97, 98, 121, 132, 173, 207, 211, 212, 220. Ali Smith, Autumn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2016), a series of short extracts from pages 3, 15, 18, 19, 22, 30, 31, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 89, 99, 101, 102, 104, 112, 119, 130, 171, 172, 181. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from ARTFUL by Ali Smith, copyright © 2013 by Ali Smith. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission. Excerpts from PUBLIC LIBRARY AND OTHER STORIES by Ali Smith, compilation copyright © 2015 by Ali Smith. Used by permission of Anchor Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission. Excerpts from AUTUMN: A NOVEL by Ali Smith, copyright © 2016 by Ali Smith. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission. The Wylie Agency for permission to quote from AUTUMN Copyright © 2016, Ali Smith, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited. Claudia Gehrke from konkursbuch Verlag for permission to quote from Yoko Tawada, Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to quote from Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2002), from Jo Shapcott, Her Book. Poems

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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1988–1998 (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2000), and Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2010). Éditions Gallimard for permission to cite Jacques Roubaud ‘Dialogue’, Quelque chose noir © Éditions Gallimard, 1986. Oxford University Press for permission to reuse an article first published in 2012 as ‘Metamorphosis, Mutability and the Third Wave’ in Classical Receptions Journal 4/2. Material from this article appears in the Introduction and in Chapter 7. I am immensely grateful to the following authors for their generous permission to cite from their work: Josephine Balmer, Averill Curdy, Clare Pollard, Saviana Stanescu, Marina Warner, and Mary Zimmerman. I am especially grateful to Mary Zimmerman for her generosity in elaborating on various aspects of her work in an email conversation. Other citations are cited in conformity with guidelines for Fair Dealing proposed by the Society of Authors. In the event of any omissions or errors the author apologises and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

Translations I have used the Mary Innes translation of the Metamorphoses, except in Chapter 5, where Zimmerman melds David Slavitt’s translation of the Metamorphoses into the fabric of her play, and in Chapter 11 in the discussion of Jane Alison’s translation of Ovid. Translations of Tawada in Chapter 3 are my own. Translators of all other works are indicated in the individual chapters.

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Contents Introduction

1

1. Ali Smith

25

2. Marina Warner

47

3. Yoko Tawada

63

4. Alice Oswald

85

5. Mary Zimmerman

97

6. Saviana Stanescu

117

7. Jo Shapcott

141

8. Marie Darrieussecq

155

9. Josephine Balmer and Averill Curdy

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10. Michèle Roberts and Clare Pollard

201

11. Jane Alison

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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Introduction Ovid is our contemporary.¹ From his postcolonial appearances in the novels of Salman Rushdie² and the poetry of Derek Mahon to his emergence as ‘agony-uncle’ for the love problems of the modern age;³ from his new forms in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid to his voice ghosting the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Tristia Blues,⁴ Ovid seems on course to shape the new millennium every bit as much as he did the last. In 1994 Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun spoke of the impetus behind their project, After Ovid—New Metamorphoses,⁵ articulating why our age, in particular, should respond so powerfully to Ovid: Such qualities as his mischief and cleverness, his deliberate use of shock—not always relished in the past—are contemporary values. Then, too, the stories have direct, obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality. They offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behaviour and suffering, especially ones we think of as peculiarly modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, heteroand homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of the themes. (xi)

Ovid’s myths acquire a new set of meanings, as the world catches up in endlessly novel ways with his imagination. It is now surgically and medically possible for girls to become boys and boys to become girls. In Italy one now has the option of being buried in a pod with the seed of a tree, thus growing into a new life after death as a plant rather than a human.⁶

¹ I am borrowing this notion from Kott (1964). ² See Kennedy (2002), 327–30. ³ Higgins (2007). ⁴ See Harrison’s discussion of Dylan’s lyrics. Harrison (2011), 207–23. ⁵ Hofmann and Lasdun (1994). ⁶ Marina Warner connects her thinking about Ovid to scientific progress in Warner (2002), 201–2: ‘In the autumn of 2001, the very week I was giving my lecture on “Doubling”, genetic engineers claimed to have cloned a human embryo for the first time so that they can

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STRANGE MONSTERS

In Iceland huge figures appear to stride through the landscape, bearing light and heat to its citizens, since the Icelanders have imaginatively constructed electricity pylons as giants. We have a new and terrifying understanding of the ways in which the earth and the heavens may punish us for our catalogue of abuses. The illnesses and disorders that blight the modern world, so often resulting in altered bodies—cancer, anorexia, narcissism, malignant greed—can be discerned within Ovid’s myths of transformation. Furthermore, we are now more aware of rare diseases such as Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva which causes muscle to turn to bone, and is often known as ‘stone man syndrome’, or Epidermodysplasia verruciformis, a skin disorder in which warts proliferate and form lesions that resemble tree branches and roots. Many of the writers studied in this book use Ovid as a way of exploring their responses to such conditions. We are also living through a time of acute transition. There are concrete markers of this, such as the calendar change to the new millennium, but I write at a time when political and economic unions are under threat, and geographical boundaries are being broken or reinforced. Brexit appears to be underway; there are question marks over the survival of the United Kingdom, and of the European Union. At the beginning of this millennium, in a series of lectures analysing Ovid’s abiding influence, Marina Warner observed that resurgences of interest in Ovid tend to occur at crossing points and thresholds: ‘tales of metamorphosis often arose in spaces (temporal, geographical and mental) that were crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate, connective tissue of communications between cultures.’⁷ The fact that our age is witness to an increase in these cross-cultural zones (which many are now trying to shut down), through the movement of increasing numbers of immigrants, refugees, and emigrants, accounts in part for a renewed interest also in Ovid and his Tristia, his songs

harvest stem cells and grow material to help certain degenerative diseases. In order to understand the excitement compounded of fear, marvelling and horror that this new possibility stirs, the history of doubles provides a context, for cloning in its popular cultural manifestations continually ponders possible states of personal identity: the copy—the you who is not you but is yet another you—challenges the premise of individual integrity; it also performs, it seems, a daemonic act of metamorphosis from inanimate to animate that in mythology often discloses divine operation.’ ⁷ Warner (2002), 17.

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of exile.⁸ Perhaps, then, it is not as surprising as it might first appear that Ovid’s works should have achieved the immortality that he dreamed of over two thousand years ago, and that at the dawn of a new millennium their vitality remains undiminished as they receive renewed life in a host of contemporary works. Despite this resurgence of contemporary engagement with Ovid, however, as yet there has been no study devoted specifically to Ovid and his presence in contemporary women’s writing. The French author and translator, Marie Darrieussecq, offers an especially vivid image of Ovid’s arrival in the twenty-first century. In the Preface to her translation of the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto she describes sitting working at her computer, with the growing realization that Ovid’s ghost was there at her shoulder, gazing in amazement not only at the fact that this machine should have the power to send his words spinning through space at the touch of a button, but also that it should be a woman translating the lines of a man, who himself so often spoke through a woman’s voice.⁹ This book will examine one of the most striking aspects of the current reception of Ovid, which is an unprecedented response to him by contemporary women writers. It is partly the ways in which his stories intersect with contemporary concerns (as Hofmann and Lasdun have identified), and partly through the widespread currency of myths such as Daphne and Apollo, Echo and Narcissus, and Galatea and Pygmalion, that Ovid has achieved an especially democratic reception. This, in conjunction with his fascination with female psychology, has facilitated his appeal. While this turning to Ovid is taking place against a wider phenomenon of women writers reclaiming and refashioning the ancient world,¹⁰ the response to his works in particular has allowed women writers to explore and articulate a vast array of subjects. As we shall see, the shifting, protean qualities of his artistic world equip him especially well for appropriation by women

⁸ Warner (2002), 21: ‘The territories of the African diaspora in the Americas became a “cross-cultural space”. A mercantile and political confluence of heterogeneous peoples, histories, and languages, a shifting, metamorphic, and phantasmal zone, where “le merveilleux créole” (the creole marvellous) made its appearance in five different languages and different genres.’ ⁹ Balmer (2013a) discusses this ‘cross-dressing’ of authorial voice and translation. ¹⁰ As evidence of growing interest in this phenomenon see Balmer (2013a), Cox (2011), Cox and Theodorakopoulos (2012), and Theodorakopoulos (2012).

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who have responded to the ideology underpinning third-wave feminism of engaging more widely with social and political issues. In their hands his myths now address ecological concerns and the mutation of the earth (Oswald and Shapcott), the plight of refugees and immigrants (Warner and Tawada), the trauma of a body metamorphosing through puberty or illness (Tawada, Shapcott, Smith, Alison, Zimmerman), the horror of war (Stanescu, Curdy, Balmer, Shapcott, Warner, Zimmerman), the terror and insecurity induced by the financial crisis (Curdy, Shapcott, Darrieussecq), the freedom to explore different sexualities (Roberts, Smith, Pollard). Within this medley of subjects a unifying theme is an urge both to explore issues of gender and also to write from a consciously gendered position about matters of wider political and ecological concerns, rather than to remain focused upon the second-wave trends of reclaiming a female voice and of writing oneself into a male-authored tradition. It is by these criteria that a number of notable authors, such as Carol Ann Duffy and Eavan Boland, who engage very dynamically with Ovid, are not the subjects of individual chapters. A further unifying link is the way in which so many of the authors studied in this book experience themselves as monsters, either as freakish, or as prodigies of nature, or both. I have taken the title of the book, Strange Monsters, from May Sarton’s poem ‘My Sisters, O My Sisters’, where Sarton pays homage to her female literary ancestry—Sappho, Mme de Stael, and Dorothy Wordsworth among others—while also pointing out the continuing difficulties for the woman writer: ‘And now we who are writing women and strange monsters / Still search our hearts for the difficult answers.’¹¹ The equation that Sarton makes between ‘writing women’ and ‘strange monsters’ is one that abides; as evidence of this one need only think of one of the most successful publishing enterprises of modern times, the creation of the female authors’ publication house—Virago. The twin strands of literary creativity and monstrosity also anticipate the way in which Ovid has helped to shape much of the feminist thought that underpins my studies in this book.¹² ¹¹ Sarton (1946), 263. ¹² See Balmer (2013a), 121, who comments on how Sarton helped to shape her translations of the ancient Greek poetess, Erinna. She describes her decision to expand this within her translation, using the name ‘Mormo the monster’, and points out: ‘In this I also followed the hints of the remaining Greek—and the various modern commentaries on them—to suggest a fear of latent female sexuality and its consequences, for instance the

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This creativity, allied with a refusal to be bound by pre-existing rules, can be seen in the way in which so many of the women writers who engage with Ovid defy generic conventions. Yoko Tawada creates a narrative in which different myths blend, one with another, in the style not only of the Metamorphoses, but also of the Japanese pillow books; Josephine Balmer’s poems are both original and translations—she has chosen the term ‘transgression’ as the most apt definition of them; Stanescu’s poem ‘GOOGLE ME!’ delights in presenting itself in different guises—at times as a CV, at times as a website where you need to click the right button to gain access; Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Dart incorporates a paratextual apparatus that includes learned footnotes in the style of Eliot’s Wasteland with snatches of conversation overheard on the banks of the river by contemporary Devonians. It is here, and not just at the crossroads of time and geography, that women writers are expanding and challenging boundaries in ways that predispose them to re-evaluate their relationship with the classical tradition.¹³ In her groundbreaking essay ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’¹⁴ Hélène Cixous vividly depicts the situation, familiar to Sarton, of women who need to write, who need to counter the terror of nothingness, but who are deemed monstrous for doing so: ‘On nous a figées entre deux mythes horrifiants; entre la Méduse et l’abîme’ (47) (They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss¹⁵). And of course, the more repressive the regime, the more violent the passions fuelling the underworld of female creativity: ‘Conservées intactes d’elles-mêmes, dans la glace. Frigidifiées. Mais qu’est-ce que ça remue là-dessous’ (41) (well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidifed. But

“changing shape” that a pregnancy would bring.’ In the footnote accompanying this observation she states: ‘In this I was guided by two lines from Adrienne Rich’s 1968 poem “Planetarium” “A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman” (1975, 146), as well as echoing May Sarton’s call to “we who are writing women and strange monsters”.’ ¹³ Such a liminal position is also characteristic of the women writers who engage with Virgil, as I point out in Cox (2011), passim. ¹⁴ Cixous (1975). Page numbers from this volume will appear in parentheses in the text. See Zajko and Leonard (2006), especially Zajko and Leonard, ‘Introduction’, 1–17 (3), for an examination of ‘how classical myth has been central to the development of feminist thought’. ¹⁵ Cixous (1976), 885.

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STRANGE MONSTERS

are they ever seething underneath!¹⁶). When we see Cixous’s chilling account of the place from which so many women write, it becomes clear why Ovid is invoked so often to depict illnesses such as anorexia nervosa:¹⁷ Quelle est la femme bouillonnante et infinie qui [ . . . ] ne s’est pas, surprise et horrifiée par le remue-ménage fantastique de ses pulsions (car on lui a fait croire qu’une femme bien réglée, normale, est d’un calme . . . divin) accusée d’être monstrueuse; qui, sentant s’agiter d’une drôle d’envie (de chanter, d’écrire, de proférer, bref de faire sortir du neuf ) ne s’est pas crue malade? Or, sa maladie honteuse, c’est qu’elle résiste à la mort, qu’elle se donne tant de fil à retordre. (40) (Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who [ . . . ] surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a . . . divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.)¹⁸

In rejecting the site of death where she has been condemned to stay with her monsters, Cixous’s writing woman performs the role of both Penelope and Ariadne, as she spins the textual thread that will lead to her salvation. In order to weave her own stories she must revisit the patriarchal canon and unravel the [hi]stories that have kept her silenced and imprisoned: ‘Elle dé-pense l’histoire unifiante, ordonnatrice, qui homogénéise et canalise les forces et ramène les contradictions dans la pratique d’un seul champ de bataille’(46) (Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield¹⁹). The writing process for women is, then, necessarily the practice of transformation. She learns to exult in her creativity by ‘undoing the work of death’²⁰ (‘défaire le travail de la mort’, 46), and this liberating process enables her to pursue a ‘parcours multiple et inépuisable à milliers de rencontres et transformations du même dans l’autre et dans l’entre, d’où la femme prend ses formes (et l’homme de son côté; mais c’est son autre histoire) (46) (a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from which

¹⁶ Cixous (1976), 877. ¹⁷ As in Zimmerman. See my discussion in Chapter 5. ¹⁸ Cixous (1976), 876. ¹⁹ Cixous (1976), 882.

²⁰ Cixous (1976), 883.

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woman takes her forms (and man, in his turn; but that’s his other history)²¹). It is important to recognize that Cixous is in no way suggesting that men aren’t equally capable of a life-giving, transformative imagination, simply that that of women has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged. But women are no longer doomed to play the muted, dead role of Echo;²² we hear the script and are able to transform it, as Ali Smith demonstrates in ‘True Short Story’:²³ That’s you sorted, Juno said. You sordid, Echo said. Right, I’m back to the hunt, Juno said. The cunt, Echo said. Actually I’m making up that small rebellion. There is actually no rebelliousness for Echo in Ovid’s original version of the story. (12)

Though Echo herself may not have achieved rebellion in the Metamorphoses, she is nevertheless part of an oeuvre that celebrated and encouraged transgression. And, of course, Cixous’s most notable act of subversion is to shock us into gazing upon the face of one of the most noted female monsters, Medusa. Far from being petrified by her death-dealing gaze, we are able to look into her face and see it in all its beautiful, laughing glory:²⁴ Est-ce que le pire, ce ne serait, ce n’est pas en vérité, que la femme n’est pas castrée, qu’il lui suffit de ne plus écouter les sirènes (car les sirènes, c’étaient des hommes) pour que l’histoire change du sens. Il suffit qu’on regarde la Méduse en face pour la voir : et elle n’est pas mortelle. Elle est belle et elle rit. (47) (Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history

²¹ Cixous (1976), 883. ²² ‘Une femme sans corps, une muette, une aveugle, ne peut pas être une bonne combattante’ (43) (A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter). Cixous (1976), 880. ²³ Smith (2008), 3–17. ²⁴ See Rimell (2006), 17: ‘Hence Medusa has appeared in twentieth-century feminist thought as both a figure for the silencing of women, for women’s self-hatred, and for the free rein given under patriarchy to sadistic fantasies of women, but also as an icon of resistance and rage at female subjugation, or even, faced fearlessly, as a source of vibrant creativity. Meanwhile, in popular culture since the early 1990s (and since “that dress” that launched Elizabeth Hurley’s career) the Versace brand, with its omnipresent Medusa-head logo, has defined the paradoxes of a controversial, new-generation feminism which celebrates empowerment in the act of attracting and manipulating a male gaze.’

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to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.)²⁵

Cixous reverses the Homeric myth of the sirens by showing that once women are no longer seduced into believing the songs of men, which will relegate them to the death of silence, their capacity to generate new songs and stories is infinite. And the motor of this creativity is transformation: ‘Je suis Chair spacieuse chantante, sur laquelle s’ente nul sait quel (le) je plus ou moins humain mais d’abord vivant puisqu’en transformation’ (50–1) (I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation²⁶). Ovid’s work, a paean to the power of change, is itself transformed in the hands of contemporary women’s writing. The ‘carmen perpetuum’ that he knew would outlive him has found new life and vitality in the ‘chants inouïs’ (40) (unheard-of songs²⁷) that Cixous evokes. And these songs are set to achieve a social and political transformation that is far more radical than the singers yet realize: Parce que son ‘économie’ pulsionnelle est prodigue, elle ne peut pas en prenant la parole, ne pas transformer directement et indirectement tous les systèmes d’échanges fondés sur l’épargne masculine. Sa libido produira des effets de remaniement politique et social beaucoup plus radical qu’on ne veut le penser. (45) (Because the ‘economy’ of her drives is prodigious, she cannot fail, in seizing the occasion to speak, to transform directly and indirectly all systems of exchange based on masculine thrift. Her libido will produce far more radical effects of political and social change than some might like to think.)²⁸

Cixous herself could not have anticipated quite how formative her essay ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ would be, how it would become one of the foundation texts of second-wave feminism. Yet it is a difficult text, relying heavily on allusions and wordplay in order to make its points, so that the women who heed its rallying call will need to have had the equivalent of a university education in order to hear it in the first place. The development of third-wave feminism in the 1980s arose in part as an attempt to counter this exclusivity and to extend the power of liberating discourse to women from all social backgrounds. In 1997 Rita Alfonso

²⁵ Cixous (1976), 885. ²⁸ Cixous (1976), 882.

²⁶ Cixous (1976), 889.

²⁷ Cixous (1976), 876.

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and Jo Triglio, third-wave philosophers, conducted a dialogue in Hypatia about the various trends of feminist philosophy and the directions in which the third wave needed to drive them in order to survive as a valid, shaping force.²⁹ Jo Triglio expressed concern about the fact that feminist thought had dessicated, had become so rooted in arcane and thereby exclusionary jargon, that it no longer had anything to say to, or about, the vast majority of the people for whom it purported to be a mouthpiece: I also have serious concerns about the difficult, specialized, jargonistic language in which much more recent feminist philosophy is being presented. These theories are accessible only to the most highly educated. I would like to think it ironic that theories about oppression are being presented in a manner that the majority of those who are oppressed cannot understand [ . . . ] More and more, the problems feminist thinkers take up are problems that arise out of academic discourse. They are not the socio-political problems ordinary women of different races, sexualities, ethnicities face in their everyday lives. As I see it, feminist philosophy has to play its part in promoting feminist change, and this change cannot be limited to the world of academic discourse.³⁰

While it would be difficult to defend Cixous from the charge of presenting her readers with a challenging and difficult read in ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, it would be unfair not to recognize that its abiding influence is proof that it was a text that needed to be written, and that Cixous was writing it in part as an exploration of her own writing self, as formed in part from her reading of classical texts. It would also be unfair not to point out that Cixous herself has developed her thought, and that later works of hers bear a stronger stamp of third-wave feminism, in that they address wider political and social concerns than the need to establish a female perspective and forge a feminine voice. This is particularly evident in her play La Ville parjure ou Le réveil des Erinyes,³¹ in which once again she issues a rallying cry to alert the world to outrages that are being perpetrated. What has awoken the Furies is the stench of blood corrupting the modern world. In her ‘Préface’ Cixous observes: Mais il y a une odeur aigre dans les rideaux de ces palais—vous la reconnaissez? C’est la ‘pourriture des royaumes’. Celle que l’on sentait au royaume de

²⁹ Elements of his discussion of third wave are drawn from my article ‘Metamorphosis, Mutability and the Third Wave’. Cox (2012). ³⁰ Alfonso and Triglio (1997), 7–16. ³¹ Cixous (1993). Translations of this work are my own.

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Danemark. Une telle puissance, c’est un cri. C’est ce cri qui réveille bien des personnages de notre pièce. Certains, comme les Erinyes, dormaient sous la terre depuis cinq mille années, d’autres depuis huit jours à peine. Un cri d’horreur, d’alarme, de révolte. (7) (But there’s a sour smell in the palace curtains—do you recognize it? It’s the ‘decay of kingdoms’. The same that could be smelt in the kingdom of Denmark. Such power is a cry. It’s this cry that awakes many of the characters of our play. Some, like the Furies, had been sleeping below ground for five thousand years, others barely a week. A cry of horror, of alarm, of revolt.)

The cry and the rotten odour belong to the scandal of the contaminated blood transfusions that horrified France in the 1990s. Once more Cixous is asking us to be alert to the cries that indicate the outrage of injustice, but this play’s rallying cry is on behalf of all those whose lives are destroyed by a society too deadened and corrupt to remember them. Members of the Chorus enumerate the hells particular to a contemporary world: Moi, j’ai connu tous les enfers: L’entraille du métro, le squat pour les damnés, la cabane de carton. J’ai été un fantôme dans les portes cochères. J’ai eu de brèves nuits au sein des pissotières, J’ai frôlé le fourneau crématoire. (39) (I’ve known every kind of hell: The guts of the metro, squatting for the condemned, the cardboard hut. I’ve been a ghost in carriage porches. I spent short nights at the heart of the urinals. I’ve brushed past the crematorium furnace.)

This use of classical imagery to highlight the plight of the dispossessed anticipates Warner’s depiction of illegal immigrants in The Leto Bundle, as well as Tawada’s snapshots of refugee life in Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Cixous closes her Préface by warning us not to be eased into the comfort of de-familiarization as a result of the classical trappings. Her Furies may have travelled to us via works such as Macbeth, but they nevertheless belong to the real world, and they are issuing a warning that we ignore at our peril: ‘Tous les parfums de l’Arabie n’adouciraient pas les blanches mains souillées. Mais dans nos royaumes certains ont peut-être inventé les moyens de dévitaliser les nez. Mais ceci n’est pas une fable (7) (All the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten the soiled white hands. But in our kingdoms some have perhaps invented ways of deadening their noses. But this is not a fable).

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While the imperative to enable women to express their gloriously multiple and monstrous identities has not been forgotten, third-wave feminism acknowledges that these identities entail responses to the social and political realities that women both experience and witness. For Morag Schiach contemporary feminism is underpinned by a sense of fear, as it negotiates the risks of the modern world. Her article, with its Ovidian title ‘Millennial Fears: Fear, Hope and Transformation in Contemporary Feminist Writing’,³² considers the ‘implications of the intensification of fear and the circulation of anxieties for the cultural and political project that is contemporary feminism’ (325). One of the texts that Shiach considers is La Ville parjure, but her concerns also confirm Warner’s contention that responses to Ovid are much more likely to occur at temporal and geographical crossroads. Such currents of fear and anxiety, allied with an urge to recognize new potentials, have enabled new dimensions to filter into the Ovidianism of contemporary women writers. In a chapter published as recently as 2006, Genevieve Liveley was evaluating the influence of contemporary feminism on our readings of classical poets, such as Ovid, and warning against the danger of interpretations that are so partisan, and so tied to a specific moment in literary history, that they risk speaking only to a limited few, before becoming fossilized.³³ One response to this danger has been the engagement with the wider political and cultural sphere on the part of women responding to Ovid, allied with a recognition of the potential in mutability and metamorphosis. Eavan Boland is one writer to have explored the power of change, and of being able to choose to change. In her most recent anthology, A Woman Without a Country,³⁴ Eavan Boland explores her abiding feelings of living on the edge, in terms of being both a woman and Irish, but acknowledges the possibilities that exist for liberation through metamorphosis by not fully belonging. In a poem entitled ‘Becoming Anne Bradstreet’ she relishes the transformative ³² Shiach (2000). ³³ ‘Hence the continuing risk that feminist interpretations of any text render themselves vulnerable to the type of criticism levelled by Culham: that they are offered only a temporary authorization by and within the broader literary community, and that they await their own moment of reception when another set of readers will judge whether to grant or withhold continued authority.’ Liveley (2006), 65. ³⁴ Boland (2014).

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possibilities of ‘thinking back through her mothers’.³⁵ As she responds to the writing of others, she is acutely aware of the ways in which they shape her both as reader and writer: ‘I am again / An Irish poet watching an English woman / Become an American poet’ (78), she observes. It is, however, more difficult to write herself into the male-dominated classical tradition, not least because its identity as an elite subject that is predominantly the preserve of white middle-class males, constantly entails some kind of justification. The poem ‘An Irish Georgic’ opens with these challenging questions: ‘Listen, who reads the classics? And who cares / Whether a Georgic works or what Virgil said?’ (54) The answer, of course, is that Boland cares, desperately, and through her poetry her readers also glimpse the possibility of finding their own histories sheltering in the lines of these ancient works. Her poetry has always been infused by her love of classical poetry,³⁶ which she explores as a way of reshaping the classical tradition. The way in which her poetry is haunted by the past is indicated by her choice of early evening as her ideal poetic landscape—the magical hour when transformations and enchantment seem possible, but also the bleakly lit dusk of the solitude and isolation from which poetry springs. As she gives voice to Eurydice in the poem ‘Eurydice Speaks’ she asks: ‘What shall we do with the loneliness of the mythical?’ (22)³⁷ The epigraph from Virginia Woolf that Boland selects for the volume firmly establishes this theme of exclusion: ‘The outsider will say “in fact, as a woman, I have no country.” ’ It is unsurprising, therefore, that she should foreground Ovid’s exile poetry as she articulates her relationship with him in this volume.³⁸ The first section is entitled ‘Song and Error’,³⁹ a clear allusion to the famous ‘carmen et error’ that Ovid claimed had driven him into exile.⁴⁰ The final section ‘Edge of Empire’ looks back both to Ovid’s conflicted relationship with Rome and to Boland’s relationship with Britain. In the actual poem entitled ‘Song and Error’ Boland refers to Ovid as ‘The old Latin Master’ ³⁵ The phrase ‘thinking back through our mothers’ glosses Woolf ’s famous observation that ‘if we are a woman we think back through our mothers’. Woolf (1992), 99. ³⁶ Some of her Horace translations have been published. ³⁷ See Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Eurydice’ for a comparably melancholy tone: ‘The living walk by the edge of a vast lake/near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.’ Duffy (1999), 62. ³⁸ For Boland’s engagement with Ovid in earlier works see Fowler, Hurst, and Dellner. ³⁹ It is notable that Averill Curdy also borrows this title from Ovid for her volume. See Chapter 9. ⁴⁰ Ovid, Tristia II, 1, 207.

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(23), as if he were her teacher at school. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that through his tales of metamorphosis he offered Boland, as a young girl, the sense of power and liberation that were denied to him at the end of his life in exile. The poem closes with an image of a young boy coming through the twilit shadows to light Ovid’s rush lamp. Even though ‘The room brightens quickly’ (24), Ovid is trapped within the dark misery of wordlessness, as he cannot articulate how he feels about ‘the Empire that owns him’ (24). This bleak close to Ovid’s life stands in stark contrast to the gifts that he bestowed upon a young Irish girl in the twentieth century, who perceived the possibility of choosing who she wanted to be from his fantastic tales of transformation: ‘Ovid, I loved you when I was a girl’ (23), she declares, before focusing upon the elements of her appearance that she wanted to change: ‘I hated my fair skin and freckles’ (23). We shall see in the course of the book quite how often the cry ‘Change me’ is uttered by different women,⁴¹ how desperately they respond to the possibility of escaping from themselves, of finding a new, improved identity. ‘You were my laureate of escape,’ writes Boland. ‘You showed me how to flee from entity to being’ (23). This image of a flight away from solid, unformed matter towards the fluidity and dynamism of an unfolding identity reverses myths such as the story of Daphne and Apollo. It also parallels developments in recent feminist theory which recognize gender identity as being active, performative,⁴² transforming. Such liberation underpins Rosi Braidotti’s analysis of the way in which the female self develops in the contemporary world. A feminist philosopher, Braidotti selects various facets of the human condition, such as nomadism, sexual difference and embodiment, and explores how these develop in a post-structuralist culture, obsessed with technology, cyberworlds, and monstrosity as it manifests itself within a penchant for gothic worlds and vampirism. It is telling that one of her most groundbreaking books looks back to Ovid in its title: Metamorphoses—Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.⁴³ She links the risks attendant upon her endeavour with the peculiar blend of disquiet in the face of improperly

⁴¹ For Jane Alison it is so strong an imperative within Ovid that she uses the phrase as the title of her translations of selected Ovid works. ⁴² Ali Smith uses Judith Butler as an epigraph to Girl Meets Boy. ⁴³ Braidotti (2002).

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understood forces and possibilities and a sense of liberation:⁴⁴ ‘This is a book of explorations and risks, of convictions and desires. For these are strange times and strange things are happening’ (10). Like Boland, Braidotti selects the words of Virginia Woolf as her epigram, words which catch the same tension between movement and stasis that Boland depicts: ‘I am rooted, but I flow.’⁴⁵ The emphasis that she thus places upon dynamism and fluidity explains in part the rationale of her book: ‘If the only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then the challenge lies in thinking about processes, rather than concepts’ (1). Published in 2002, the same year as Warner’s study of Ovid entitled Fantastic Metamorphoses, Braidotti’s book presents the Zeitgeist as one that lends itself especially strongly to retellings of Ovid, since: ‘Transformations, metamorphoses, mutations and processes of change have in fact become familiar in the lives of most contemporary subjects’ (1). While Braidotti does not focus explicitly upon Ovidian reception in her study, she nevertheless wrestles with many of the questions besetting the women writers of this book, who have used Ovidian myths to help them think through their processes of developing as women, as socially and politically responsible thinkers, as cultural commentators: The starting point for my work is a question that I would set at the top of the agenda for the new millennium; the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become, how to represent mutations, changes and transformations, rather than Being in its classical modes. (2)

As well as a shared interest in the fusion of dark insecurities and emancipatory potential inherent in metamorphosis, Braidotti also explores the sense of alienation that has underpinned the fascination exerted by Ovid’s exile poetry upon so many of the writers in this volume—Jo Shapcott, Josephine Balmer, Saviana Stanescu, Marie Darrieussecq, and Averill Curdy. Her depiction of the ‘nomadic’ self also resonates uncannily with Marina Warner’s treatment of the myth of Leto in The Leto Bundle, where the experience of living as a refugee shapes irrevocably one’s sense of oneself:⁴⁶

⁴⁴ The complexity of this tension is explored by Yoko Tawada, when she re-presents the myth of Narcissus, in which Narcissus is an isolated teenage boy, locked in his bedroom as he brings his desires to life by playing them out on internet porn sites. See Chapter 3. ⁴⁵ Woolf (1977), 69. The image is also very suggestive of Alice Oswald’s treatment of the ancient river Dart. See Chapter 4. ⁴⁶ See Chapter 2.

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Being nomadic, homeless, a refugee, a Bosnian rape-in-war victim,⁴⁷ an itinerant migrant, an illegal immigrant, is no metaphor. Having no passport or having too many of them is neither equivalent nor is it merely metaphorical, as some critics of nomadic subjectivity have suggested. These are highly specific geo-political and historical locations—history tattooed on your body. (3)

But the discourses of third-wave feminists also highlight the exuberance of the Ovidianism chosen by several of the writers under discussion. In their evocation of the movement Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake celebrate the difficulty of establishing a fixed categorization for a movement that relishes the endless opportunities for reinvention and discovery: The lived messiness characteristic of the third wave is what defines it: girls who want to be boys, boys who want to be girls, boys and girls who insist that they are both, whites who want to be black, blacks who want or refuse to be white, people who are white and black, gay and straight, masculine and feminine, or who are finding ways to be and name none of the above.⁴⁸

This ‘lived messiness’ fuels Ali Smith’s version of ‘one of the cheeriest metamorphoses in the whole work [Metamorphoses]’,⁴⁹ the story of Iphis and Ianthe. Not only does Smith explore the self-awareness and discovery of young girls coming to terms with their lesbian sexuality in contemporary Scotland, but her novel also includes meditations on the nature of ‘reality shows’ such as Blind Date, where emotions are liable to be manufactured, and both contestants and spectators are vulnerable to losing their footing in the real world. Furthermore, even as Smith’s heroines discover each other and themselves, they are militating for a better, more just society as well as daubing graffiti slogans campaigning for better conditions for women and also for more responsible custody of the earth. The contemporary mania for plundering the earth’s natural resources in order to produce bottles in which to store ‘natural’ water that emerges from factories troubles Smith’s heroines, and offers one example of the perversity of the modern world, which we increasingly accept as ‘normal’. Smith’s blend of playful exuberance and joyful exploration which is shadowed by an examination of society’s injustices

⁴⁷ See Shapcott’s shape-shifting imagery in ‘Thetis’, a poem which is in part about the way in which the brutality of war is visited upon female civilians, as discussed in Chapter 7. ⁴⁸ Heywood and Drake (1997), 8. ⁴⁹ Smith (2007), 163. For an analysis of Smith’s Ovidianism in this book see Cox and Theodorakopoulos (2013).

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and ills both epitomizes third-wave ideals, and offers one response to Ziolkowski’s anxious question at the end of Ovid and the Moderns: Every age gets the Ovid it deserves. What sort of Ovid will the new millennium bring forth? Where, indeed, can it go beyond the frothy trivializations at the turn of the millennium? Will continued skepticism (sic) toward government and religion combined with an intensified solipsism sustain a new and perhaps more serious aetas Ovidiana?⁵⁰

There are few writers more likely to meet Ziolkowski’s hope of treating Ovid seriously than A. S. Byatt, who has often, indeed, been criticized for an unremittingly highbrow outlook and the demands that she makes of her readers.⁵¹ In Philip Terry’s millennial anthology, Ovid Metamorphosed,⁵² Byatt writes movingly of the ways in which her responses to Ovid and his myths shaped her as a writer, to the point of her selection of the name Arachne as her email identity.⁵³ In the second part of this Introduction I shall focus upon her short story ‘The Stone Woman,’⁵⁴ since its depictions of the fusion of self-disgust, monstrosity, excitement, grief, pain, and liberation experienced by a woman in the grip of metamorphosis define the themes of this book. The story tells the tale of Ines, a middle-aged woman who, felled by grief for her elderly mother with whom she had peaceably shared a flat in London, falls ill, and while recovering, discovers that she is progressively turning to stone. At first sight, we might expect a story about a woman becoming petrified during a period of mourning to respond to the myth of Niobe, but it becomes clear that Ines is a closer relative of Galatea. It is notable that she is at a crossroads in her life, is experiencing profound change. Even though it was her mother who had died, Ines thinks of her former self as belonging to the past also. Uninterested in cooking for one, she subsists on frugal snacks, and the change in habit affords her momentary surprise: ‘She had been a good cook—she thought of herself in the past tense’ (133). Such instances of transition make the human self more vulnerable to metamorphosis, and it is unsurprising that Byatt should select half-light as the backdrop for her story. Right at the start ⁵⁰ Ziolkowski (2005), 225. ⁵¹ Higgins and Davies (2010). ⁵² Terry (2000). This volume also contains a chapter from Warner’s then unpublished The Leto Bundle. ⁵³ For a discussion of Byatt’s Ovidianism see Cox (2013). ⁵⁴ Byatt (2003), 129–83.

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she tells us that ‘The apartment seemed constantly twilit’ (129),⁵⁵ and later on when Ines’s body has begun to change, and she is overwhelmed with confusion and shame, she eventually dares to inspect herself in this crepuscular light (137). The story opens in the shadow of death, and Ines herself dwells on the body’s inevitable mutations: White face on white pillow amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh. The efficient rage of consuming fire, the handfuls of fawn ash which she had scattered, as she had promised, in the hurrying foam of a Yorkshire beck. (130)

As Ines allows the final vision of her mother to haunt her memories, she transforms the books and poetry she has read so that they infuse her telling of this moment. Christina Rossetti’s chillingly beautiful poem ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, an evocation of grief and depression as much as a carol, depicts an earth whose matter has been transformed into stone and iron. Within this frozen landscape, ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow / Snow on snow.’ This repetition, and amassing of white snow, stands behind the sentence ‘White face on white pillow amongst white hair’.⁵⁶ Through the repetition within ‘Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh’, Byatt reminds us of the strange metamorphoses that occur within the bloodlines that carry DNA, that allow the parent’s face to be discerned behind the features of the child. Finally, there is the dissolution of the human body, from flesh through fire to ash and stone, before being cast upon the waters. Her illness strikes her during this period of mourning, and in her benumbed state the pain that was its first symptom was particularly acute. It ‘struck her like a sudden beak, tearing at her gut’ (130). The image, of ⁵⁵ In Byatt (2003) the characters who inhabit the Virgilian short story ‘The Pink Ribbon’ (233–76) also live in this crepuscular world. The idea that a twilight landscape is the one most appropriate for myths is also one that Eavan Boland shares, as we have seen. ⁵⁶ Byatt responds to the grief within ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ in her novel A Whistling Woman where the motherless Mary Orton sings it as a solo, and evokes within her father and grandfather memories of her lost, young mother: ‘Her father saw her voice beat in the channel of her throat, in the movement of her lips, across the shimmer of her teeth, as she moved her lovely head with the rhythm, and the curtain of her thick red-gold hair swung in the light of her one remaining candle. Beside him, Bill Potter coughed unhappily, phlegm rising and suppressed in his dried channels. There was no life in Stephanie Potter, but life that had come from this cross old man had moved in her, had mixed with his own, which had come from his cross old mother and his unknown father, and there it was now, briefly alight in the shadows, singing of milk, and fleece, and snow.’ Byatt (2002), 243.

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course, maintains the mythical background to the story, by evoking the plight of Prometheus, bound to his rock, and visited every day by an eagle that plucks out his liver.⁵⁷ While she recovers the surgeon comes to visit her, and admires his handiwork, thus turning her human body into the canvas of his achievement: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s a work of art’ (132).⁵⁸ As he prides himself upon the neatness of his stitching, Ines discovers that he has excised her navel—has removed the last, tangible physical link between her and her mother. As is so often the case in Ovidian myth, grief is the catalyst for the bodily metamorphosis: ‘And where her navel had been, like a button caught in a seam at an angle, was an asymmetric whorl with a little sill of skin. Ines thought of her lost navel, of the umbilical cord that had been a part of her and of her mother’ (132). At first she perceived the changes in her body as resulting from the surgery that she had undergone.⁵⁹ As she bathed she reflected sombrely on the disintegration of flesh, while handling her loofah and pumice stone, and thought how they were the remains of once living objects (136). Just as cancerous tumours distort and deform the natural lines of the body, so Ines’s flesh pulled her human frame out of shape, as it began to turn to stone. She describes how she ‘found a cluster of greenish-white crystals sprouting in her armpit. [ . . . ] They were attached deep within; they could be felt to be stirring stony roots under the skin surface, pulling the muscles’ (139). The contrast between the increasingly hard stone and the soft flesh, and fluid innards, establishes a quintessentially Ovidian dynamic:⁶⁰ ‘under the stones her compressed innards were still fluid and soft, responsive to pain and pressure’ (139). Paradoxically the stranger her predicament, the more she suspects that there is something ⁵⁷ The episode reworks one of Byatt’s experiences of illness when, having suffered a twisted bowel, she was rushed to hospital and told that she would have died within four hours had they not operated then. ⁵⁸ An earlier story in Byatt (2003) entitled ‘Body Art’ (55–125) is set in a hospital and explores the ways in which bodies become art. A huge controversy is caused when an artwork is created from both prostheses and body parts, and is found to be arresting, gruesome, unethical, and fascinating. ⁵⁹ The theme of illness and surgery as sources of metamorphosis is also explored by Smith, Tawada, and Shapcott. ⁶⁰ Charles Martindale explores such contrasts as he examines the way in which Bernini responded to Ovid in his sculpture of Daphne and Apollo: ‘The contrasted textures of the sculpture convey the paradoxes of Ovid’s descriptions of the metamorphosis—heavy torpor seizing the running limbs, soft flesh ringed with bark, hair growing into leaves, swift feet sticking in clinging roots.’ Martindale (1988), 9.

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freakish, monstrous about her, the more fascinated she becomes by her condition to the point of perceiving its beauties. Byatt evokes the natural human instinct of excessive interest in the idiosyncracies or wounding of one’s own body, which prompt one to gaze at oneself from a distance, as a body separate from a consciousness, with the sense of liberating agency that Cixous advocates. Even as Ines’s body is escaping from her control, is turning her into a monster, there is a part of her that exults in its strange loveliness. She values the artwork created by this process of metamorphosis, far more than the disfigurement visited upon her by the surgeon’s scalpel: ‘one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels, and she thought of jewels before she thought of pustules’ (139). As a bookish, scholarly woman it was natural for her to consult dictionaries, which could at least shed light upon the nature of the different stones appearing on her body, even if there were no answers about what kind of medical phenomenon she was experiencing. In a twist on the epic convention of listing, which Ovid himself parodied in the Metamorphoses,⁶¹ she sat in the mythical half-light, dwelling on the beauties of the terminology such as ‘pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff’ (140). As her condition progresses she delights more and more in the gorgeousness of the stones that bedeck her body like jewels: The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair—a necklace of veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal—fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening at herself in her mirror. She wondered fatalistically and drowsily whether when she was all stone, she would cease to breathe, see and move. (140)

In a reversal of the Pygmalion myth, as she watches her body turn from flesh to stone, she not only recalls Narcissus, as she preens in the mirror, but also echoes the gestures of Pygmalion who adorned his beloved statue with jewels as he transformed her from statue to living, breathing woman.⁶² Where once Pygmalion performed the miracle of

⁶¹ As for example with his list of dogs in Book VIII. ⁶² ‘He kissed the statue, and imagined that it kissed him back, spoke to it and embraced it, and thought he felt his fingers sink into the limbs he touched, so that he was afraid lest a bruise appear where he had pressed the flesh. [ . . . ] He dressed the limbs of his statue in

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transforming the lifeless Galatea into a warm and animate being, Ines contemplates a future where she will perhaps have been transformed into an insensate, paralysed mass. She recognizes that her predicament will make of her a ‘strange monster’, a freakish pariah who will be subject to studies and analysis, so that she can be categorized and understood. In a bid to exert at least some control over her body’s wilful transformation, she contemplates adopting a scientific, objective approach to what was happening to her, so that she could provide a medical record, and thus potentially offer some help to others:⁶³ She herself was about to observe its approach in a new fantastic form. She thought of recording the transformations, the metamorphic folds, the ooze, the conchoidal fractures. Then when ‘they’ found her, ‘they’ would have a record of how she had become what she was. (141)

Ines’s dispassionate stance in the face of her metamorphosis reflects the tone of much of the Metamorphoses, where Ovid appears to adopt a similarly unemotional approach to the suffering endured by his creations.⁶⁴ Not only does she manage her plight by adopting a scientific approach, but she also attempts to understand it by remembering other tales of metamorphosis from her own reading. It is unsurprising that Ariel’s song from The Tempest, a play in which Ovid’s influence is especially palpable⁶⁵ should resonate in her memory:⁶⁶ ‘The phrase came into her head: Those are pearls that were his eyes. A song of grief made fantastic by a sea-change. Would her eyes close over and become pearls?’ (146) Significantly, as she imagines the transformation of her eyes into pearls, she once more glances back to the myth of Pygmalion, who selected pearls with which to adorn Galatea. Furthermore, as she women’s robes, and put rings on its fingers, long necklaces round its neck. Pearls hung from its ears, and chains were looped upon its breast. All this finery became the image well, but it was no less lovely unadorned.’ ⁶³ As an imaginative example of charting tales of metamorphosis as medical examples, see Axelrad (2000). ⁶⁴ See Brown (1999), 8: ‘The world of the Metamorphoses has its own peculiar atmosphere. Although pathos is not quite absent, the overrriding impression is of a kind of aesthetic detachment, rather than a deep involvement with any of the characters.’ ⁶⁵ Brown (1999), 69–70: ‘Shakespeare seems in some ways more in step with his source in this later play than he does in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, more truly “Ovidian” perhaps.’ ⁶⁶ Ariel’s song is also a significant intertext for Smith, Oswald, and Stanescu. See Chapters 2, 5, and 6.

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contemplates the hardening of her flesh, she looks upon the world with renewed awareness, as she appreciates the abundance of metamorphoses hidden within the earth’s matter (147).⁶⁷ As Ines roamed alone, trying to find a final resting place, the site where her body would finish petrifying and halt, she came upon a clearing filled with broken, half-formed stone figures. In her hybrid state she found the clash of textures, so quintessentially Ovidian, deeply destabilizing: ‘The stony representations of floating things—feathered wings, blossom and petals—made Ines feel queasy, for they were inert and weighed down, they were pulled towards the earth and what was under it’ (150). So visceral a response to the downward pull of the stone may at first seem surprising, but Ines is, of course, looking at her own final form, looking upon the future in which the warm, living flesh will have ceased to be, and she will exist only as stone. The disappearance of her former self is illustrated by her vanishing voice. As she identifies the stonemason, who appears to be in charge of these broken statues, she summons up the courage to quiz him, but her voice has grown faint and rusty through disuse. Like Echo, she discovers that her voice has almost abandoned her: ‘She had almost given up speech, for her voice scratched and whistled oddly in her petrifying larynx. She shopped with gestures, as though she was an Eastern woman, robed and veiled, too timid, or linguistically inept, to ask about things’ (152). Through this description Ines is presented as both increasingly outcast, but also as a figure who embodies the experience of vast hordes of women, either forbidden to speak altogether, or too used to the idea that they lack the fluency and cogency that would make expressing their ideas worthwhile. As the stonemason explains to her that he is drawn to the vestiges of life that he can discern still within the stone figures, and that his mission is to fan such life into a new mode of meaningful being, Ines likens him to Pygmalion (154). Though he self-deprecatingly brushes aside the parallel, she presents herself to him, in the hope that he will be able to identify and restore a vital spark within her also:

⁶⁷ Ovid shares this preoccupation. See Pythagoras’ observations in Metamorphoses XV, 178–9: ‘cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago; / ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu’ (Nothing is constant in the whole world. Everything is in a state of flux and comes into being as a transient appearance. Time itself flows on with constant motion).

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She stood in front of him in her roughly gleaming patchwork, a human form vanishing under outcrops of silica, its lineaments suggested by veins of blue john that vanished into crusts of pumice and agate. She looked out of her cavernous eye sockets through salty eyes at the man, whose blue eyes considered her grotesque transformation. He looked. She croaked, ‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’ ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Never.’ Hot liquid rose to the sills of her eyes and clattered in pearly drops on her ruddy haematite cheeks. He stared. She thought, he is a man, and he sees me as I am, a monster.

(157)

Byatt plays with the myth of Pygmalion in this passage, by enumerating the garments that Ines discards, as if she were engaging in some kind of strip show. But the myth has gone wrong. The erotic charge that infuses Pygmalion’s longing to bring his statue to life is completely absent from the stonemason’s gaze as he looks upon this woman, whom stone is claiming more and more. By displaying herself to him as something wondrous, something extraordinary, Ines is returning to the original Latin sense of ‘monstrum’—which is ‘something worthy of being shown.’ However, once the stonemason has finished looking over her, she experiences herself in ways that are much closer to our modern idea of ‘monster’—as something freakish, unworthy, repellent. But Ines has not quite understood the source of the stonemason’s awe. It is not simply that he has never beheld a being like her; rather, it is that she has brought to life the myths that circulate within his native Icelandic culture: ‘Our tales are full of striding stone women. We have mostly not given up the expectation of seeing them. But I did not expect to meet one here, in this dead place’ (158). As he looks upon her, he heals her feelings of self-disgust, by recognizing what has happened to her. He restores the original sense of ‘monstrum’ to the idea of a ‘monster’: Ines is a marvel, a miracle. ‘ “Personally,” said Thorsteinn,⁶⁸ “I do not think you are a troll. I think you are a metamorphosis” ’ (168). Thorsteinn, who had spent his working life focusing upon the processes of metamorphosis, finds himself transformed through meeting so miraculous a figure as Ines, and seeks her permission to make a visual record of her over time, and asks her to accompany him back to Iceland so that he can do this. She is thus ⁶⁸ Byatt enjoys the wordplay of including ‘steinn’—stone—in the stonemason’s surname. I owe this point to Dick Collins.

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transfigured twice into a work of art—once by her condition, and then again by Thorsteinn. Unlike Pygmalion, who created a statue to meet his own desires, Thorsteinn recognizes Ines as a separate, human self, and reveals her innate beauty: ‘it was possible to see the lineaments of a beautiful woman, a woman with a carved, attentive face, looking up and out. The human likeness vanished as she came closer. She thought that he had seen her, and this made her happy’ (176). Thorsteinn’s attitude towards her as a work of art is light years away from that of the anaesthetist who came to see her after her operation, congratulating his profession for the neat handiwork of her reconstructed torso while failing to recognize her distress and sense of loss. Significantly, it is through the clash of cultures that she is able to find herself understood by another and, ultimately, to achieve liberation. Having progressively lost her capacity to speak, she now ceases to think through her native tongue of English. Once again Byatt revels in the clash and mixture of textures, as Ines’s stoniness alters the fluidity and fluency of her thoughts: ‘She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold’ (164); ‘New thoughts growled between her marbled ears’ (169). Paradoxically such stone thoughts, resulting from her transformation from an animate woman to a petrified form, are harbingers not of an ultimate paralysis, but of a new stage of life, in a new form, that awaits Ines. The losses she has undergone find some compensation, as she acquires new abilities. She fits in within her new, adopted landscape, which has been haunted from time immemorial by ‘striding stone women’, as Thorsteinn taught her.⁶⁹ She is the opposite of Galatea: where Galatea melted from stone into flesh, as a gift from the gods to her creator Pygmalion, Ines metamorphoses from a middle-aged, grief-struck invalid into a figure who has embraced a new culture, and has learnt to dance in order to express her exuberance. Thorsteinn watches her run from him into her new world: ‘She [ . . . ] began a dancing run, into the blizzard. He heard a stone voice, shouting and singing, “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum”’⁷⁰ (182–3).

⁶⁹ It is, therefore, not surprising that Iceland should have come up with the idea of transforming their electricity pylons into striding figures. ⁷⁰ The Icelandic translates as ‘Trunt, trunt, and the trolls in the mountains’, ‘trunt’ being the sound effect of heavy feet on the ground. I am grateful to Ingalo Thompson for this translation and this point.

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Byatt’s short story meditates upon many of the themes that pervade this book: the idea of grief and loss catalysing metamorphosis; the reshaping of myths so that they can express the framing of illness in mythical terms, in order to explore the feelings of those whose body is changing beyond their control; the transformative power of crosscultural clashes; above all, the power of perspective and context to transfigure our notion of the ‘monstrous’ into the ‘marvellous’. It is time to turn to the individuals chosen as exemplary ‘writing women and strange monsters’ and to examine the changes that they both depict and urge.

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1 Ali Smith In November 2016 when Ali Smith was asked on Desert Island Discs what book she would choose to take to her desert island, along with the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, she unhesitatingly plumped for Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the Mary Innes translation. Smith, who was born in 1962 and brought up in Inverness, but who has made her home in Cambridge, has an endless capacity for wonder, a fascination for the ways in which art can transform us, a delight in wordplay, and an urge to explore and expand boundaries, such as the boundaries between humans and animals and plants, boundaries between genders, generic boundaries. Reviews of her work use language such as ‘sparkling satirical’,¹ ‘dazzlingly inventive’,² ‘effervescent;’³ she is one of the most Ovidian of contemporary writers. In 2007 she published Girl Meets Boy, having been invited by Canongate to rework a myth for the twenty-first century for their series of mythical retellings.⁴ Smith selected what she called the ‘cheeriest’ myth of the Metamorphoses, the story of Iphis and Ianthe, and used it to write a tender and funny love story between two girls in contemporary Scotland. However, Girl Meets Boy is edged with political satire, as Smith condemns the ravages perpetrated upon the environment by those who make their fortune by packaging commodities such as bottled water, which is marketed to the public as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’.⁵ Smith’s Ovidianism is nourished by a third-wave agenda, which not only depicts and charts the transformations in the world around us, but also exhorts her readers to be alert and

¹ Publisher’s blurb for There But for The (2011). ² Byatt (2011). ³ Taylor (2007). ⁴ Other contributions included Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad, and Jeanette Winterson, Weight. ⁵ See Cox and Theodorakopoulos (2013).

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courageous enough to enact change themselves. There is real anger coursing through her fantastic narratives at a world in which government policies consign people to unnecessary deaths through the postcode lottery of NHS treatment, or where the possibility of transforming one’s life through education and imagination is severely curtailed. I shall focus particularly on two recent works of fiction, Public Library (2015)⁶ and Autumn (2016),⁷ as well as Artful, the publication of her four lectures given for the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in 2012.⁸ These lectures, ‘On Time’, ‘On Form’, ‘On Edge’, and ‘On Reflection’, constitute both a meditation on the power and adaptability of literature and a fictional letter to her dead lover, whose ghost hovers around and within the books that she used to love and to write about. Smith’s hallmark inventiveness in expanding generic boundaries, so that an academic lecture becomes a letter to the dead, transforms her lectures into a modern-day version of the Heroides, letters written by Ovid’s abandoned women to their lovers, in order to express their longing to see these lovers return. Smith’s narrator casts herself into the role of a female Orpheus, prepared to rout the underworld, if she could only thus secure the return of her beloved: God. If I had a chance to fetch you from the underworld, to go down and persuade them and fetch you home, I’d never look back. But maybe you wouldn’t want to come back. Maybe, like the woman in the poem, you were already root. Maybe that was why not even my imagination could bring you back anymore. (140)

The passage echoes Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Eurydice’, where Eurydice’s blood runs cold with dread when she hears Orpheus arrive at the gates of the Underworld,⁹ but it also serves as a reminder that the subject of Artful is art, and the power of art. Art can transform lives when it meets a creative and willing imagination. An imagination that is deadened by routine thoughts, or deafened by desperation, will fail to unlock the potential for hope and for a future that art can offer. It is significant

⁶ Smith (2015). ⁷ Smith (2016). ⁸ Smith (2012). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text. ⁹ Duffy (1999), ‘Eurydice’, 58–60. For a discussion of this see Cox (2011), 24–7 and Braund (2012), 190–209.

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that the narrator is frustrated by her conviction that her lover is sending her messages in an incomprehensible language. The narrator’s lover performs the role of the Sibyl, deliberately frustrating the need of the narrator to find answers, or to gain access to the place where such answers might be forthcoming: Maybe the languages of underworld and overworld can’t really meet, I thought, opening the old paperback wider, cracking the spine on it, hearing the gum of the binding give. Maybe that’s why you’d been giving me messages in a language I couldn’t speak and I knew for sure you couldn’t speak either. (107)

The narrator’s mistake is to have decided in advance what she wants to gain from reading, rather than to allow the book to speak to her. She wants to read the book her lover read, to know the thoughts that her lover had had when reading it, to embody her dead lover, so that she can resuscitate her. She attempts to trace her lover’s thought processes through the commentary and annotations on the books, but isn’t able to appreciate the message that the power of great art lies in allowing its infinity to illuminate what is ephemeral and provisional in our own lives: You’d written about a man in a Greek myth, I couldn’t make out his name, who plays music so beautifully that the god Apollo challenges him to a music competition. If I win, Apollo says, then I get to skin you alive. The man agrees. Of course the god wins, you wrote, because gods always win, but the music played by the man who is bound to lose his skin moves to tears, moves more than any god’s perfect playing ever will, every living thing round him. (139–140)

It is such vulnerability, the pain of being mortal, that lends art the power of humanity, but in order to speak to and for humanity, art must accompany the human world in its unending process of transformation. Smith reminds us of our fragility, our limited time here, in a passage that also alerts us to the fact that each new generation refashions for itself its own new versions of great works of art: Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice—or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order. (31–2)

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It is apt that Smith should have shaped the above observations with allusions to Heraclitus and to the book of Ecclesiastes. By punning on Heraclitus’ claim that you cannot step twice into the same river, and replacing river by ‘story’, she emphasizes the Ovidian idea of a story as a ‘carmen perpetuum’, an unbroken song, that twists and turns, disappears and resurfaces, and links her contemporary readers in communion with millennia of earlier readers of the same myths and stories. Our ‘comings and goings’ shade the passage with melancholy by reminding us of our mortality, of the Ecclesiastical ‘seasons’ that we are allowed to spend on earth. And because books have the power to transform us, it is through a person’s reading that we are able to recover facets of his or her thoughts and ideas, hopes and sorrows. The narrator draws sustenance from her lover’s reading. Indeed, it is because she reads her lover’s words about the myth of Baucis and Philemon, and is moved by the story of the couple who loved each other so constantly that they were transfigured into trees that would always stay together, that she is prompted to seek out the Metamorphoses and read it (78). And the Metamorphoses, of course, teach us all about the inevitability and necessity and exuberance of change. That they themselves are changed in order to meet each generation anew is indicated by the fact that Smith includes different versions and adaptations, as Ovid is re-translated and re-formed over and over again: ‘God, or some such artist as resourceful, / Began to sort it out. / Land here, sky there, / And sea there’ is how Ovid, metamorphosing into Ted Hughes, saw the start of all things. [ . . . ] Form, from the Latin forma, meaning shape. Shape, a mould; something that holds or shapes; a species or kind; a pattern or type; a way of being; order, regularity, system. It once meant beauty, but now that particular meaning’s obsolete. (65)

Smith follows Hughes following Ovid as she meditates upon the ‘godbusiness’ (71) of creating new aesthetic forms that can accommodate the new versions of stories. ‘Form never stops,’ she observes. ‘And form is always environmental’ (71). The comment not only looks to Pythagoras’ speech in Metamorphoses XV,¹⁰ but also highlights the fact that, if an art ¹⁰ ‘omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc / huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus / spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit / inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo, / utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris/nec manet ut fuerat nec formam servat eandem, / sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eandem / esse, sed in varias doceo migrare figuras’ (Metamorphoses XV, 165–72) (All things change, but nothing dies: the spirit wanders hither and thither, taking possession of what limbs it pleases, passing from

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form is going to survive and thrive, it must speak to people of where they live and how they live in a language from which they can learn. She writes movingly of the affective power of aesthetic form, of how simply a recognition of cadences and conventions can offer a stability of self to a person whose identity is shaped by books. This recognition is confirmation that books offer a homeland to those in exile, and serve as talismen to those walking through the landscape of metamorphosis. Her comments remind us of the plight of the exiled Ovid, ironically banished in part because of his books, but she also looks ahead to the extensive use made of Ovid to speak for the homeless and refugees: For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we know it. (73–4)

Yet, at the same time, aesthetic form must adapt to an ever-changing culture and set of readers’ expectations. Artful itself is testimony to this, as Smith meditates upon the enduring and shaping power of the Metamorphoses in this set of four academic lectures, framed as the fictional account of a bereaved lover. She argues that it is the very plasticity of artistic form that ensures its survival: There’ll always be a dialogue, an argument, between aesthetic form and reality, between form and its content, between seminality, art, fruitfulness and life. There’ll always be seminal argument between forms—that’s how forms produce themselves, out of a meeting of opposites, of different things; out of form encountering form. Put two poems together and they’ll make a third. (69)

But for Smith the importance of the transformation is not simply to ensure the survival and relevance of art, it is that it allows art to speak directly to us in a way that urges us to respond by transforming our lives. In a sentence that could have been written to depict the emotions experienced by Byatt’s stone woman, she urges: ‘It’s this being seen (met in the act of looking)—the exchange that happens when art and beasts into human bodies, or again our human spirit passes into beasts, but never at any time does it perish. Like pliant wax which, stamped with new designs, does not remain as it was, or keep the same shape, but yet is still itself, so I tell you that the soul is always the same, but incorporates itself in different forms).

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human meet—that results in the pure urgency for transformation: “you must change your life” ’ (27).¹¹ In being seen we are not just recognized, but ideally are woken to our responsibilities to ourselves and to others. Effective art alerts us to the necessity of change, which offers one reason for why so many writers are invoking Ovid in an attempt to transform the world socially and politically. The abrupt break at the end signifies an untimely death, but its poignancy is tempered by the necessity for her readers to complete the line for themselves, to continue her work: ‘Here’s to the place where reality and the imagination meet, whose exchange, whose dialogue, allows us not just to imagine an unreal different world but also a real different world—to match reality with possibili [ . . . ]’ (188). In Smith’s latest collection of short stories she celebrates the places where reality and imagination meet, even while mourning for the fact that such places are disappearing on a weekly basis.¹² Public Library intersperses statements from writers about what libraries mean to them with short stories penned by Smith. The power of this innovative approach is that as readers we hear testimony from witness after witness to the transformative power of reading.¹³ Ovid asserts the power of literature repeatedly; at the end of the Metamorphoses he is insistent that his books will outlive physical monuments, that his poetry will travel in unbroken song from his age into an inconceivable future. In the Tristia he sends his books to travel to places from which he is now in exile. The message of Public Library is that public libraries ¹¹ There are striking echoes here of the closing comments of Charles Martindale’s seminal work on reception, Redeeming the Text—Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (1993), 106: ‘If [ . . . ] reading can be constructed as (potentially) dialogic in some such sense as this, then, perhaps the word is not frozen, not dead, but capable of being redeemed and of redeeming, whenever a reader, accepting her own historicity, makes an act of trust, and commits herself to a text in all its alterity, takes, in other words, the risks—and they would be risks—of being read, of relationship. In such relationships who knows what can be found? Maybe only an absence. But there is always the possibility that, for some reader, somewhere, one day, it will prove to be the Love that moves the sun and the stars.’ ¹² Smith (2015). All references are to this edition, with page references given within the text. ¹³ It is notable that the back cover of the book offers quotations from three women writers about libraries: Virginia Woolf exuberantly declares that ‘I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure’; Germaine Greer states that ‘Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit . . . In any library in the world, I am at home’, while Doris Lessing observes that ‘With a library you are free. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one—but no one at all—can tell you what to read and when and how.’

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invest in the collective good, by enabling all readers to change their lives by daring to imagine. This focus on change is reinforced by Smith’s short stories, which are heavily indebted to Ovid. Ovid infuses Smith’s anger at a government which is closing down public libraries on a weekly basis¹⁴ and thus robbing the nation of its assets, and robbing the poor by shutting down their opportunities to imagine. As Lesley Bryce pointed out: My parents were readers, but we did not have many books in the house, so the library was a gateway to a wider world, a lifeline, an essential resource, a cave of wonder. Without access to the public library as a child, my whole world would have been much smaller, and infinitely less rich. All those riches freely available, to everyone and anyone with a library card. All children should be so lucky. (98)

Through collating such contributions Smith gives an audience to the voices that demand the preservation of our libraries, which form a vital link between our pasts and the present. The importance of libraries lies not only in their ability to kindle a child’s hopes and imagination, but also in their capacity to reveal and affirm our identities that have been shaped by a shared cultural history. Sarah Wood writes of her excitement at the opening of the new library in her town: ‘The brand new building brought with it the idea that our local history was important—that books were important, but also that we were too, and that where we lived was, that it had a heritage and a future that mattered’ (21).¹⁵ For Jackie Kay the library card functions as a golden bough, opening up worlds that were previously inaccessible and unimaginable. In her poem ‘Dear Library’ she observes: ‘Browse, borrow, request, renew—lovely words to me / A library card in your hand is your democracy’ (121). It is this focus upon democracy, this anger at political decisions that have so marked an impact upon those least able to withstand it, that aligns Smith with the values of the third-wave feminists, intent upon ¹⁴ A report by the BBC in March 2016 revealed that in the preceding six years 343 public libraries had been closed in the United Kingdom. Smith bleakly observes that ‘Just in the few weeks that I’ve been ordering and re-editing these twelve stories for this book, 28 libraries have come under threat of closure or passing to volunteers. Fifteen mobile libraries have also come under this same threat. That makes forty three—in a matter of weeks. [ . . . ] The statistics suggest that by the time this book is published there will be one thousand fewer libraries in the UK than there were at the time I began writing the first of the stories’ (97–8). ¹⁵ See also Anna James’s contribution: ‘That tiny library gave me access to worlds and lives that a child growing up in rural Northumberland could never have hoped to experience anywhere else.’ Smith (2015), 207.

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their efforts to include the interests of the working-class and less welleducated in their striving for a better society. The agenda and concerns of those who write about the importance of public libraries to a decent and civilized society find an echo in the short stories that she includes in the volume, some of which have been previously published elsewhere. In ‘Last’ Smith evokes the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, while tracking the history of our English words, which lead us back to different cultures and worlds. It is not just the local history shelved within our public libraries that bestows upon us a sense of our position in history, it is also a recognition of the journeys taken by the words that we use every day. The filaments of these words lead us back to Ovid, to the threads laid down by Ariadne in her efforts to rescue Theseus: Or the word aloof, which was a shipping term, came from luff, the word for the command to distance your boat from something too dangerously close to it. Or the word clue, too, which came from the word for a ball of thread and the coinage of which was probably something to do with the big ball of string Theseus took into the labyrinth with him to mark his way out and defeat the Minotaur. Ariadne got it from Daedalus, the inventor, and she gave it to Theseus, with whom she was in love, and the ball of string saved his life and made him a hero. Then he abandoned her on Naxos island. She woke on the beach and she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone till she saw the sails of his ship disappearing over the sea’s horizon. Now that’s what I call aloof. (10)

Smith establishes the importance of Ovid right at the start of the volume. She combines arcane, detailed etymological research with a matter-offact, chatty tone, casually relating the myth as it has come down to us from both the Metamorphoses and the Heroides. In a flourish whose wit mirrors that of Ovid’s many verbal puns and instances of wordplay, Smith offers examples of modern usage of the two words whose history she has so painstakingly tracked, by employing them in the narration of this age-old story: ‘she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone’ and ‘Now that’s what I call aloof.’ Such delight in the richness inherited within the English language is also evident in the short story ‘Grass’. At the beginning of the story the narrator returns to her father’s house, and discovers there a book of Herrick’s poetry from her childhood, in which she had made various notes. Once again Smith charts the ways in which books transform and shape people, especially at a young and malleable age. The narrator deciphers from her childlike script a parody of the epic convention of

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listing,¹⁶ where she has noted down ‘words I clearly thought were of use, bunch assortment tussock shock sheaf truss heap swathe bouquet nosegay posy skein hank’ (173). The list looks back to the title of the story ‘Grass’, but in a work so heavily imbued with classical resonances it also evokes images of young girls, gathering flowers, and the dangers attendant on such an activity. This association is strengthened by Smith’s other marginalia, where she had noted the well-known Horatian tag and followed this up by reminding herself of the function of classical nymphs: ‘Carpe diem. Greek mythological nymphs who took care of beautiful gardens’ (173). Her childhood self was clearly an enterprising and thoughtful reader, who tracked the classical allusions within Herrick’s poem. She notes that she has underlined certain phrases from ‘Farewell Frost, or Welcome the Spring’—clearly her younger self was intrigued by the idea of ‘wild civility’ or enchanted by the anthropomorphic twist given to a tree by the verb ‘swagger’: ‘and every tree / Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry’ (173). Though Herrick’s debt is predominantly to Horace,¹⁷ the human demeanour of the tree is also suggestive of Ovid. As she re-reads the poems and her notes as an adult she both finds the child that she used to be, and is able to muse upon the filaments of allusion, the intertextual threads that bind her to Herrick and, through Herrick, back to Ovid and Horace. By alternating these short stories with the letters from friends and colleagues about what public libraries mean to them, Smith is both emphasizing the transformative potential of books and reading, and reminding us of the vital role played by public libraries in democratizing literature, in ensuring that those who might be most in need of the dreams of change should not be failed. The message she received from Pat Hunter stressed the power of libraries to confirm our identities within our own cultures—‘Because libraries have always been a part of any civilization they are not negotiable. They are part of our inheritance’ (42)—while Sophie Mayer adamantly asserts that: I believe libraries are essential for informed and participatory democracy, and that there is therefore an ideological war on them via cuts and closures, depriving individuals and communities of their right to knowledge and becoming on their own terms. (76)

¹⁶ This convention was itself parodied by Ovid, who in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses enumerated an extensive list of hunting dogs’ names, as opposed to the lists of gods and heroes that had been found in Homer and Virgil. ¹⁷ For a discussion of the Horatian influence on this poem see Martindale (1993), 81.

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Some of Smith’s stories within this collection had been published previously in earlier volumes. One such contribution is ‘The Beholder’, which had formed part of Shire (2012). Its re-framing and re-contextualization within a volume which celebrates the metamorphoses engendered by reading alerts us to the elements that once again affirm the importance of recognizing the cultural forces and traditions that shape us. The narrator of the story, like Byatt’s stone woman, is suffering from a predicament that has stumped her doctors. Her plight began when she experienced some difficulties in breathing, and developed as she discovered a growth that resembled a woody twig. Smith cannot resist the pleasures of sardonic wordplay, as she once again parodies an epic list, which this time mocks medical specialties. Unable to diagnose her, the GP refers her to various consultants: I’m referring you to a consultant, he said. Actually—you might want to make a note—I’m going to refer you to several consultants at the following clinics: Oncology Ontology Dermatology Neurology Urology Etymology Impology Expology Informology Menthology Ornithology and Apology, did you get all that? (47)

The list looks back to classical epic, while also indicating the helplessness of a medical profession in the face of conditions that are unfamiliar. As the narrator’s condition advances she realizes that she is, in fact, growing a rose bush from her chest. Significantly Smith describes the burgeoning twigs as ‘stubby antlers’, so that the reader envisages a transformation that incorporates human and animal and plant at one and the same time: ‘Meanwhile the pairs of little stubby antlers grew and greened and notched themselves then split and grew again, long and slender, as high as my eyes, so that putting on a jumper took ten careful minutes’ (49). The matter-offact observation about the careful manoeuvring required to get dressed grounds the story in an everyday world, familiar to many after an illness or an accident, even as Smith depicts a transformation as fantastic as one of Ovid’s myths. And just as ‘Grass’ shows a narrator who looks back to the ancient world through Herrick, so ‘The Beholder’ discovers that the rose she is growing is called ‘Lycidas’, after Milton’s elegy, itself based upon Virgil’s tenth Eclogue. The name prompts her to muse upon Milton, and his own delight in wordplay and neologisms: The other thing about Milton, I said, is that he was a great maker-up of words, and one of the reasons they named a rose after him, not just because it was an anniversary of his birth or death, I can’t remember which, in 2008, is that he’s

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actually the person who invented, just made up, out of nothing, the word fragrance. Well, not out of nothing, from a Latin root, but you know what I mean. [ . . . ] And gloom, I said. And lovelorn, and even the word padlock we wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for him just making it up. (50–1)

Like Byatt’s stone woman, the narrator delights in her transformation, is entranced by the beauty inherent in it, even though at first sight she appears unnatural and hybrid. This is unsurprising from a writer who plumped for retelling the story of Iphis and Ianthe, one of Ovid’s ‘cheeriest myths’, in Girl Meets Boy. ‘The Beholder’ ends on a note of wonder. Though the narrator at times finds herself ravaged by strong winds and rain that strip her petals from her rose branches, she is energized and revitalized to see that she can leave traces of beauty in the most unlikely and unpromising of environments: But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards. (55–6)

Public Library is all about just such transformations, the moments of beauty that transform the greyest of outlooks. As an epigraph Smith cites Alexandra Harris’s cry: ‘O magic place it was—still open thank God.’ The miracle of such sites of wonder opening up the imagination of any citizen who chooses to enter the realms of literature is shadowed by an ever-present awareness of the fragility of its survival, its vulnerability to the cuts made by a government intent upon its austerity cuts. In a short story entitled ‘The Art of Elsewhere’ Smith evokes a utopia that is doomed to exist only in the imagination, but a utopia that also offers us an impetus necessary for striving for a more equitable world: ‘Elsewhere there are no religions. Elsewhere there are no borders. Elsewhere nobody is a refugee or an asylum seeker whose worth can be decided about by a government’ (132).¹⁸ As she develops her vision further it becomes clear ¹⁸ Such ideals are reminiscent of those selected by Stanescu as the criteria for the Saviana Stanescu fellowship, which Stanescu envisages as a grant that will guarantee visafree travel across a globe where there are no superpowers, no war, and no discrimination. See Chapter 6.

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that this utopia is the site Ovid envisaged for the ‘better part of me’, the part that would survive death and soar amidst the stars, the part that would overcome the exile of his last, bleak years. Elsewhere is the home that he could never regain, the place that books promise, that we all long for, but are fated never to find: Elsewhere the graves of the dead are empty and their spirits fly above the cities in instinctual shapeshifting formations that astound the eye. Elsewhere poems cancel imprisonment. Elsewhere we do time differently. Every time I travel, I head for it. Every time I come home, I look for it.

(132)

The ability of literature to cancel imprisonment is not its only magical property. The final story of the volume has the most casual of titles— ‘And so on’—and yet it achieves the most hopeful of transfigurations. Once again it takes us into the realm of illness, since it opens with the death of the narrator’s friend. In the course of one of her last fevers, ‘She believed that what was happening to her wasn’t that she was so ill she was hallucinating, but that she was a work of art and she was being stolen by unscrupulous people’ (211). Illness not only changes the shape of the body, it also alters our perception about who we are, what space we occupy, how we relate to the world. Although the metamorphosis may only have occurred within the patient’s dying mind, the change is no less real to her. And the transformation that she describes on her deathbed offers such solace to the narrator that Smith is able to transform the experience into a meditation upon one of the most powerful of all Ovidian myths—the story of Persephone. Smith returns to the theme of Artful as she depicts the narrator’s difficulty in accepting her friend’s death, especially at an obscenely young age, and her consequent attempts to bring her friend back to life. Like the Smith of Artful, she thus performs the role of Orpheus. She persuaded herself that her friend had spoken the truth: ‘more and more I’m coming to understand that she was a work of art and that she has, after all, been stolen by art thieves who are keeping her hidden until they can work out how to make a fortune from her’ (212). The best stories of metamorphosis are, of course, those that bind the commonly experienced emotions of everyday life with the possibility of magical transformation. By refusing to accept her friend’s death, by subscribing to the fiction that she had become a work of art, the narrator turns her into the subject of a story, which immortalizes her in literature and rescues her from a final oblivion. Smith claims for her own purposes Ovid’s proud

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assertion of immortality through literature at the end of the Metamorphoses. The story closes with the narrator imagining the return of her friend in the form of a library, where she will continue to grow, and so to inspire new works. Ovid’s ‘carmen perpetuum’ here becomes a tree, and an unquenchable source of literature: a work of art, no: a work of life, though she died so roughly, and wherever those thieves are hiding her till they can sell her, they have to tape blankets over the windows, because the light coming off her mind, even though she’s dead, gives away her whereabouts, and they have to keep pulling up and cutting back the flowers and tendrils and green stuff that persistently crack the stone of the floors of wherever they’ve got her. That’s the art of dying all right. Pretty soon the whole place will resemble I don’t know what, probably a library, one with trees growing right through its floors up past its shelves and piercing its roof. They’ll try and stop it happening; they’ll move her to the next empty cave or mansion or cellar or wherever, but it doesn’t matter where she is. She’ll do the same to it and to the one after it and to the one after that, and so on. (220)

As once Persephone was hidden away from the world of the living, imprisoned underground in a cave, so the narrator’s friend is incarcerated in a blank, darkened space. And just as spring, in Persephone’s story, is able to conquer winter and death, at least for a while, so the narrator’s friend breaks the confines of her prison with her verdant, new growths and shoots. ‘And so on’ is far from a throwaway, careless comment; rather, it is a joyful declaration of the power of literature to grow and to endure, despite the closure of public libraries, despite all the obstacles placed in its path. The political landscape of Smith’s Autumn is darker still. Autumn (2016) is the first in a projected quartet of books, each dedicated to a season. Autumn is set in 2016, during the days of the Brexit referendum, when both sides spoke passionately about ‘getting their country back’, and neither side wanted to endorse the vision of their opponents. Smith evokes a heavy sense of loss, and the anger experienced on both sides that such visions were only ever fragile and fictional, yet capable of unleashing such vitriol and division across the land. The book opens, tellingly, with a distortion of the most famous line from A Tale of Two Cities, but in riven England the two sides are both losing. ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times’ (3), observes Smith bleakly.¹⁹ After her celebration of and lament for public libraries, she turns her attention in ¹⁹ Smith (2016). Page references to this work will appear as parentheses in the text.

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Autumn to the plight of those attempting to manage on casual contracts, that are meanly paid and precarious. Though the book opens in midsummer, the winds of poverty chill the lives of those whose foothold in the world of financial security is extremely tenuous: It is a Wednesday, just past midsummer. Elisabeth Demand—thirty two years old, no fixed-hours casual contract junior lecturer at a university in London, living the dream, her mother says, and she is, if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you’re still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago. (15)

Elisabeth’s frustrations stem from the fact that her career and life have stagnated, due to a lack of investment in higher education.²⁰ Paradoxically, even as everything stood still for her, seismic change was happening all around her, and culminated in the shock referendum result of 2016 that led to Brexit. Autumn is a book that meditates upon permanence and mutation. Smith emphasizes the enormity of the decision to leave the European Union through the repetition of ‘All across the country’. One instance of this reveals the irresponsibility of those who voted before finding out what they were voting about, while others, fearing that the quality of their lives would deteriorate, sought change by looking into the option of emigrating: ‘All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish passport applications’ (59). The nature of the change could not be categorically identified, since it was a process through which people were still living, but there was no doubt that it was momentous: ‘All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder’ (60). However, even as apparently irrevocable change swept the country, the most pernicious of the old certainties abided: ‘All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same’ (61). This tension between permanence and mutability is, of course, quintessentially Ovidian, and so it is unsurprising that Ovid haunts Smith’s depiction of a Brexit-broken world. The atmosphere in the streets down which Elisabeth walks is sharpened by a new wariness and suspicion. The newly awakened hostilities feed into a recognition of the patterns of ²⁰ See also from later in the book: ‘Elisabeth shows the receptionist her library card for the university. Valid until my job goes, at least, she says, now the universities are all going to lose 16 per cent of our funding’ (104).

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history, that induces a weary ennui. Such patterning informs Smith’s choice to write a quartet of books, based upon and named after the seasons. The Weltschmerz depicted here deepens the melancholy tone of Autumn: I’m tired of the vitriol. I’m tired of the anger. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the selfishness. I’m tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it. I’m tired of how we’re encouraging it. I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I’m tired of lying governments. I’m tired of people not caring whether they’re being lied to any more. I’m tired of being made to feel this fearful. I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity. (56–7)

The world of books offers a necessary counterpoint to the frightening and dreary politics of nationalism. Ironically Elisabeth happens upon words from Shakespeare, who might be thought of as representing a ‘merry old England’ to which many citizens appear to wish to return, but who is himself exhorting transformation, progress, and action. The lines quoted come from The Tempest, which is generally agreed to be one of the most Ovidian of Shakespeare’s plays.²¹ Even as Elisabeth is worn down by the unending stream of abusive and corrupt statements and actions, she is reading of Miranda’s wonder at the sight of new men arriving at her island: ‘“O brave new world!” Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. “O brave new world!” It was a challenge, a command’ (18). It is a challenge to which Smith herself has risen, using her own writing as a way of both charting the world, and trying to enable change within it. She recognizes that, in order to enact change, you need to enable people to see the world from a different perspective, and one of the ways in which she achieves this is to place old texts in new and different contexts. At times this entails two characters responding differently to the same book. When Elisabeth goes to visit her former neighbour, Daniel Gluck, in his care home, she knows that he will ask her about her reading, and runs through the imagined conversation in her head before her visit:

²¹ Brown (1999), 57.

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He’d look at the book in her hands. What you reading? he’d say. Elisabeth would hold it up. Brave New World, she’d say. Oh that old thing, he’d say. It’s new to me, she’d say. (30–1)

The choice of book is significant, as it allows Smith to explore the idea of responding anew to old texts, which pervades Autumn, and to remind us that books come to new life each time they encounter a new reader. The world is recreated, is re-made within books. Ovid’s recognition of this point is indicated by his attempts to depict the formation of the world within the Metamorphoses. Furthermore, Brave New World, Huxley’s work of science fiction, looks back to The Tempest, but also allows Smith to incorporate allusions to dystopic literature within her examination of the world of Brexit. Elisabeth eventually understands that it is through becoming Miranda from The Tempest that she is able to harness the sense of wonder and the imagination necessary to fight against the lost and broken world of Brexit Britain. As she recites The Tempest to herself, she muses upon the gap between rich and poor: ‘But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and— / Rich and what? she thought. Rich and poor’ (198).²² Elisabeth finds communion with the poor, the other rag-ends of humanity. In this version of Britain where it is suddenly acceptable to express xenophobic feeling, she glimpses the world of outsiders, even though she herself is a British citizen. As she renews her passport, the spelling of her name gives rise to some consternation: ‘It’s people from other countries that spell it like that, generally, isn’t it? the man says. / He flicks through the outdated passport. / But this does say you’re UK, he says’ (22).²³ Furthermore, as Elisabeth comments about how long she’s waited for this appointment in the Post Office, she suggests to the Post Office employee that they might stock books here for those waiting, that they might turn it into a kind of public facility, a library.

²² The original passage from The Tempest reads: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies. / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. / Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong / Hark! Now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.’ ²³ See also from later in the book: ‘They’d clearly just arrived here on holiday, their luggage round their feet. The people behind them in the queue shouted at them. What they shouted at them was to go home. This isn’t Europe, they shouted. Go back to Europe’ (130).

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The response she receives looks back to the themes that Smith explored in Public Library, the many dimensions of loss entailed by the closure of each one of them, losses borne by those most in need of the communion and possibility housed within them: ‘Funny you should say that, the man says. Most of those people aren’t here for Post Office services at all. Since the library closed this is where they come if it’s raining or intemperate’ (19). The book she is reading is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tellingly she thinks of as her ‘new/old book’ (112). Smith cites its opening lines in the Mary Innes translation, lines which stretch back from Ovid’s world to the beginning of time and which, through Smith’s appropriation, now stretch forward two thousand years to our present day also: My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. You heavenly bodies, since you were responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favourably on my attempts and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times. (112)

This is another book that Elisabeth reads aloud to Daniel Gluck, as he lies progressively weakened and diminished towards the end of his life. It is an inspired choice, as Pythagoras’ speech from Book XV meditates upon the changes wrought upon the body by increasing age, and likens a mortal lifespan to the seasons: Quid? non in species succedere quattuor annum adspicis, aetatis peragentem imitamina nostrae? nam tener et laetens puerique simillimus aevo vere novo est; tunc herba recens et roboris expers turget et insolida est et spe delectat agrestes; omnia tunc florent, florumque coloribus almus ludit ager, neque adhuc virtus in frondibus ulla est. transit in aestatem post ver robustior annus fitque valens iuvenis : neque enim robustior aetas ulla nec uberior, nec quae magis ardeat, ulla est. excipit autumnus, posito fervore iuventae maturus mitisque inter iuvenemque senemque temperie medius, sparsus quoque tempora canis. inde senilis hiems tremulo venit horrida passu, aut spoliata suos, aut, quos habet, alba capillos. nostra quoque ipsorum semper requieque sine ulla corpora vertuntur, nec quod fuimusve sumusve cras erimus. (Metamorphoses XV, 199–216)

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(Or again, don’t you see the year passing through a succession of four seasons, thus imitating our own life? In the early spring, it is tender and full of sap, like the age of childhood. Then the crops, in shining trim but still delicate, shoot up in the fields and, though they are not yet stout and strong, fill the farmers with joyous hopes. Everything is in flower, the fertile earth gay with brightly-coloured blossoms, but there is as yet no sturdiness in the leaves. Spring past, the year grows more robust and, moving on into summer, becomes like a strong young man. There is no time hardier than this, none richer, none so hot and fiery. Autumn takes over when the ardour of youth is gone, a season ripe and mellow, in temper midway between youth and age, with a sprinkling of grey hairs at its temples. Then aged winter comes shivering in, with tottering steps, its hair all gone, or what it has turned white. In the same way, our own bodies are always ceaselessly changing, and what we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow.)

The passage is highly suggestive in light of Smith’s decision to write her quartet of novels, each one dedicated to a season. It also illuminates Daniel Gluck’s predicament, as his mind remains active and alert, even as his body weakens and shrinks. He has moved from autumn to winter, but as he experiences a new relationship with his changing body, he looks back over the various seasons through which he has lived. Moreover, he no longer experiences his self as an embodied human being—rather, he feels that he has transmuted into a different form of being, such as a plant or a tree, recalling Smith’s earlier short story in which the protagonist becomes in part a rose bush. As his functionality diminishes, and he becomes progressively less capable of movement, he feels that his body is being encased in a rigid, wooden trunk: ‘The old man (Daniel) opens his eyes to find he can’t open his eyes. / He seems to be shut inside something remarkably like the trunk of a Scots pine’ (89). His mind is still alert enough to be able to congratulate himself on the species of tree his body has selected for its new home, and to enumerate its distinctions, one of which is longevity, a capacity to last ‘for many centuries’. The idea of the Scots pine triggers memories, and shuttles him back through time to the early days of his life, days when the storm clouds of the Second World War were gathering and darkening Europe. Here, too, there is a blurring of the seasons, as Daniel’s youth is threatened by what seemed to some to be the closing days of the world. Smith is building upon the parallels many commentators perceive between the rise of Fascism and the Nazi regime in the 1930s and the return to nationalism and far right movements today. Daniel’s youth was clouded by such political regimes, as are his dying days:

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Then the old man confined in the bed in the tree, Daniel, is a boy on a train that’s passing through deep, spruce woods. He is thin and small, sixteen summers old but he thinks he’s a man. It’s summer again, he is on the continent, they are all on the continent, things are a little uneasy on the continent. Something’s going to happen. It is already happening. Everybody knows. But everybody is pretending it’s not happening. (99) Cut this tree I’m living in down. Hollow its trunk out. Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides. Slide the new me back inside the old trunk. Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year’s crops to grow. Birth me all over again. Burn me and the tree. Next summer’s sun. Midwinter guarantee. (101–2)

It is, Smith suggests, through stories that the world might be saved. When Elisabeth looked up to Daniel as a mentor in earlier days, he taught her that ‘whoever makes up the story makes up the world [ . . . ] So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion’ (119). Such an approach informs Smith’s decision to work texts such as the Metamorphoses through her stories. She is both extending the ‘carmen perpetuum’ and simultaneously democratizing classical texts that, until recently, were the preserve of the well-off elite, at least within the UK. It is such openness, the willingness to extend an invitation to all, that stands in stark contrast to the political discourse that has been empowered, where reciprocity of views is unwelcome because they might reveal opposition and dissent. Dialogue is not possible: Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time’s over. Democracy. You lost. It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.

(112)²⁴

²⁴ Writing at the time of Daniel’s youth, Camus observed: ‘Oui, ce qu’il faut combattre aujourd’hui, c’est la peur et le silence, et avec eux la séparation des esprits et des âmes qu’ils entraînent. Ce qu’il faut défendre, c’est le dialogue et la communication universelle des hommes entre eux.’ Camus (1950), 177 (Yes, what we need to fight against today is fear and silence, and the attendant separation of mind and soul that they bring in their wake. What we need to defend is dialogue and universal communication between people) [My translation].

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The stories enact the magic of transformation and of survival. In the above passage Daniel is both old man and young boy, human and plant, old me and new me. He is himself a part of the Metamorphoses that Elisabeth is reading to him, the ‘old new book’, Smith’s desert island choice. As he returns to the world of vegetation he resembles a work of art by Arcimboldo, but also appears to experience some relief: Here’s an old story so new that it’s still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it’ll end. An old man is sleeping in a bed in a care facility on his back with his head pillow-propped. His heart is beating and his blood’s going round his body, he’s breathing in then out, he is asleep and awake and he’s nothing but a torn leaf scrap on the surface of a running brook, green veins and leaf-stuff, water and current, Daniel Gluck taking leaf of his senses at last, his tongue, a broad green leaf, leaves growing through the sockets of his eyes, leaves thrustling (very good word for it) out of his ears, leaves tendrilling down through the caves of his nostrils and out and round till he’s swathed in foliage, leafskin, relief. (181)

This image of the dying man transformed and comforted by the fresh green verdure perpetuates Ovid’s cycles of death and rebirth, endings and beginning. It is worth noting in passing, also, that Smith’s loving attention to the detail of the way in which change is experienced echoes Ovid’s meticulous charting of the senses of those who metamorphosed in his poem. And while Daniel lies apparently motionless, but revelling in his mutation into a tree, he listens to another story of death and birth, of fading and new life from the Metamorphoses, which Elisabeth reads to him: She opens her book at random. She starts to read, from where she’s opened it, but this time out loud, to Daniel: His sisters, the nymphs of the spring, mourned for him, and cut off their hair in tribute to their brother. The wood nymphs mourned him too, and Echo sang her refrain to their lament. The pyre, the tossing torches, and the bier, were now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow centre. (171–2)

The passage is a powerful one. The human mortal body is transformed into new life in the form of a flower but, more importantly, survives through the stories that have had the plasticity to adapt themselves to the needs and anxieties of different cultures and different generations. Furthermore, the myth of Echo is of central importance to the reception of Ovid among contemporary women writers, since she offers a model of the female figure doomed only to repeat fragments of the words of

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others. She is the foil to the more dominant myth of Narcissus. Yet Ali Smith embraces an understanding of Ovid and an engagement with Ovid that goes far beyond a restoration of the women’s voice and perspective to the male-authored myths. In her hands Ovid articulates the injustices of government policies that disadvantage the poor over and over again, that threaten the survival of classical education, that put lives at risk through an inequitable postcode lottery. In Smith’s work Echo finds her voice in order to speak out on behalf of those unable to speak for themselves. In ‘True Short Story’²⁵ she once again probes the necessary transformation of literary genres. Its narrator overhears a conversation between two men in a café, who are arguing that the genre of the novel has passed its sell-by date. In casually misogynistic language one observes that the novel is a ‘flabby old whore [ . . . ] really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose. [ . . . ] Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people had mastered the short story, she was still in good shape’ (4). Unable to stop herself from eavesdropping, the narrator phones her friend, Kasia, who is an expert on the short story, and who is receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer in hospital and needs distraction: Why is the short story like a nymph, Kasia said. Sounds like a dirty joke. Ha. Okay, I said. Come on then. Why is the short story like a nymph? I’ll think about it, she said. It’ll give me something to do in here.

(7)

The two friends think of the story of Echo, one of the most famous nymphs, whose history underlines the crass cruelty of the men who contrast the ‘flabby old whore’ with the ‘slim nymph’. If Echo is slim, it is because she is ill, and her illness drives her to seek the relief of not being noticed, of achieving a conformity of thinking and saying exactly the same things as everybody else. Smith points out that Echo offers us one of the first accounts in literature of anorexia nervosa, as she paints a vividly recognizable portrait of aa desperately insecure adolescent girl: Echo pined too. Her weight dropped off her. She became fashionably skinny, then she became nothing but bones, then all that was left of her was a whiny, piny voice which floated bodilessly about, saying over and over exactly the same things that everybody else was saying. (13) ²⁵ Smith (2008), 3–17. All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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Echo, the ‘fit’ young girl, turns herself into a skeletal monster before achieving nothingness, reminding us of Ovid’s ability to articulate the ways in which women experience themselves as monstrous. It is striking how often he is invoked by women writers in order to chart illness, especially illness that may radically affect appearance—A. S. Byatt’s stone woman is suffering from progressive petrification, while in her poetry, as we shall see, Jo Shapcott’s Ovid accompanies her into the exile of her experience of breast cancer. And it is from a breast cancer ward that ‘True Short Story’ emerges. The form of the short story may appear to the men in the café as pristine and virginal, but Smith transforms it into a meditation on myth, and on the ways in which myth can help us to articulate polemic. Not only does she spark dis-ease with the lewd conjuring up of the nymph, but she uses the story to highlight issues of the postcode lottery within the NHS, by celebrating Kasia’s campaign to see Herceptin being made available to all the women who need it. She transforms the story of Echo into a story of triumph, by celebrating women who respond to their various challenges by answering back. ‘True Short Story’ offers a parable of the women writers discussed in this book, and the various ways in which they have chosen to ‘answer back’ to Ovid: Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two short stories. [ . . . ] This story was written in discussion with my friend Kasia, and in celebration of her (and all) tireless articulacy—one of the reasons, in this instance, that a lot more people were able to have that particular drug when they needed it. So when is the short story like a nymph? When the echo of it answers back.

(17)

In the following chapter we shall examine the ways in which Ovidian echoes shape Marina Warner’s meditation upon the myth of Leto, and its abiding relevance for refugees in the contemporary world, and consider the ways in which a contemporary Leto ‘answers back’ to her Ovidian original.

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2 Marina Warner Marina Warner’s 1993 short story collection, The Mermaids in the Basement, takes as its epigraph an extract from a poem by Emily Dickinson: I started Early—Took my Dog— And visited the Sea The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me.

The citation both reminds us of the long history of women writers who experience themselves as freakish eccentrics, the ‘strange monsters’ of Sarton’s poem, and highlights the sense of wonder that charged Dickinson’s imagination. By quoting Dickinson’s work Warner harnesses this wonder, while also indicating the intertextual dimensions of her work. Indeed, Warner’s fiction is characterized by a wealth of intertextual allusions, many of them relating to the important cultural studies that she has written about myths and fairytales, including Fantastic Metamorphoses, her volume on Ovid. Mermaids in the Basement draws explicitly from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Ovid’s Heroides and his Metamorphoses as well as from paintings by Tiepolo and Veronese. The short story that is most explicitly Ovidian, ‘Ariadne after Naxos’,¹ is furnished with an explicit reference to Metamorphoses VIII. However, Warner’s decision to allow Ariadne to voice her story herself obviously looks back also to the Heroides, and at the same time to the second-wave trend of revisiting male-authored texts from a female perspective. Warner’s Ariadne inserts herself into a long line of women who have been the dupes of male wiles and trickery, including her mother Pasiphae, who famously gave birth to the Minotaur:

¹ A note indicates that it was first published in Quarto, July/August 1982.

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In our family, the dangerousness of men has always been taught as gospel. My mother has suffered so much that now she lives only in darkened rooms [ . . . ] She has wrinkles and strained webs of skin around the eyes and mouth show how much she has suffered for the notorious passions of her past. (102)²

Poignantly Ariadne and her sister, Phaedra, promise themselves that they will never succumb to the same female weakness as their mother, but Warner relies upon the reader’s familiarity with the myths of Theseus and Ariadne, of Phaedra and Hippolytus, to understand that the following scene is heavy with foreboding, as we recognize that Ariadne is doomed to destruction at the hands of Theseus, and Phaedra in the grip of her uncontrollable passion: ‘My sister and I used to whisper together from our beds at night about the sufferings my mother had undergone at the hand of my father and of her many lovers; we vowed never to let it happen to us’ (102). However, she ends up dispelling ‘the great fear of men that was lodged in us’ (102), believing that her renunciation of men was turning her into that most monstrous of figures—a frigid spinster: Instead of whispering about imagined battles in the dark to my sister, I now dreamed of surrender: the rage that had blazed with such mischief in me I now saw as monstrous, a beast of malignant and dangerous stupidity, like the deformed, slobbery brother my dear mother bore after one of her men abused her credulousness. (103)

Ironically Ariadne believes that she had found salvation in her love for Theseus. Even as he was slaying her monstrous half-brother, the Minotaur, he was at the same time killing Ariadne’s perverse shunning of men: ‘Another monster had been tamed, the monster of my misanthropy; T., guided by a thread of my own weaving, had walked down into the nexus of my terrors and laid them’ (104). However, as her childhood-self had warned her, vulnerability in love leads to destruction—Ariadne gives everything to Theseus, only to find herself abandoned on the island of Naxos, while he sails into a future that includes marriage to her sister, Phaedra. Once again rage blazes through her, threatening to consume her: ‘Pain began to spill out of me. I was breaking apart at my seams, black pitch on fire seeping out, crackling on my dry surfaces. My love for ever, Theseus had said, for ever’ (105).

² Warner (1993). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given in the body of the text.

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Paradoxically, however, Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne does liberate her, and she forges her own future on an island inhabited exclusively by women, where after ten months she gives birth to Theseus’ daughter, Chloe, a child spared the afterlife and tragedy of Hippolytus, Theseus’ son: ‘Chloe [ . . . ] was born ten months after T. penetrated to the heart of the labyrinth’ (108). The island of women belongs to both the ancient and the modern world. Warner glances back to the Roman world through touches such as calculating pregnancy as lasting ten months, while at the same time including anachronistic descriptions such as ‘under the tall creaking trees, with their hospital smell and bark peeling off like sunburn, a heap of rubbish slewed this way and that in plastic bags of lurid dye’ (107). The effect of this is not just to emphasize how much the ancient world remains a living presence today,³ but also to indicate the long history of solidarity and storytelling that forms so strong a bond, but which has remained outside the mainstream. Warner traces the history of the island back to the experiences of Penthesilea, an Amazon of the Trojan war, who therefore belongs to the earliest of classical epics. At the same time her vision unites with that expressed by Monique Wittig, whose novel Les Guérillères (1969) was a response to the Iliad that commemorated lists of female warriors, while also depicting an island inhabited by women who rejected male dominance.⁴ Like Wittig, Warner reminds her readers of the price paid by women for wars begun by men, a price that too often goes unrecorded: In a pamphlet tied on a string to the desk in the hall for casual visitors or prospective members to browse, I read that some historians trace our foundation back to Penthesilea herself. At the end of her reign, and tired out by pitched battle against men, she saw the need for a place of retreat for women exhausted like her by war’s high cost in dead and wounded (99)

³ Warner cleverly includes images of past mythological figures, such as Medusa, whose statue issues fresh water for the women on the island: ‘where the soft fruits ripen in the sun, down to the tomato vines and cucumber beds, and then through the lips of a grinning Medusa into a big cistern that brims over continually’ (106). ⁴ See Duffy (1990), 208–9: ‘Les Guérillères, with its island community of female warriors modelled on the mythical societies of the Lemnians and the Amazons, is clearly an attempt to create a feminist epic [ . . . ] The divisive, patriotic dimension of the traditional epic has no place here, and the catalogues of national heroes, a standard set piece in the epic, have given way to lists of female names drawn from a wide range of cultural sources and juxtaposing the recognisable and the obscure, the mythological and the historical, the ancient and the modern.’

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Within this female island community women’s rights are no longer the source of endless conflict: ‘After all, on an island founded by Amazons, what man would be such an idiot as to deny a woman’s rights’ (115). Indeed the only labour appears to be controlling the abundance of gifts, showered upon the women by a fruitful earth. It is striking quite how closely Warner’s vision of paradise corresponds to Wittig’s heavenly kitchen (La Cuisine des Anges) at the end of Virgile, Non (1985), in which the conventional lists of classical epic are subverted as enumerations of (among other things) different fruits.⁵ In the same way as Wittig’s women prepare a meal to share together from the fruits of the earth, Warner’s Ariadne marvels at their shared good fortune: ‘We can reach up into the vine and snap off the heavy bunches. It’s an image of paradise; paradise was just such a garden as we enjoy here’ (97). Having experienced herself as monstrous through her relationships with men, once because of her inclination to reject them and once as a result of her corrosive bitterness at being abandoned, Warner’s Ariadne asserts that the story of her real self could only begin once she ceased defining herself in relation to Theseus: ‘Many say that the story of Ariadne ended when you came to the island and carried me off. But Hypatia will know the falsehood of that. For me and for Chloe, your coming was the first moment, and no amount of wordshed can match our sequels’ (120). These closing words look both back to the innumerable responses to the myth of Ariadne and Theseus and forwards to a future where their stories will continue unabated. It is a moment that parallels Ovid’s confident assertion of his ‘carmen perpetuum’. Ariadne is not the only Ovidian heroine whose story has received new form in Warner’s hands. In 2000 she published a short story entitled ‘Leto’s Flight’ in Philip Terry’s anthology, Ovid Metamorphosed,⁶ which formed part of her novel The Leto Bundle (2001). It is unsurprising that Ovid should have shaped her fiction so greatly at the turn of the millennium, since she ⁵ Wittig (1985), 138: ‘Il y a des cerises, des fraises, des framboises, des abricots, des pêches, des prunes, des tomates, des avocats, des melons verts, des cantaloups, des pastèques, des citrons, des oranges, des papayes, des ananas et des noix de coco. A un moment donné, un chérubin seins nus, sonne la trompette pour annoncer que tout est prêt pour la cuisine des anges’ (There are cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, oranges, papayas, pineapples, and coconuts. At a given moment a bare-breasted cherubim blasts the trumpet to announce that everything is ready for the angels’ kitchen) [My translation]. ⁶ Terry (2000).

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observed in Fantastic Metamorphoses (2002) that ‘it is characteristic of metamorphic writing to appear in transitional places and at the confluence of traditions and civilisations’.⁷ The Leto Bundle is a novel that foregrounds Warner’s fascination with both the continuities and the ruptures of histories, and the ways in which stories change and also persist within different contexts and cultures. Its chronology stretches from 400 BCE to the 1990s, with four distinct time periods and locations identified. Part of the story is set in the Lycania of 400 BCE to 620 CE, and part in Cadenas-la-Jolie from 700 CE to about 1350. There is then a jump of nearly five hundred years before the Leto Bundle becomes part of the treasures found by a nineteenth-century British explorer, who transports it on HMS Shearwater to the Royal Museum of Albion. The latest time frame of the novel (1970–199-⁸) takes place in Tirzah, where there is a civil war, and Albion.⁹ The novel does not follow a linear progression—indeed, it opens in the late twentieth century—but allows the different time frames to overlap, to lie one on top of the other, enabling palimpsestic readings and forming its own bundle of stories. Warner skilfully leads her readers from age to age, across different parts of the globe, introducing us to a myriad of different characters, until we realize that the same myth is playing itself out over and over again, accruing new meanings and deepening its resonances as it does so. The Leto Bundle is first introduced to us as an object, a carefully packaged bundle of bones being transported by plane, having been sent over abroad to form part of another museum’s exhibition. By the end of the novel it is clear that the bundle is also a repository of stories from the past, in which we find our own stories.¹⁰ Leto’s story appears in Book VI of the Metamorphoses. It is intimately linked to the story of Niobe, and indeed the plight of Niobe and her dead children haunts Warner’s novel, most especially in the depictions of the twentieth-century refugee children who end up maimed or dead. Niobe’s children die as a result of Leto’s curse, delivered as a punishment to Niobe who had sneered at a command to pay homage to Leto. ⁷ Warner (2002), 18. ⁸ The dates appear in this form in Warner’s Chronology. Warner (2001), 407. ⁹ The choice of these names is an indication that The Leto Bundle is also highly allusive and intertextual, as according to Blake’s vision in Jerusalem, Tirzah and her mother Rahab take charge of the daughters of Albion. I owe this point to Dick Collins. ¹⁰ As Warner points out (2002), stories themselves prompt change.

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The reasons Niobe delivers for her refusal point to Leto’s long association with the history of refugees: quaerite nunc, habeat quam nostra superbia causam, nescio quoque audete satam Titanida Coeo Latonam praeferre mihi, cui maxima quondam exiguam sedem pariturae terra negavit! nec caelo nec humo nec aquis dea vestra recepta est: exsul erat mundi, donec miserata vagantem ‘hospita tu terris erras, ego’ dixit, ‘in undis’ instabilemque locum Delos dedit. (Metamorphoses VI, 184–91) (Can you still ask what cause I have for pride? Can you still ignore me in favour of Leto, the daughter of the Titan Coeus, whoever he may be, a goddess to whom the great earth once refused even the tiniest resting-place, when she was about to give birth to her children? She was rejected by heaven, by earth, by sea, cast out from the whole world, this divinity of yours, until Delos took pity on her wanderings and said: ‘You roam the earth as I the sea, a wanderer with no fixed abode.’ And then the island granted her a resting-place, which was itself never at rest.)

Given that the plight of refugees is so dominant a theme in Warner’s account, it is significant that the Leto Bundle first appears to the reader when it is travelling, in transit at an airport under the watchful eye of ‘Hortense Fernly [who] was a museum curator, the deputy keeper of Classical Antiquities at the National Museum of Albion’ (1).¹¹ The nomenclature of the museum is telling—the use of the name ‘Albion’ suggests an urge to assert a long-standing English identity, a common reaction on the part of those who perceive their society as becoming increasingly multicultural and multilingual. From the start the role of the museum is foregrounded: it becomes increasingly apparent that Warner is asking her readers to think about the ways in which the past is transmitted to us, about who the rightful owners of the past might be, about who the classical past belongs to in the present day. When asked about the bundle she is transporting, Hortense speaks about the difficulties of establishing a stable identity for the bones, and in doing so associates Leto with Helen, and, by extension, with the earliest of classical epics: ‘We’ve always called her “Helen” because the cartonnage—the face mask—is very beautiful. We don’t really know—there are other stories. ¹¹ Warner (2001). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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It’s the sarcophagus she’s buried in that’s the real treasure—and the mask. She’s a bundle of old bandages. But Greek, and very late Greek at that’ (4). In order to give her readers more solid bearings about the provenance of the Leto Bundle, Warner inserts a fragment from a papyrus dated to 350–325 CE, part of the 1841 collection of Sir Giles Skipwith. The careful annotation and recording of such artefacts not only protects them, but reminds us of how astonishing a journey stories and objects from the ancient world have undergone in order to arrive at our present. The inclusion of this fragment also bestows an Ovidian flavour to Leto’s story, as it recounts the protean metamorphoses of Jupiter, swooping to take her: When Leto was flying from her lover, and the god, now man, now dove, now fish, now hawk, was pursuing her, they had skimmed and swooped over the surface of the water together in their long, hard duel, and it was when his strong wings had beaten to enfold her, and his extended neck had gripped her and his soft silken breast had pressed her to the ground under him that she had opened to him; and conceived. (10)

As in Ovid’s version, Leto is the mother of twins—a boy and a girl— Phoebus Apollo and Diana in Ovid, Phoebus and Phoebe in Warner (although they acquire a series of different names in the course of their peregrinations, as we shall see). Once Leto gives birth to her children, she feels that she is undergoing yet another transformation, one that entails an exile from the woman she was before: ‘After the clandestine closeness of the last months inside her, her own hot, tight secret, their new separateness from her gave her a sense of deep exile, of estrangement from her own self ’ (11). In addition to these fragments, Warner intersperses the narrative set in the modern day with extracts of fiction in which she imagines the wanderings and tribulations of Leto. In one of these, Leto joins the ranks of Ovid’s abandoned women, as her lament echoes that voiced by so many of the protagonists in the Heroides: ‘“Why did he let it happen like this?” Leto managed to wail. [ . . . ] “He said he was miserable with his wife and that she never did anything to give him pleasure . . . That’s what he said. The other girls were nothing, he said”’ (29). As well as looking back to the Heroides, Leto’s tawdry, unanswerable complaint aligns her with abandoned women from every generation, beguiled and deceived in exactly the same way. Without stability, without a home, Leto fears that she must be fated to wander the earth endlessly with her children who are equally

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condemned to remain outsiders. ‘I’ll never rest. That’s the curse I bear’, she cries (29). The fact that she is having this conversation with a she-wolf, whose cave she must leave, recalls the myth of Romulus and Remus and underscores the idea that her heart is in Rome, but that Rome can no longer be her home. The she-wolf can offer no help or consolation: ‘That’s a heavy burden.’ The she-wolf was quiet, reflective. ‘If that’s your destiny, to wander until you and your babies are no longer taken for strangers’ (29). Exile, it seems, is to be her lot in whatever circumstances she finds herself, and when she finds herself exiled as an artefact in the National Museum of Albion, it transpires that she also attracts the attention of the lost and dispossessed. As part of her meditation on the ways in which the past is mediated to us, Warner emphasizes the jarring dissonance that a museum environment can impose upon the images and objects housed there. She filters her observation through Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, offering yet another layer of transmission to her narrative, referring to: that Grecian urn, on which the passions of pursuit are stilled and the rule of metamorphosis overturned. Just before the doorway of Room XIX, two maenads were thrashing in ecstasy, tearing a doe limb from limb, their frenzy defying the chill inertia of the Parian marble from which they had been carved. (13)

It is worth noting in passing that the fusion of savage, unbridled passion and cool impassivity is quintessentially Ovidian. The constraints and pressures exerted upon classical reception by a museum’s culture are also examined through Hortense’s obligation to deliver a lunchtime talk on the Leto Bundle. In order to pitch her lecture effectively she has to determine the likely profile of her audience, which raises the question of the demographic for whom these lunchtime talks cater—who are these works for, is there any evidence of any democratization of the classics?¹² But her plans are complicated by the fact that the Leto Bundle appears to be drawing into the museum a different clientele from the usual audience. The earliest signs of this were little notes, left as prayers or homage in front of the Leto Bundle from those who sensed that it might offer ¹² The Museum Director tells her to expect as her lunchtime audience: ‘Lots of women [ . . . ] Females who’re just lost for something to believe in. Some male long-term unemployed and their children. Ex minicab drivers whose cars have been repossessed. First generation failed economic migrants. Second, third generation immigrants. Some in work, but lots of urban flotsam. Single fathers. Kids. No school parties though’ (23).

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protection to refugees and exiles. Hortense listened to her colleague read some of the messages: Her team worker, Eileen, who was nearer home in Enoch than Pilar and could read besides, did so: ‘HOMELESS LADY YOU KIND GIV ME WERK.’ The photograph showed a lady shadowed by a headscarf. [ . . . ] She accepted another scrap from Pilar and read: ‘ “Dear Lady of Scattered People, please find me shelter.” ’ [ . . . ] Someone had also added in lime green highlighter the word ASYLUM.

(15)

In the midst of this crowd, who disturb the museum authorities because they cannot be easily categorized or understood, arrives a young schoolteacher named Kim McQuy, an immigrant from Tirzah and founder of a political activist group known as HSWU, or History Starts With Us. He develops a friendship with Hortense after attending one of her talks, and the two of them engage in an extensive email exchange that largely centres on the significance and relevance of the Leto Bundle. The first talk, the one which fired Kim’s imagination, was one in which Hortense presented Leto as one of the victims of a wider imposition of male authority and dominance, a position which parallels that of countless women throughout history: ‘The site was dedicated to the goddess Leto, who was one of the Titans. The Titans were the rather mysterious giants whose power Zeus and the other Olympians took over, in the case of the Titanesses, usually through rape.’ She departed from her prepared notes at this point, lifted her head, and spoke directly into the darkness of the hall where her audience sat, invisible to her. ‘This is still going on, of course; in wars, everywhere soldiers kill their male enemies and rape the women – leaving them to have their offspring.’ (31)¹³

Leto’s story struck an immediate chord with Kim, who had been driven from the burning city of Tirzah in the 1970s as a child and had come west. Though Warner does not make an explicit allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, it shines through her lines as a palimpsestic presence, so that burning Troy and the refugee Trojans also haunt Kim’s exodus. As well as finding echoes of his story in classical mythology, Kim also finds his story told in episodes from the Bible. When he ‘read the story of Ishmael at his catechism class, he recognized his alter ego’ (49). His identification with such figures underwent constant reinforcement, as he was always alert to indications and signs that, as a refugee, as an immigrant, he could ¹³ Jo Shapcott makes a comparable point in her poem ‘Thetis’, discussed in Chapter 7.

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never be wholly welcomed in Britain: ‘nobody wants more aliens, refugees or immigrants. They don’t want the ones who are already here’ (42). The central principle guiding his life was ‘how to belong somewhere and then stay put’ (45). Not only did Kim learn about the story of Leto, or ‘Helen’ as the National Museum affectionately called her, from Hortense, he was also interviewed about the strange conversation that he claimed had taken place between her virtual image and himself in the dead of night, from which he noted down the lines that he alleged she spoke: ‘So “Helen”, the auncient baebe of the National Museum, spoke to our Kim at 2.30 a.m. last Sunday morning, and this is what she’s supposed to have revealed: “I came from somewhere, but now I’m everywhere— My everywhere is your here and now— I am the angel of the present time.” ’

(41)

The coyly antiquated spelling of ‘auncient baebe’, with its attempts to make a past world appear more glamorous through contamination by contemporary teenage slang, is indicative of the appeal of the ancient world to popular culture. And indeed the interview with Kim provokes amused indignation on the part of one of the newspapers’ readers, the singer-songwriter Gramercy Poule, who contemplates suing him for plagiarism, on the grounds that the lines voiced by Helen are almost the same as lines Gramercy penned in one of her songs. ‘ “It’s my lost peoples song!” She took the paper back and scanned the words again. “Not word for word, exactly. But. Close.” [ . . . ] Gramercy hummed a bluesy bar and then laughed. “What a nerve” ’ (41). The echoing of Gramercy’s song serves not only to emphasize quite how scarred the present day is by collective and individual experiences of loss and exile, but also to remind us of just how many media convey the stories from and references to the ancient world today.¹⁴ The presence of the Leto myth within the contemporary music scene is confirmation of the democratization of the classical world—its allusions and meanings are no longer the exclusive preserve of the public school elite, but belong to us all. It is also, and just as importantly, confirmation of the astonishing powers of survival of this myth, transmitted from the ancient world via ¹⁴ In her 2001 review of the book Alex Clark points out that it could be read as a response to the problems posed by mass migrations.

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the fragments that appear in Warner’s novel, the extracts from the manuscripts that recount Leto’s story. It is appropriate that the story of Leto should appear to us in fragments within The Leto Bundle, as this strategy highlights quite how improbable the survival of her story is. Warner’s novel depicts not just the metamorphosis of one of the many young girls to take the fancy of the gods, but also portrays the metamorphosis of a myth as it travels the centuries, disappearing at times, only to resurface in the most unexpected of places. The variations of Leto’s myth are often indicated by a change of name. When there is a variation of her story in a medieval convent in Cadenas-la-Jolie (in a story read by Kim McQuy at the end of the twentieth century), we see the clash of classical and Biblical cultures dictating the nuns’ decision to change her name: She was called Leto then, for her name in God, Laetitia, was given to her in the Convent, later. Abbess Cecily did not consider Leto, the name of a pagan idol (and one of the savage generations of Titans at that), a suitable name for a little child Deodata, given by God. (109)

Within the different permutations of the myth that appear in The Leto Bundle she appears as Latona, Leto, Laetitia, Helen, and Ella, a chambermaid who steals from Gramercy Poule and eventually ends up in her service in one of the twentieth-century variations of the myth. However, as Kim McQuy points out in one of his lectures, she represents many more people besides: She’s everyone who’s ever been driven from home, who’s been stolen away or beaten out . . . she’s Persephone and dozens and dozens of young women who’ve been raped—not least Europa, you know that story. That victim gave her name to where we live now. She’s Hagar and Mary and . . . well, she’s Leto. (95)

This metamorphosis of the name by which she is known highlights her survival, but also evokes the sheer numbers of the lost and dispossessed in whom she lodges.¹⁵ When Leto appeared in medieval Cadenas-la-Jolie ¹⁵ See Hardie (2002a), 245–6, for an account of the power of naming in Ovid: ‘Names and bodies often come apart in Ovid’s stories of transformation. The word nomen frequently appears in the ‘vocabulary of continuity’, with verbs of preserving and remaining such as servare, manere, inhaerere, restare, tenere, habere. Bodies change, names remain. A metamorphosis may function as an aetiology of the meaning of a common noun, originally the proper name of a person who loses their human body, in a reversal of the actual derivation of a proper name from common noun [ . . . ] The name survives as a

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her plight evoked suspicion and anger: ‘The girl, Leto, isn’t worthy of your love—she’s a schismatic, who came to us as merchandise—not much better than a slave, who speaks no language as a mother tongue, who belongs nowhere. [ . . . ] This woman, Leto, has no history’ (150). These words of one Ser Matteo are, of course, utterly mistaken. Leto’s story belongs to all places, to all languages. She has an extraordinarily long and rich history, as Warner’s novel demonstrates. It’s just that she has no official records to confirm her identity. In this medieval variation of her story she skirts death once again, but even as Warner evokes her lucky escape, she employs language that looks directly back to Gloucester’s observation in King Lear: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ Such impassive cruelty on the part of the gods renders these human victims all the more vulnerable, all the more exposed. Warner concludes her account of this stage of Leto’s survival with the observation that ‘Leto was spared death for herself and for her offspring, but cursed to wander on the face of the earth, one of the fugitives whom the fates cherish even while they are wanton with them, harrying them hither and yon as a cat bats a shrew for sport’ (157). It is unsurprising that Kim, himself a child refugee from the civil war in Tirzah who was adopted by a British family, should respond to the story as it was recounted in this fragment. Not only does he feel an affinity with Leto, but he also uses the story of the Aeneid as a way of structuring his own life story within his mind. The imagery of humans, being batted and shuttled back and forth at the whim of the gods not only looks back to Lear, but also, of course, to the opening lines of the Aeneid, which depict the wrath of Juno. And Kim himself does not know his original name. All he knows is that he acquired the name Kim from the lettering on the buttons of the clothes he was wearing when he was found (374). The coincidence of this lettering allows Warner a name that accommodates both genders, while also enabling a covert allusion to Kipling’s Kim, a classic of British children’s literature, which recounts the survival efforts of an orphaned boy in a culture that is not his own. It is this lettering on the button that convinces Ella that she has found her son. Ella is also a refugee from Tirzah who works as a chambermaid, while attempting to find medical aid for her daughter, who sustained reminder of the person now absent, in the way that tombs preserve the names of those no longer present in body.’

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horrific injuries in a bomb blast. She is also a modern incarnation of Leto, and we learn that ‘Ella’ is not her real name, but simply a generic term for a woman, thrown out at her, stripping her of her name and of her past: At the end of the day, when they’d assess the women’s work, they’d call her out, referring to her as ‘Ella’—simply ‘her’ or ‘that woman’. She did not fight against this new name: ‘Leto’ was outlandish to the locals, and her life in Tirzah felt so cut off from the former sense she had of herself before, that she no longer owned the woman she had been. (255)

Ella’s sense of a lost self is due in part to the loss of her children. After the bomb blast she felt an overpowering need to send her son somewhere safe, somewhere where he could have some hope of a future: ‘Phoebus was the sunnier child, the most winning, irresistible, in fact; he wasn’t damaged like his sister; he would be accepted somewhere where he’d have a better future. There, he would thrive’ (256). ‘Sunny’ is an adjective often used by his mother to describe the boy twin, Phoebus, and is clearly looking back to the original Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun, and offspring of Leto. It is notable that when Ella recognizes her lost child at the end of the twentieth century, she is consumed by a ‘burning’ conviction that she has found her son again: ‘at the first glimpse of Kim McQuy in action, Ella was possessed by a burning raging joyful certainty’ (323). When Kim looks at Ella, he too experiences a jolt, but attributes it simply to a belief that he is responding to an unexpressed plea for help on the part of Ella: ‘Then Kim glances back at the woman, Gramercy’s help, the Tirzahner refugee. She looks like many of the HSWU followers, especially in the way her eyes cling to him: it’s an expression he knows. It’s recognition—that he can help; it’s made up of inextinguishable hope; it’s the look in certain faces that gives him belief that what he does is necessary.’ (374)

Kim McQuy is, of course, aware of the facts of his past—that he was a refugee from the war-torn East, that he is adopted, that he will always be a stranger within his new country. It is, however, other people who see within him the replaying of an ancient story. Once a friendship is established with him, Hortense Fernly marvels at how he ‘had opened up gaps in time¹⁶ she hadn’t known existed’ (328), and discerns within ¹⁶ It is notable that Jeanette Winterson uses this phrase to meditate upon the way in which Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale transcends temporal boundaries. See Winterson (2015).

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him the ghostly outlines of mythical personifications, such as those which people Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘he’d rent the fabric of her daily routine, and erupted through the rent, as if on winged feet, like one of those visual devices that whisper in the ears of black figure paintings on the vases in her care—Persuasion, Fear or Grief taking possession. Or, Seduction’ (328). But it is not just Kim who uncannily houses the ghosts of his former selves; when his twin sister, Phoebe, is maimed in Tirzah, she is bundled up and borne away on a stretcher in a manner that closely resembles the care displayed to the bandaged, still body of the Leto Bundle in the airport at the start of the book: Phoebe was gibbering, shaking as she lay on the road to a kind of hoo-hoo-hoo sound like a lost bird; there was no help to hand, not for a while, not until the paramedics appeared in a freshly marked Peace Front ambulance with the journalists behind them in a dented Mercedes. The team wrapped Phoebe in a shiny foil pupa and laid her on a stretcher in the shade. (253)

Under the rain of molten metal Phoebe metamorphoses into first a bird and then a pupa in a stark reminder of the ways in which war can strip the innocent of their human features. The severity of her disfigurement is such that doctors take an interest in her, and promise the medical miracle of fabricating a new skin for her—further evidence of the ways in which scientific advances have been able to realize some of the Ovidian changes which seemed purely fantastical for centuries: ‘But then the doctor lifted her head and made her a promise: “If I make it through this, I’ll tell people that she’s the child—the child in that photograph of the massacre at Tirinčeva. We’ll make her a new skin” ’ (269). The theme of metamorphosis is not only suggested through this surgical procedure, however; as Phoebe lies whimpering like a wounded bird, her plight aligns her to the quivering mess that Leto becomes as she attempts to escape Zeus’ clutches. Like her twin brother Phoebus, Phoebe opens up gaps in time that allow the earlier versions of the myth to shine through. Leto’s suffering as a mythical character foreshadows Phoebe’s stunned pain in the massacre: now to the leaping salmon she had become as she sprang from him again, blood streaming from her flanks as she flashed into the coastal waters where he could still see her, with his hawk’s eye, flecked against the pebbles, a twisting, squirming banner of gleaming skin and pink flesh exposed where he had mauled her, trailing wisps of blood in her wake. (105)

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Despite Niobe’s curse, despite the fact that Leto is fated to wander eternally with her children, denied rest and security wherever she goes, it appears that in a late twentieth-century Albion she is at last in a place of security with both her children nearby. Her son Phoebus has found a home here as the schoolteacher Kim McQuy. As she marvels at her good fortune in finding him again, she emphasizes the shining quality of his appearance, by calling him ‘glossy’: ‘my glossy boy as long as it is you if it is you it must be you and yes you are thriving you are at home here as I always hoped as I dreamed’ (374). Yet, as any careful reader of Ovid can confirm, the characters cannot outrun their fate and there is to be no peaceful, secure resting place for Ella/Leto. No sooner has she found her son again than she loses him, and the whole cycle of grief, and pain, and desperate wandering must start up again. It is ironic that it should have been Kim who pointed out that Leto’s story fuses with that of Persephone, for Ella is faced once more with the loss of her child. The golden boy, shining Phoebus Apollo, the glossy Kim McQuy faces the most pointless and tawdry and depressingly common of deaths, as he is stabbed in the school playground by a thug. Leto’s last words in the book are voiced by Ella in a section entitled ‘Threnody’: ‘I will look for you again you must be somewhere here one day one of the faces will be you again’ (402). Ella’s lament is the ageless, unchanging cry of bereaved parents—somewhere in the world their child must still exist. It is simply a matter of crossing continents and centuries in order to find them again. Ella’s Threnody closes with a promise to Kim/Phoebus, voiced through an adaptation of the words of Julian of Norwich: ‘you will be well all will be well we shall be well.’ (402) This note of consolation is, however, edged by the fact that Kim’s story is one phase in the continuation of the Leto myth. The modern incarnation of Leto, Ella, is doomed always to be in pursuit of her lost children, always to be running after them. Their metamorphosis across countries and from generation to generation both highlights the impossibility of the challenge facing Leto and, at the same time, testifies to the ongoing miracle of their survival, and so of Ovid’s survival. When Warner addressed the Charter 88 convention she observed that ‘Out of uprootedness, out of unbelonging, artists can create new dwellings with their memory and imagination.’¹⁷ The Leto

¹⁷ Cited in Clark (2001).

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Bundle offers a new home to Ovid in the work of a politically engaged, female novelist and critic at the turn of the millennium. As he shapes her meditations upon literary survival and tradition, she enables him to speak also of the blight of homelessness and the plight of refugees in the modern world. These are themes and concerns which Warner shares with the Japanese writer, Yoko Tawada, who also negotiates myth and contemporary politics, by situating Ovid on the streets of her adopted city of Hamburg, as we shall see in the following chapter.

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3 Yoko Tawada In her chapter ‘The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age’¹ Amy Richlin likens the critic’s challenges of attempting to reconstruct women’s experience within the ancient world to the ethnographer’s excavation of lost worlds within colonized lands. Richlin points out that there are additional difficulties in recovering the experiences of those who had already been marginalized within their native cultures: ‘we have to scramble to find the voices of women, of slaves, and of those who were literally colonized within that world.’ The chapter meditates on the questions posed in 1991 by Sandra Harding and cited by Richlin: what are the feminist assumptions that permit contemporary women to identify with other women across two millennia, across the vast cultural differences between Antigone’s culture and ours, across the class, race, and sexual identity differences between contemporary female feminist readers and the imagined female audiences for those literatures. (286)

Failure to recognize such assumptions risks deadening our ears to any nuances or tones hidden within the echoes of these women’s voices. For classicists the risk is exacerbated by the fact that classical texts are packaged within dense layers of exegesis and commentary, such as the Introductions and footnotes of translations, all of which ‘package’ the ancient world so that it ends up appearing dangerously familiar. Cocooned in this comfortable reading experience, we may glide over our responsibilities both to the texts we are reading and to the society from which we come. Richlin’s comments illustrate the infiltration of third-wave feminism into classical scholarship: As we read Latin and Greek we distance ourselves, muffling the meaning with layers of grammar, commentary and previous scholarship. We skip things. ¹ Richlin (1993).

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I think that is not a responsible or honest way to read, and that reading should be socially responsible; this is one reason classicists need feminist theory—our old way of reading keeps us cut off. As a woman, a feminist, and a scholar, I want to know what relation scholarship can have to social change. The question seems to me to necessitate serious thought about the attitudes we bring to our work—our optimism or pessimism—and their relation to action. (273)

Displacement, a sense of exile, a feeling of dis-ease are all, of course, born of specific circumstances and lend their own distinctive colour to the reading experience, but they all also ward off the ease of familiarity and enable us to approach well-known texts from a fresh perspective. One of the most original responses to, and reworkings of, Ovid in recent years has been Yoko Tawada’s Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen, published in 2000. Tawada (born 1960) is Japanese, but has lived and worked in Germany for over thirty years since her arrival as a graduate student. She writes in both German and Japanese, and her fiction is characterized by its haunting strangeness. The novelist Rivka Galchen observes: Often in Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own. This is, of course, precisely what it feels like to speak in a non-mother tongue. It is also, in fact, often what is happening in Tawada’s stories: in one story a woman seems to be turning into a fish and in another a monk leaps into a pond to embrace his own reflection. But the mythologies mix with more familiar tropes. And often in Tawada’s work, sights or sensations we are accustomed to start to seem like traces of alien stories.²

Tawada’s interest in metamorphosis supports Warner’s observation, already considered, that ‘tales of metamorphosis often arose in spaces (temporal, geographical and mental) that were crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate, connective tissue of communications between cultures’.³ Before analysing the ways in which Tawada blends Ovid’s Metamorphoses with the conventions of The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, the record of female musings and observations kept by a lady-in-waiting in tenth- and eleventh-century Japan, I want to turn to the series of lectures she published in 1998 about metamorphosis. At the very beginning of Verwandlungen: Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen (1998) Tawada depicts the feeling of dislocation that belongs to those inhabiting cultures and languages that are not their own. Forcing oneself ² Galchen (2012).

³ Warner (2002), 17.

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to speak with a voice that is not one’s own provokes the sensations of metamorphosis. The wrong sounds come out of one’s mouth; one’s utterances hang in shaming isolation. This dislocation is especially palpable to those attempting to modulate their voices to the new tones and registers of an alien language: Wenn man in einem fremden Land spricht, schwebt die Stimme merkwürdig isoliert und nackt in der Luft. Es ist, als würde man nicht Wörter, sondern Vögel ausspucken. Manchmal entsteht ein Vogelzwitschern, das tief ins Gehör eindringt, dabei aber unfaßbar bleibt. Dann sucht man nach dem Singvogel, als wollte man eine Bestätigung dafür haben, daß da wirklich eine Stimme war. Man sieht aber nichts außer den dicht gewachsenen Blättern. Wenn man Glück hat, sieht man den Schatten eines wegfliegenden Wesens. Ein seltsames Gefühl beim Sprechen vor fremden Ohren: Die Sätze bilden klare Konturen—was beim Sprechen in der Muttersprache oft nicht der Fall ist-, der Inhalt wirkt konkret und bildhaft, nur die Stimme findet keinen Platz in der Luft. [ . . . ] Was macht man, wenn man von fremden Stimmen umgeben ist? Einige Menschen versuchen bewußt oder unbewußt, ihre Stimme der neuen Umgebung anzupassen. Tonhöhe und Lautstärke werden korrigiert, der neue Sprachrhythmus wird nachgeahmt und auf das Ein- und Ausatmen geachtet. Jeder Konsonant, jeder Vokal und vielleicht auch jedes Komma durchlaufen die Fleischzellen und verwandeln die sprechende Person. (7–8) (If you speak in a foreign country your voice floats through the air and stands out, naked and isolated. It’s as if you’re spitting out birds rather than words. Sometimes birdsong arises and lodges itself deeply into one’s hearing, but remains elusive at the same time. Then you look around for a singing bird, as though you want to double-check that there really was a voice there. But there’s nothing to be seen except the thick foliage. If you’re lucky you’ll see the shadow of something flying away. It’s a curious feeling when you’re speaking in front of foreign ears. The sentences establish clear contours—something that is very often not the case when speaking in one’s mother tongue—the content comes across concretely and vividly. It’s only the voice that has no place in the air. [ . . . ] What do you do when you’re surrounded by foreign voices? Some people try, either consciously or subconsciously, to match their voice to the new environment. Pitch and volume are corrected, the new speech rhythms are absorbed and monitored as you breathe in and out. Every consonant, every word and maybe every comma pervades the cells of your body and transforms the speaking person.)

To operate in an environment in which everyone else is speaking a different language entails a self-consciousness that transforms one’s entire body

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image. Tawada’s imagery emphasizes the loss of control experienced by the speaking subject, the fear of being unable to recall one’s words before errors of intonation or vocabulary can be misinterpreted. By likening the imperfect utterances to birdsong, Tawada both evokes the music and the joy that comes from difference,⁴ while also creating a magical world, a world in which the boundaries separating human beings from animals are far more porous than we may have ever imagined: Die Zunge verwandelte sich in ein Tier, die Lippen wurden immer unsicherer, und die Zähne störten nur noch. Um sprechen zu können, muß man über alle Organe die Kontrolle behalten. Der Mann verlor die Kontrolle, und die einzelnen Körperteile fingen an, ihren eigenen Willen zu behaupten. (10) (Your tongue turned into an animal, your lips became ever more uncertain, and only your teeth still protruded. In order to be able to speak, you have to be in control of all your organs. This control was lost, and the individual body parts began to assert their own wills.)

Such an experience of metamorphosis illustrates the blend of vulnerability and wonder inherent in opening oneself up to a different culture. It is precisely such a blend that characterizes many of the transformations in the Metamorphoses where the loss of a former self can carry the compensation of experiencing the world in an entirely new way. Tawada joins Ovid in forcing us to expand our ideas about the limitations of the human body; imagining human experience outside of the confines of the human body offers insight into our experiences of a world beyond the limits of the safe and familiar: Wenn ich deutsch spreche, komme ich mir manchmal vor wie eine Komponistin, die in einen Wald steht und versucht, die Musik der Vögel zu hören, zu notieren und nachzuahmen.

⁴ It is notable that at the end of Virgile, Non (1985) Monique Wittig’s vision of Paradise birdsong melds with the voices of angels: ‘Toute sorte d’oiseaux traversent les lieux, certains ne faisant que passer, d’autres s’y attardant et s’y ébattant. Il y a des hirondelles, des oiseauxmouches, des geais bleus, des corbeaux, des perdrix, des merles, des pélicans, des mouettes, des cormorans, des grebes, des plongeons, des orfraies, des hérons, des aigrettes. [ . . . ]. Leur concert se joint et s’ajoute à la musique des anges et à leur parler serein (137–8) (All kinds of birds cross the places, some just pass over, others linger and frolic there. There are swallows, hummingbirds, blue jays, crows, partridges, blackbirds, pelicans, gulls, cormorants, grebes, divers, ospreys, herons, egrets. [ . . . ] Their concert blends with and swells the music and the serene speech of the angels) [My translation]. For a discussion of Wittig, see Cox (2011), 181–207.

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Wer mit einer fremden Zunge spricht, ist ein Ornithologe und ein Vogel in einer Person. (22) (Sometimes, if I’m speaking German, it’s as if I’m looking at myself as a composer who’s standing in a wood and attempting to hear, to note down and emulate the birds’ music. Whoever speaks in a foreign tongue is both an ornithologist and a bird.)

Tawada turns to the animal world in order to evoke this experience of strangeness, but also turns to imagery borrowed from landscape. She recognizes her own face as if it is a place: ‘Ich weiß nicht, wie ich von außen aussehe. Von innen aber habe ich mein Gesicht schon oft gesehen: eine schattige Landschaft mit einem sumpfigen Wald und zwei gefrorenen Seen. Außerdem gibt es dort eine Tropfsteinhöhle und zwei Tunnel mit Muscheln im Netz. Ich trete in diese Landschaft ein und verlaufe mich’ (50) (I don’t know what I look like from the outside. But I’ve already often seen my face from the inside: it’s a shadowy landscape with a marshy wood and two frozen lakes. In addition there’s a dripstone cave there, and two tunnels with mussels in the net. I step into this landscape and lose my way). Furthermore, in an attempt to see herself from outside, ‘as others see her’, Tawada imagines herself as a breeze fluttering around her face, exploring its nooks and crevices. Tawada’s descriptions of the efforts entailed in living within a foreign culture offer insight not only into the dislocation entailed by immigration, but also into the imaginative efforts demanded by translation. We shall, of course, be considering these issues when looking at the ways in which Tawada blends her reading of the Metamorphoses with her reading of the The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon and ‘translates’ the characters and conventions of these texts into modern Germany, but in a short meditation within this volume of lectures Tawada offers a graphic realization of the gremlins that dog the translator. In this meditation entitled ‘E-Mail für Japanische Gespenster’ she describes the difficulties of working with a computer programme that enables the scripts for both the German and Japanese languages. The programme has a glitch that suddenly plunges from German to Japanese. Beyond the inevitable frustrations of a computer glitch, Tawada was struck by the image of Japanese ‘ghosts’ hovering behind the German letters. The image highlights the writer’s ultimate lack of control, as her words dance about on screen, delighting in frustrating and thwarting her:

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Als ich zum ersten Mal mit eigenen Augen diese Gespenster sah, waren sie mir unheimlich. Damals verwandelten sich plötzlich deutsche Umlaute in Kombination mit ‘f ’ oder ‘ch’ in Ideogramme. Jubeln, Peinigen und Niesen bedeuteten diese Schriftzeichen, die mitten im Text auftauchten. Es war, als wollten die kleinen Gespenster, die unter der Textoberfläche leben, mich peinigen und dabei jubeln. (41)⁵ (When I came across these ghosts for the first time with my own eyes, I found them eerie. On that occasion German umlauts connected to ‘f ’ or ‘ch’ suddenly metamorphosed into ideograms. This lettering that popped up in the middle of the text meant ‘to rejoice’, ‘to torment’, and ‘to sneeze’. It was as though the little ghosts that live under the surface of the text wanted to torment me, and were exulting in doing so.)

Tawada points out that the eeriness of this phenomenon is heightened by the fact that the writing is on a computer screen, rather than on paper. The computer screen offers an illusion of shimmering depth, which is suggestive of gazing into another, more ghostly, and elusive world: Die Buchstaben auf dem Bildschirm wirken auf mich gespenstischer als eine Pinselschrift auf Papier, denn sie sind da und doch nicht da. Sie sind nur Schatten auf der Oberfläche des elektronischen Wassers oder Erinnerungen an Gegenstände, die einmal im Wasser verlorengegangen sind. Sie haben kein Gewicht und können jetzt hier sein und im nächsten Moment an einem entfernten Ort in einem anderen Computer erscheinen, so wie Geister es können. (42) (The letters on the screen have a ghostlier effect on me than script written on paper, for they are there and yet not there. They are but shadows on the surface of electronic water or memories of objects that once got lost in the water. They are weightless and can be here now and in the very next moment appear in some farflung place on another computer, just as ghosts can.)

These shadows, pregnant with meaning, dance about on the glassy surfaces of the computer screen. They disappear, only to surface on a computer screen on the other side of the world. Tawada reminds us of how fantastical this seems, and the magical qualities lure her back to her memories of Ovid and the Metamorphoses. It is striking that both Tawada and Marie Darrieussecq⁶ focus upon the computer screen as

⁵ Tawada’s italics. ⁶ Darrieussecq (2008): ‘J’ai souvent imaginé son fantôme sur mon épaule, éberlué de me voir à la tâche devant mes outils modernes—et une femme, en plus!’ (18–19) (I’ve often imagined his ghost standing at my shoulder, astonished to see me at work on my modern equipment—especially as I’m a woman!’) [My translation].

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emblematic of the wonder of Ovid’s reception in the contemporary world, while the Romanian Saviana Stanescu gave the title Google Me! to her response to the Tristia. Tawada’s use of water imagery to depict the computer screen combined with the ethereal, disembodied nature of the words leads to a meditation on the myth of Narcissus and Echo in the volume’s final essay, entitled ‘Gesicht eines Fisches oder das Problem der Verwandlung’ (A Fish’s Face or the Problem of Metamorphosis): Hat die Stimme ein Gesicht? Bei dieser Frage fällt mir eine Verwandlungsgeschichte aus den ‘Metamorphosen’ von Ovid ein, in der Echo von Narziß abgelehnt wird und sich in eine Stimme verwandelt. Interessant ist, daß Echo schon vor der Verwandlung als ein unsichtbares Wesen dargestellt wird. [ . . . ] Es geht bei der Verwandlung Echos nicht um eine körperliche Veränderung, sondern eher um die Entstehung der Bedeutung von Echo, wie wir sie heute verwenden. Sie verwandelt sich in einen Begriff und wird auf diese Weise körperlos. In der Geschichte überlebt Echo als eine Stimme. Dagegen verliert Narziß, der sich in sein Spiegelbild verliebt hat, seine Stimme. Beide Figuren haben mit dem Identischen zu tun: Echo ist eine Stimme, die nur das, was eine andere Stimme gesagt hat, wiederholen kann. Und Narziß begehrt das Spiegelbild, das die Wiederholung seines eigenen Körpers ist. (49) (Does one’s voice have a face? When this question occurred to me I thought of a story of transformation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Echo is rejected by Narcissus and is transformed into a voice. It is interesting that even before her transformation Echo is already portrayed as an invisible being. [ . . . ] In the case of Echo’s transformation it’s not a matter of a bodily change, but rather of the genesis of the meaning of Echo, as we understand her today. She was transformed into a concept, and as such became bodiless. In the story Echo survives as a voice. On the other hand Narcissus, who had fallen in love with his reflection, loses his voice. Both figures are connected with what is identical; Echo is a voice which can only repeat what another voice has said. And Narcissus craves the reflection that is a doubling of his own body.)

The world of Narcissus and Echo, this unsettling, ghostly world of multiple images, and fractured repetitions of other people’s words, speaks to Tawada’s own experiences of a Western culture, in which she is attempting to find her footing by learning to speak the language, a process which entails repeating, falteringly, the words of others. In the passage quoted above Tawada indicates that the meaning of Echo’s story changes from generation to generation. We have already seen in this volume how Ali Smith exults in Echo’s new powers in a world that relishes the subversion of classical myth, how Echo’s repetition nuances and shifts the original statement so that it means something completely

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different, how she learns to ‘answer back’. Victoria Rimell points out that this shift in power represents one stage in the story of the reception of Echo and Narcissus, which is characterized by endless power struggles between the sexes.⁷ Tawada extends the potency of the myth by using it to speak of the experience of feeling oneself to be foreign, an experience epitomized by the Japanese ghosts on the computer screen, where the signifiers of one language inexplicably mutate: ‘Wenn ein Buchstabe sich umdreht, wird ein fremdes Gesicht sichtbar.’ (41) (If a letter turns around, an alien face becomes visible). She explores further this feeling of alienation, of being caught between two worlds, in Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen.⁸ In Opium für Ovid Tawada transposes the (predominantly female) characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses onto the streets of modern-day Hamburg. Ceres, Niobe, Leda, and Semele among others appear in the guises of political activists, dancers, competitive swimmers, and hospital patients. While there is an obvious disjunction between the contemporary world and the characters of ancient myth, the title of the book points to an underlying preoccupation with the relationship between East and West also. By blending The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tawada inscribes him directly into feminine experience, but also imports him into the Japanese literary tradition. Tawada’s characters, most of whom bear Ovidian names, also reflect and comment upon the society of which they are part—namely contemporary Germany. From the standpoint of the Western world at the birth of the new millennium Limnaea looks back at the history of the West with its urge to domination and to establish empire: ⁷ Rimell (2006), 9–10: ‘Ovid’s textbook (Ars Amatoria) is littered with traces of the two primordial mirror-myths, Medusa/Perseus and Narcissus/Echo, models which are both interwoven and let loose, so that male and female lovers/artists trade places or play multiple roles. Neat symmetries and chessboard patterns are arranged only to be confounded or messed up, with the result that neither men nor women (artists nor readers, lovers nor rivals) can keep the upper hand for long, and the sexes are propelled into seemingly endless rounds of competition.’ ⁸ Ovid’s history of appealing to writers and artists working at the thresholds or clashing points of cultures is indicated not only by Warner’s observations cited in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, but also by Hermann Fränkel’s seminal work Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (1945). See Hardie (2002a), 328: ‘Malouf shares Hermann Fränkel’s view of Ovid as a poet between two worlds, and his Ovid introduces himself as (19) “born between two cycles of time, the millennium of the old gods that shudders to its end, and a new era that will come to its crisis at some far point in the future I can barely conceive of.” ’

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‘England mußte früher an China sehr viel Geld bezahlen, für den Tee, weißt du. Der Tee ist nichts, was man für Ernährung braucht, aber man kann nicht mehr auf ihn verzichten, wenn man ihn einmal getrunken hat. Das ist Abhängigkeit, nicht wahr? Sehr ärgerlich für das Königreich. Eines Tages gelang es ihm aber, sich durch eine geniale Idee von China zu emanzipieren: England zwang nämlich Indien, Tee zu produzieren, und kaufte ihn für wenig Geld.’ (129)⁹ (‘You see, in the old days England had to pay a great deal to China for tea. While tea is of no nutritional value, once you’ve drunk it you can’t do without it anymore. That’s an addiction, isn’t it. Very tiresome for the realm. But one day he had a brilliant idea which allowed him to emancipate himself from China: in short, England forced India to produce tea and bought it for a small price.’”)

The greed of the Western world was not, however, sated by its control of tea production, as Limnaea discovers: ‘Aber diese Emanzipation reichte noch nicht aus, England wollte sich nicht nur von China befreien, sondern auch China beherrschen. England hatte wieder eine geniale Idee: Wer unter Tee gelitten hat, kann die Teekultur überspitzen und damit zurückschlagen. Das ist beinahe eine postkolonialistische Strategie. Und was wäre die Überspitzung der Teekultur? Die Opiumpolitik! England zwang Indien, Opium zu produzieren und verkaufte es für viel Geld an China. Opium war verdammt teuer und unwiderstehlich. Nur das Opium oder der Kommunismus können ein so großes Land wie China beherrschen.’ (130) (‘But this emancipation didn’t yet go far enough—England didn’t just want to free herself from China, but also to dominate China. England had yet another brilliant idea: whoever has suffered from tea can carry the culture of tea too far and hit back in this way. It’s practically a postmodern strategy. And what would be the result of carrying the culture of tea too far? The opium policy! England coerced India into producing opium and sold it to China at vast expense. Opium was damned expensive and irresistible. Only opium or communism can rule so large a country as China.’”)

By associating Ovid with opium, Tawada is prompting us to reassess the values of the Western world, not only in terms of its imperial ambition, but also in terms of those writers who have achieved canonical status.¹⁰

⁹ Tawada (2000). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text. ¹⁰ See Ziolkowski (2005), 216: ‘The author tells us that her own reasoning is precisely the opposite of Pomona’s: rather than anticipating or denying her pain with drugs, she cultivates it almost greedily and transmutes it into the heady intoxication of art, which in turn becomes her antidote or “opium” against the colonizing power of Ovid whose images tend to creep into her writing like a drug.’

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It is notable that her characters have both literary and literal encounters with thinkers and writers who have meditated upon the power of opium in the Western world. Daphne observes: ‘Daß ich mich von dem Wort “Glück” verabschieden und mich für das Wort “Opium” entscheiden konnte, verdanke ich Karl Marx’ (27) (I thank Karl Marx for the fact that I could say goodbye to the word ‘luck’ and plump for the word ‘Opium’). On the other hand Echo, who is an editor trained to smooth the halfformed, incomplete utterances of others, actually meets De Quincey, author of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821): ‘Echo bringt die junge Frau mit ihrem Blick zum Schweigen und zum Verschwinden. “Erzählen Sie bitte weiter, Herr . . . Wie war Ihr Name, bitte?” “De Quincey. Nennen Sie mich aber einfach Thomas” ’ (176) (With her glance Echo reduces the young woman to silence and makes her disappear. ‘Please tell me again, Sir, what was your name please?’ ‘De Quincey. But just call me Thomas’). Through her character, Pomona, Tawada questions the efficacy and status of the drug in the contemporary world—Pomona refuses to take any more medication for chronic pain, which she chooses instead to alleviate by smoking opium. Her decision parallels the predicament of patients in the contemporary world who choose to break the law by smoking cannabis, since they find it to be the most effective means of dulling their pain. As Pomona justifies her actions, she aligns the side effects of her prescribed medication with the unwanted transformations wrought on unhappy victims in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Wird die eine Tablette meine Haut in Baumrinde verwandeln, werde ich sie durch einen Rausch wieder einweichen. Ein Opium gegen Ovid, mein Opiumkrieg ist noch nicht zu Ende. Wenn der Rausch da ist, braucht man keine zweite Person mehr, die einem sagt, du bist soundso. Man braucht keinen Spiegel mehr. Man sitzt allein, umgeben von nebelartigem Stimmengewölk. Nichts fehlt, nichts treibt. (172–3) (My skin’s changing into treebark because of a tablet?—I’ll steep it again through intoxication. It’s an opium against Ovid and my opium war isn’t over yet. Whenever intoxication is there, you don’t need a second person who says to you, ‘You’re so-and-so. You don’t need a mirror any more. You sit alone, surrounded by nebulous voice people. You want for nothing; nothing’s going on.’)

Tawada’s ‘Ovid’ is an Ovid who speaks of and for the women of the twenty-first century by virtue of being filtered through the words of a female immigrant to the West. At the start of the new millennium Ovid’s

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sway appears to be wider than ever. But the association with opium also serves as a reminder of just how potently Ovid charts the highs and the lows of intoxication, whether this is born of Cupid’s potions, or Juno’s rages or Jupiter’s lusts. In a twist upon the myth of Narcissus Tawada depicts the contemporary addiction and intoxication of internet pornography.¹¹ In her account Juno is an anxious mother, worrying about what it is that her teenage son, Mars, finds to do while locked away in his bedroom all day. She peers through the keyhole into his room, thus establishing a layering of voyeurism. She watches her son who gazes in turn at the images that surface from his computer screen. And beyond all of the characters of this tableau we, the readers, intrude into the scene. As readers of stories involving characters from classical myth we also carry the memories of Diana and Actaeon, so that the dangers and penalties of voyeurism invest this scene also: Eines Abends schaute sie heimlich durch das Schlüsselloch in das Zimmer des Jungen. Der Computerbildschirm leuchtete im dunklen Zimmer gespenstisch auf, Mars saß davor. Iuno sah, wie eine Mädchenhand aus dem Bildschirm herauskam und die Lippen ihres Sohnes streichelte. Mars schmiegte sich an den Bildschirm, da erschienen rote Lippen, Mars küßte sie, die Lippen verwandelten sich in Schamlippen. Man sieht immer nur einen Teil des Körpers, aber nie das Ganze, denkt Iuno enttäuscht, warum gefällt ihm so ein zerstückeltes Mädchen. (197) (One evening she looked secretly through the keyhole into the boy’s room. The computer screen glowed spookily in the dark room. Mars was sitting in front of it. Juno saw how a young girl’s hand came out of the monitor and stroked her son’s lips. Mars snuggled up to the screen, red lips appeared there, Mars kissed them, the lips metamorphosed into labia. You can only ever see part of the body, but never the whole, thinks Juno, disappointed. Why is he attracted to such a disjointed girl?)

It is helpful here to recall Tawada’s critical essay about the Japanese ghosts lurking behind the computer screen as a reminder that, for her, the eerily smooth surface of the computer screen performs the same function as the dangerously still waters of Ovid’s beautiful ponds, from ¹¹ Braidotti’s comments about monstrosity and internet pornography are enlightening here: ‘ “Altered states” are trendsetters: video drugs now compete with the pharmaceutical ones. This cyber-teratology also gives a new twist to the centuries-old connection between the feminine and the monstrous.’ Braidotti (2002), 179. Braidotti is also worried by ‘the globalization of pornography and the prostitution of women and children in a ruthless trade in human life’ (177).

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one of which Narcissus was unable to avert his erotically charged gaze. By showing us Mars as Narcissus, enjoying yet frustrated by the images he conjures up on screen, Tawada expands the resonances of the Narcissus myth by reminding us that the viewing of pornography is, ultimately, a narcissistic experience, in that the images on screen have no depth or reality, but are simply the empty simulacra of projected desire. Juno notes that Mars never looks upon a fully embodied girl, but is only able to stare at individual body parts. The images that surface from the computer screen meet Mars’ desire, even as they kindle it further and leave him frustrated, creating fertile ground for an addiction to pornography. The images are tantalizingly present, yet are ultimately empty and absent. Hardie alerts us to the fact that such a lure has always been a potent charge within the Metamorphoses: ‘Astyages turned to stone is a dreadful warning of the consequences of too intense an identification with a work of art or literature: once inside, you may never escape, a fantasy with a long history in later literature and cinema.’¹² The themes of intoxication, of drugging, that pervade Tawada’s volume comment upon aspects of the contemporary world that have an all too gritty reality. Where the Metamorphoses teem with stories of babies born from unusual body parts, such as Jupiter’s thigh, Tawada offers a twist on this by referring to Juno’s tumour as her fourth child. The metaphor highlights the insidious, pervading quality of tumours—in a ghastly mirroring of the processes of pregnancy, tumours invade and feed off one’s body. As in pregnancy, the tumours also engineer a change in one’s relationship with one’s body and are likely to alter one’s body shape (aspects which Jo Shapcott, in her poetic account of her experience with breast cancer, Of Mutability (2010), also explores¹³): ‘Der Tumor ist Iunos viertes Kind, es will Iunos Körper aber nicht verlassen. Nach der Operation bleibt ein Stück des Kindes in Iunos Bauch, und aus diesem Stück wächst wieder das ganze Kind, diese Amöben, ihnen machen Trennungen und Teilungen nichts aus, diese primitiven Wesen, sie sind unsterblich’ (200) (The tumour is Juno’s fourth child, but it doesn’t want to leave Juno’s body. After the operation a piece of the child stayed in Juno’s belly, and the whole child grew once again from this piece. ¹² Hardie (2002a), 181. ¹³ For a discussion of this see Chapter 7 of this volume, part of which is a reworking of Cox (2012).

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Division and separation have no effect at all on these amoeba. These primitive beings are immortal). That illness is a key theme of Opium für Ovid is indicated in the very first story, the story of Leda, who is struggling to manage her ever-increasing incapacity due to the paralysis she experiences in both arms which are, of course, no longer human arms but the wings of a swan. Tawada draws on Leda’s fantastical experience to comment satirically upon the sorts of laws that govern rights to healthcare in the Western world: Das neue, umstrittene Gesetz sei gestern verabschiedet worden: die Krankenkasse müsse nicht mehr die Kosten für medizinische Behandlungen des Unterleibs übernehmen. Ein Spezialist für soziale Wandlungen sagte im Radio, in Zukunft würden öfter Transplantationen vorkommen, bei denen Unterleibsorgane auf den Oberleib übertragen würden. (9) (The new controversial law was passed yesterday: health insurers are no longer to take on the costs for medical treatment of the lower body. An expert in social change was saying on the radio that in the future it would be more common for the organs of the lower body to be grafted onto the upper body.)

While Leda’s predicament is fantastical and the law that is to affect her so badly is plainly ludicrous, its absurdity is nevertheless uncomfortably close to the extreme measures taken by many Western governments to limit their spending on healthcare, with the result that the most vulnerable are all too often liable to see the necessary help being withdrawn.¹⁴ Leda works illegally as a chemist which is how she comes into contact with Galanthis, whose request once again betrays a regime that is determined to punish the indigent: ‘Ich möchte nur eine Bestätigung für meine Sehkraft haben, die Behörde verlangt das von allen Arbeitslosen’ (22) (I just want a certificate confirming the strength of my vision. The authorities are demanding it from anyone who is out of work). The observations and commentary that Tawada provides about the contemporary world not only look back to the musings of The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon but also chime with the third-wave agenda of heightening awareness about the social issues that can have a devastating impact upon the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, as Tawada muses upon the reasons for crime in the very first section of Opium für Ovid, she establishes the differences between crime born of desperation and crime that is the result of financial greed. She thus anticipates one of the tensions that characterised the financial ¹⁴ See Chapter 1 for Ali Smith’s presentation of the ‘postcode lottery’ system of drug availability within the UK’s National Health Service.

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crisis of 2008, an episode that also features in Shapcott’s and Curdy’s responses to Ovid:¹⁵ ‘aus der Zeitung springt ein Bericht über das Anwachsen der Kriminalität. Die Armut soll der Grund für das Verbrechen sein, obwohl es doch so viele kriminelle Bankiers und Politiker gibt’(15) (from the paper leaps out a report about increased crime rates. Poverty would appear to be the reason for crime, even though there are so many criminal bankers and politicians). In an imaginative and witty twist Tawada also alerts us to the power of drugs to achieve the kinds of metamorphoses that were once the exclusive preserve of Ovid’s fantastical world. In Tawada’s hands Salmacis appears as a professional competitive swimmer who has been accused of abusing drugs in order to improve her performance in the water. Tawada remains true to the spirit of Ovid’s version, by emphasizing the ambiguity of Salmacis’ gender. Where once the nymph Salmacis raped the beautiful young Hermaphroditus by blending her female body with his, thus creating a being that was both male and female, Tawada’s Salmacis defends her altered shape to her judges by claiming that prolonged contact with the water while training had changed her from man to woman: Die verdächtigte dreiundzwanzigjährige Schwimmerin erzählte vor Gericht, sie habe keine Hormonspritze bekommen, sondern sei in Wirklichkeit ein Mann, der sich nach und nach in eine Frau verwandelt habe. Diese Verwandlung sei aufgrund des langjährigen, intensiven Kontakts mit Wasser passiert. (76) The 23-year-old swimmer who was under suspicion explained to the tribunal that she had not taken hormones, but was in reality a man who had, little by little, turned into a woman. This transformation had happened as a result of long years of intensive contact with water.

Those who hear Salmacis’ fantastical excuses are divided between horror and laughing at her; the fact that the cheating is blamed on communism, however, gestures at the divisions that have scarred Germany’s recent history. These divisions in Germany’s history surface in Tawada’s reworking of the character of Thisbe, now a hairdresser who listens attentively to her clients’ stories, which she, in turn, circulates. Tawada expands Shakespeare’s presentation of Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Thisbe represents the hole in the wall with her hand—Thisbe the hairdresser

¹⁵ See Chapters 7 and 9 respectively.

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comes to embody the crack in the wall that enables glimpses into other worlds, into the lives of others: Wenn es gewünscht wird, erzählt auch Thisbe, sie erzählt selten etwas aus ihrem Leben, sondern Anekdoten, die sie von anderen Kunden gehört hat. Thisbe gleicht einem Schlitz in der Wand. Die Menschen auf den beiden Seiten der Wand wollen nicht miteinander reden, sie wollen sich auch nicht kennenlernen, aber durch den Schlitz, der Thisbe heißt, wächst die Neugierde für die andere Seite. (184–5) (When people want her to, Thisbe also tells stories. She doesn’t often tell stories from her own life, but anecdotes that she has heard from other clients. Thisbe resembles a gap in the wall. The people on both sides of the wall have no wish to talk to each other, they don’t want to get to know each other, but through the gap that is called Thisbe, curiosity about the other side grows stronger.)

One of the customers who experiences a particularly acute feeling of isolation is Iphis. In the Metamorphoses Iphis is born female, raised as a boy who falls in love with another girl, and miraculously becomes male in time for his wedding.¹⁶ In Tawada’s account, Iphis assumes a male appearance on returning one day from the hairdressers with newly cropped hair: ‘Iphis geht mit frech abstehenden Haaren nach Hause. Sie entfernt ihren zierlichen Ohring vom Ohr, schminkt sich ab, zieht die Nylonstrümpfe aus und stellt sich vor den Spiegel. “Habe ich immer noch iregendetwas zu viel, oder bin ich endlich ein Mann geworden?” ’ (184) (Iphis goes home with her new spiky hairdo. She takes her dainty earrings out of her ears, removes her make-up, pulls her nylon stockings off, and plants herself in front of the mirror. ‘Do I still have something too much, or have I at last become a man?’). In this new form Iphis wanders the streets, confusion over the question of gender manifesting itself in a quandary about which pronouns are most suitable: ‘Außerdem kann sie nicht mehr “ich” sagen, denn, wenn sie “ich” sagt, weiß man nicht, welche Person damit gemeint ist. Die von früher oder die von heute? Stattdessen bezeichnet sie die frühere Person als “sie” und die heutige als “er” ’ (186) (What’s more I can’t say ‘I’ anymore, because if I say ‘I’, people don’t know which person is meant by this. The one from earlier or the one from today? Instead of this she signifies the earlier person as ‘she’ and today’s person as ‘he’). This disorientation on the ¹⁶ The most compelling retelling of the myth in recent times is Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007).

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streets is reminiscent of Tawada’s account of attempting to establish communication in a foreign culture and to speak a foreign tongue. Once again Tawada blends contemporary issues with ancient myth, as she addresses the difficulties of connecting with the other, through her depiction of Iphis’ reaction to a woman wearing a headscarf. Iphis feels affronted by the subliminal message of self-containment that the headscarf conveys: ‘Er ist beleidigt, weil er ihre Haare nicht sehen kann. Er will gar nicht wissen, wie diese Frau aussieht, aber das Gefühl, daß er nicht alles sehen darf, beleidigt ihn. Ich brauche deinen Blick nicht! Das ist die Aussage des Kopftuches [ . . . ] Er kann diese Frau nicht einfach gehen lassen. Die Frau versteht scheinbar seine Sprache nicht. Er fühlt sich noch stärker abgelehnt und hilflos, er schimpft mit ihr, aber sie reagiert nicht’ (187) (He is insulted because he can’t see her hair. He doesn’t want to know at all what this woman looks like, but the feeling that he may not see everything is insulting to him. ‘I don’t need you to look at me.’ That’s what the headscarf is saying. [ . . . ] He can’t just let this woman go. Apparently the woman can’t understand his language. He feels even more rejected and helpless. He bitches at her, but she doesn’t react). It is striking that Iphis’ frustration is particularly painful when the veiled lady appears incapable of understanding what he is trying to say. As Iphis’ story unfolds we discover that his feelings of dislocation and rejection stem not only from uncertainty about his new gender, but also from a childhood spent as a young girl in a refugee camp. He remembers confusion about the reasons why the other children instinctively rejected her, and wonders whether it was the diffidence that manifested itself in the way that she spoke. Once more Tawada’s sensitivity to the difficulties of correctly modulating an acquired language comes to the fore: Die Kindheit im Flüchtlingslager. Die verwaschenen Kleider waren nicht das, was die anderen Kinder abschreckend an ihr fanden, es war etwas Unsichtbares, vielleicht die Unsicherheit in ihrer Stimme oder bloße Gerüchte über ihre Familie. Die Mädchen spielten nicht mit ihr, die Jungen spuckten ihr gelengentlich freche Bemerkungen ins Gesicht, manchmal hauten sie sie. (189) (Childhood in the refugee camp. It wasn’t the faded clothes that the other children found repellent about her, it was something invisible, perhaps the uncertainty in her voice or the empty rumours about her family. The girls didn’t play with her, and the boys occasionally spat cheeky remarks in her face. Sometimes they hit her.)

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The myth that Ali Smith describes as one of Ovid’s cheeriest becomes one of the darker stories in Tawada’s volume, after it has been brought into contact with a regime that fosters suspicion of immigrants, of those belonging to alien cultures. Time and again the newspapers remind ordinary citizens that their health and wealth is under constant threat from those seeking to find a better life for themselves and their families: ‘Es sei unhygienisch, rohes Gemüse einzukaufen, denn die nackten Hände der Flüchtlinge hätten es angefaßt, hieß es in der Zeitung’(164) (It says in the paper that it’s unhygienic to buy raw vegetables, because refugees have picked them up in their bare hands and fingered them). One of the most shocking instances of the hatred propagated by the press is when the paper doll, Thetis, comes to life as a real dancer, still tattooed with the slogans of the newspaper out of which she had been cut by Salmacis; ‘Die Tänzerin dreht sich um, auf ihrem Rücken steht ein Leserbrief geschrieben: “Warum sollten wir die Schulden der dritten Welt übernehmen?”’ (115) (The dancer spins round: on her back a reader’s letter is printed: ‘Why should we shoulder the third world’s debts?’). In the book Leto (the personification of the plight of the eternal refugee in Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle, as we saw in the previous chapter) appears as Latona, who muses upon Germany’s relationship with the East in the courses that she follows in higher education. She becomes enraged by the way in which she perceives Germany as willing only to understand other cultures in relation to the image that it wishes to create of itself: ‘In der Zeitung lese ich, daß der Tibetanische Buddhismus eine Folge der deutschen Wiedervereinigung sei’ (41) (I read in the paper that Tibetan Buddism was a consequence of German reunification). She sees a Germany that interprets the impassive features of Tibetan faces as a blank canvas onto which can be painted Western ambitions, through which Western guilt can be assuaged: ‘Diejenigen, die sich in ihren politischen Aktivitäten bisher immer mit den Opfern des zweiten Weltkrieges identifiziert hatten, schlüpften jetzt in die Gestalt der Tibetaner. Sie sagten: In der Peking-Oper wurde immer eine Maske getragen, auf die wir unsere Hoffnungen malten, die nackten Gesichter der Tibetaner sind uns doch lieber, wir werden sie retten’ (41) (These same people, who until now had always identified with the victims of the Second World War in their political activities, were now slipping into the guise of the Tibetan. They said: ‘In Peking Opera a mask

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would always be worn, on which we depicted our hopes. The bare faces of the Tibetans are all the more precious to us. We will rescue them’). However, despite Tawada’s use of Ovid in her appraisal and depiction of contemporary German society, she never loses sight of the importance of the dreamlike qualities that his characters and myths bestow upon her narrative. In this world of the fantastic, a world of magical realism that is grounded in contemporary reality, sleep and the gifts of sleep are of great significance. Of course sleep is inextricably connected to opium, and by extension to the world of intoxication, of magical dreaming, of possibility which is the world promised by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The boundaries of the self are loosened by sleep, enabling us to become anything or anyone. Even before Salmacis changes gender through contact with water, she realizes that gender is fluid and shifting in sleep: ‘ “Wie kann man was verändern, wenn man schläft?” “Ich bin eine schlafende Revolutionärin, daher glaube ich: nur im Schlaf gibt es Veränderungen. Man sagt, jeder Mensch sei im Schlaf androgyn” ’ (71) (How can you change anything when you’re asleep? I’m a sleeping revolutionary—hence I believe: only in sleep is there change. People say that in sleep everyone is androgynous’).¹⁷ It is notable that through Salmacis Tawada is once again emphasizing the importance of social change, and the role that these new versions of Ovid’s characters play in engineering such change. Yet this active role is never wholly divorced from the importance of dreaming, the significance of night-time narratives for the characters. Indeed, Salmacis’ observations suggest that the magical nocturnal stories fertilize the characters’ capacity for social change. Tawada shows us Thetis discovering the Metamorphoses by night. Such a discovery entails Thetis reading the ¹⁷ Nobody describes the fluidity of the self in sleep more powerfully than Proust (1999): ‘Quelquefois, comme Ève naquit d’une côte d’Adam, une femme naissait pendant mon sommeil d’une fausse position de ma cuisse. Formée du plaisir que j’étais sur le point de goûter, je m’imaginais que c’était elle qui me l’offrait. Mon corps qui sentait dans le sien ma propre chaleur voulait s’y rejoindre, je m’éveillais. Le reste des humains m’apparaissait comme bien lointain auprès de cette femme que j’avais quittée il y avait quelques moments à peine; ma joue était chaude encore de son baiser, mon corps courbaturé par le poids de sa taille’ (14) (Sometimes, just as Eve came into being from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from my thigh lying in an awkward position. Shaped by the pleasure I was about to taste, I fancied that it was she who was offering it to me. My body which felt its own warmth in hers wanted to join her there; I was waking up. The rest of humanity seemed far distant from that woman that I had left just a few moments ago. My cheek was still glowing from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of her form) [My translation].

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tales of the mythical mothers who are the prototypes of her and her circle of friends: Einmal lag Thetis im Bett ihrer Freundin Io und wartete auf sie. Io wollte um neun Uhr zurückkommen, und dann wollten sie gemeinsam ins Kino gehen. Neben dem Bett lag ein Buch. Thetis begann unwillkürlich darin zu lesen und konnte nicht mehr aufhören, zu lesen. Io kam in der Nacht nicht zurück, sie kam am nächsten Morgen um zehn Uhr zurück, entschuldigte sich. Sie habe eine Nacht lang mit einem Philosophen gestritten und die letzte S-Bahn verpaßt. Thetis ging fröhlich nach Hause. Als Thetis von ihrem ältesten Bruder gefragt wurde, warum ihre Augen so geschwollen seien, antwortete sie, sie habe sich mit ihrer Freundin Io gestritten und die ganze Nacht geweint. Kein Mensch sollte erfahren, daß sie in dieser Nacht die ‘Metamorphosen’ von den ersten bin [sic] zur letzten Seite gelesen hatte. (121) (Once Thetis lay in the bed of her friend, Io, and waited for her. Io wanted to come back at nine, and then they wanted to go to the cinema together. A book was lying near the bed. Thetis began to read it almost involuntarily and then could not stop reading. Io didn’t come back that night; she came back the next morning at 10 o’clock and apologised. She’d spent the whole night long arguing with a philosopher and had missed the last train. Thetis went home happily. When she was asked by her eldest brother why her eyes were so swollen, she answered that she had quarrelled with her friend Io and cried all night long. Nobody must find out that she had read that night the Metamorphoses from the first to the last line.)

The girls who are portrayed in this scenario delight in ideas, in literature. Io misses the last train home because she is engaged in heated debate with a philosopher; Thetis reads the whole of the Metamorphoses in one night, an experience which fills her with happiness as she goes home. That she feels the need to lie about what she has been doing evokes the Metamorphoses’ fraught literary history, its potential to subvert and to corrupt, an aspect which is widely believed to have contributed to Ovid’s exile. However, the fact that Thetis is questioned by her elder brother is also a reminder that there are still many households in which girls are answerable to the males of the family, and in which the education of girls is frowned upon. Thetis is aware of her transgression; the Metamorphoses is a deliciously illicit secret that she is unable to resist. In true Ovidian style, however, she is caught and punished, and the punishment fits the crime—her body becomes inextricably bound to the book she is reading. Not only can she can no longer conceal the fact that she was reading, but she becomes the book that she was reading. And that book was, of course, the Metamorphoses, of which she was already a written part.

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The fate of Tawada’s Thetis proves that the power of Ovid’s Metamorphoses cannot be safely contained within the pages of his book: Jedes Buch eine Mausefalle. Eine Maus, eine leidenschaftliche Leserin. Am Abend entdeckte Thetis ein dickes Buch auf ihrem Schreibtisch. Wer hatte es dort hingelegt? Es war aufgeschlagen, sie sah dichte Schriftzüge auf vergilbtem Papier. Thetis beugte sich über das geöffnete Buch und legte ihre Finger darauf. In dem Moment klappte die Falle zu. Thetis schrie vor Schmerzen, versuchte ihre Finger herauszuziehen, aber das Buch war schon mit ihrer linken Hand verwachsen. Sie konnte nicht mehr verheimlichen, daß sie las. (122) (Every book is a mousetrap. A mouse, an impassioned woman reader. In the evening Thetis found a thick book on her desk. Who had left it there? It was open; she saw sweeping handwriting on yellowing paper. Thetis bent over the open book and laid a finger on it. In that moment the trap snapped shut. Thetis screamed in pain and tried to pull her finger out but the book had already become one with her left hand. She couldn’t keep it a secret any longer that she was a reader.)

Thetis ends up as a failed Scheherezade. Instead of being able to harness the magical power of stories in order to hold back the darkness, she instead becomes a victim of the stories’ enchantments. The figure of Scheherezade ghosts the final scene of the volume, a scene that acts as a pendant to Thetis’ discovery of the Metamorphoses, which occurs exactly halfway through the volume. The evocation of Scheherezade offers a further instance of East meeting West. The book closes with Diana unable to withstand the lure of sleep, a place where, in Tawada’s world, she will be vulnerable to metamorphosis. Tawada uses the image of a boat transporting Diana to a world of dreams, a world of stories:¹⁸ Bald bemerkt Diana, daß sie dem Sog des Schlafes nicht mehr widerstehen kann. In zwei Minuten wird der Vorhang fallen. Sie wird nicht dabei sein, wenn der Höhepunkt kommt. Bewußtlos wird sie in einem Boot an das Ufer des nächsten Morgens getragen. Aber eines Tages, denkt Diana im Halbschlaf, werde ich wachbleiben dürfen. Ich werde so lange lesen, wie ich will, ich werde lesen, durch die Nächte hindurch, und die Nächte werden immer länger und länger, sie werden so lang, daß ich nie wieder aufstehen muß. (218)

¹⁸ Such imagery recalls Michèle Roberts’s exultant story of women reclaiming biblical stories and classical myth for themselves, as Mrs Noah and her band of Sibyls sail away in their own Ark to a land of female-authored narratives in The Ark of Mrs Noah. See Chapter 10 of this volume, as well as Cox (2011).

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(Soon Diana noticed that she was no longer able to withstand the pull of sleep. In two minutes the curtain would fall. She wouldn’t be around, when the high point happened. She would be being borne, unwittingly, on a boat to the harbour of the next morning. But one day, Diana thought in her half-sleep, I’ll be able to stay awake. I’ll read as long as I want to. I’ll read all through the nights, and the nights will grow longer and longer. They’ll end up so long that I’ll never have to get up again.)

Sleep releases us from habit, from learned gender roles and so enables us to rewrite and to reshape the stories by which we have been formed. As Diana hugs herself, glorying in a world where the stories never end, where she will never have to get up, she is confirming Ovid’s assertion that his poem was a ‘carmen perpetuum’, whose influence will continue to hold sway and to shape our responses to the world around us. Tawada’s concerns about the immigrant’s experience, about refugees, about pornography and about gender roles contribute to a refashioning of an Ovid who speaks for the third millennium. The following chapter will show us how the work of the British gardener, poet, and classicist, Alice Oswald, also energizes the currents of Ovid’s verse through her poem about a Devon river, Dart.

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4 Alice Oswald In his seminal book Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion Philip Hardie analyses the lessons that Ovid teaches us about how to interpret art and literature, about learning to appreciate the artist’s craft, while also allowing ourselves to be enchanted by the magical world which the artist unfolds for us. The more we appreciate the plenitude of meanings housed within myths, and the different nuances cast upon these meanings by centuries of different receptions, the more we risk distancing ourselves from the raw, emotional punch that Ovid’s lines can deliver. To think about the way in which the myth of Proserpina has been appropriated by Milton and by Shakespeare is intellectually enriching, but may distract us from empathizing with Ceres’ blind panic and her urgent need to stop the world until her lost daughter can return, to freeze time by enclosing the world within winter. Hardie offers us a beautiful statement about the poet’s power, as he examines the myth of Orpheus. The myth of Orpheus, of course, teaches us about grief, about absences that are all too painfully present. But Hardie reminds us of an aspect of the myth that is all too easily overlooked—Orpheus, the archetypal poet, is able to invest his world with such magic that the external features of his world are seduced by him and belong to his song: In obvious ways the story of the sculptor Pygmalion reflects on the erotic experiences and artistic power of the poet Orpheus, who was able once, although not for a second time, to restore to living presence an object of desire absent through death, but who is still able through his song to animate trees and rocks, thus creating an audience who have no need to suspend disbelief in tales of metamorphosis into plant form or of hard matter given life, since their own consciousness is proof of the reality of such events.¹

¹ Hardie (2002a), 188.

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It is just such an experience, the encountering of living myth within the natural world, that the poet Alice Oswald seeks to convey in her booklength poem, Dart. Oswald, who learned both Latin and Greek at school, and who went on to read Classics at Oxford, describes herself as ‘haunted by classical myth’.² In recent years her relationship with the classics has received especial scrutiny through her response to war and to the Iliad, which was published as Memorial.³ She described this enterprise as an ‘excavation’ of the Iliad; the term suggests bringing to light those elements of the Iliad that have been overlooked or ignored. For Oswald this entails wresting Homer away from being the preserve of publicschool educated boys, and offering a more nuanced reading than one that simply glorifies war and nation. She meticulously voices the names of all Homer’s lost soldiers, offers us a snapshot of their family lives and where they come from, and details their mortal injuries in chilling detail, in the conviction that they, too, deserve to be remembered, just as much as Achilles or Hector. Oswald’s relationship with Ovid, however, predates her encounter with Homer. She first came across Ovid through Latin lessons at school, and was immediately captivated by his ability to evoke what it felt like to be outside. This relationship was consolidated in later years when, having left Oxford, Oswald worked as a professional gardener: Oh I love Ovid. I really love Ovid. I worked for a long time as a gardener and I read a lot of Ovid then. It somehow felt really appropriate to watching things grow. And I don’t just love Ovid, I believe it. I do somehow think of humans and animals as interchangeable and sharing each other’s consciousness. [ . . . ] I wouldn’t even use the word personification. I think it’s natural if you want to look at something that takes on board what it is rather than just projecting what you think it is. It’s not that you personify it, it’s that you come halfway to meet it, and the meeting ground might be a water nymph, as it were, but that doesn’t really mean you’re personifying the river. That means that you’re finding a common place where you and the river can communicate. I think there’s a real difference. People tend to feel that it’s very literary, this idea of metamorphosis, or gods, or nymphs, or whatever, but actually I think if you spend a lot of time outside you just do encounter things in a way that’s somewhere between the human and what they are. And it feels very real; it’s not something that’s problematic or literary or self-conscious.⁴

² Oswald (2013).

³ Oswald (2011).

⁴ Oswald (2013).

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The fact that in Ovid we are approaching a highly crafted, heavily allusive literary text means that we are likely to depict its effects in language that is academically formal and that risks stifling the freshness and vibrancy of Ovid’s poetic vision. In Poetry and Metamorphosis Charles Tomlinson offers a cogent account of the unifying features of the world of the Metamorphoses: ‘I take it that the wisdom of the Metamorphoses inheres in its imaginative vision of a world where all things are interrelated, where flesh and blood are near kin to soil and river, where man and animal share common instincts, where vegetarianism is poetically the only defensible philosophy of life.’⁵ However, if we turn to the work of another gardener we are offered further instances of the ways in which familiarity with the outside world kindles an appreciation of Ovid’s abiding vitality within the natural world. In her account of tending a stately home and its gardens Katherine Swift illustrates how Ovid’s myths tumble through her mind as she voices the botanical names of the plants she is dealing with: Daphne, fleeing in panic and terror, pursued by Apollo, becomes a laurel (Laurus nobilis, the bay tree), wreathing the brows of victors. Philomela, raped by Tereus, her tongue ripped out so that she cannot tell of the deed, is transformed into a nightingale, filling the forest with her song. Her avenging sister Procne, dabbled with blood, becomes a swallow. Cyparissus, distraught with grief at accidentally having killed a sacred stag, becomes a cypress tree, the emblem of grief. (His story survives in the botanical nomenclature of the genus that bears his name— Chamaecyparis, the dwarf cypresses—though Daphne has found herself reclassified into a genus of flowering shrubs.)⁶

Swift reveals herself to be a careful student of Ovid; she understands that his myths explain how the world has come to be as it is, that his world offers an exposition of human passions at their most extreme and intolerable. She explains that her appreciation of Ovid is coloured by her reading of Ted Hughes: ‘These are ancient tales which seek to explain how the world came to be as it is—how the swallow got its red throat, why the daffodil nods its head. In Ovid’s hands they become, as Ted Hughes observes in the preface to his own version of the Metamorphoses, explorations of human emotion pushed to its utter limit, the moment when passion “combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of

⁵ Tomlinson (2003), 101.

⁶ Swift (2008), 262.

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the supernatural.” ’⁷ But for Swift Ovid represents more than this; for her, as for Oswald, the world of the Metamorphoses is to be found not just in the pages of a book but as a living reality in the world around us and within us: ‘But they (the ancient tales) are also about the permeability of the human world by the natural world: how, in the extremes of passion or grief or terror, the boundary between humankind and nature dissolves, becomes transcendable. They are affirmations of our relationship with the natural world. Shooting stars, trees, birds. The wild is in us, and we are in the wild.’⁸ In Oswald’s case, this wild is located in Devon; given that she experiences the natural world through Ovid, the Devon landscape that she depicts is both England and the world of the Metamorphoses. She establishes the principle of plurality with the epigraph that she chooses for the book, which is a citation from Ivan Illyich: ‘water always comes with an ego and an alter ego.’ We might read this as suggesting that the Dart is both the river flowing through Devon and a mythical river coursing its way down from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to flow through Oswald’s imaginative response. Ovid’s rivers, which have their own narrating selves, run through Oswald’s poetic veins. Rimell reminds us that rivers in Ovid are frequently sites of sexual conflict,⁹ and of sexual anxiety.¹⁰ They are places where both men and women are raped. They are also places where gender roles become far

⁷ Swift (2008), 262. ⁸ Swift (2008), 262. See also Bate (1993), 217–18: ‘It is no coincidence that near the climax of the poem Ovid includes the discourse of Pythagoras, who speaks in favour of vegetarianism and against blood sports: metamorphosis anthropomorphizes nature—each animal, each tree, each stream has a human history—and thus demands an empathy between humankind and nature.’ ⁹ Rimell (2006), 186: ‘Throughout Ovidian poetry, famous rivers (Inachus, Xanthus, Alpheus, the Nile, the Tiber) are predatory males whose waters ravage vulnerable women (in Am 3.6, for example, after being seduced by Anio Ilia was so ashamed that she had broken her vows as a vestal virgin that she lifted up her dress and hurled herself suicidally into the river, the equivalent of yielding to her rapist, who “bedded her as his wife”). To get across the strait involves sailing or swimming, both much used figures both for Ovid’s poetic projects in Amores and the Ars Amatoria especially, and for seduction or sexual relationships.’ ¹⁰ Rimell (2006), 187: ‘In Latin literature, water is not just arousing, but potentially sexually threatening to men—we need only think of the complementary tales of Narcissus and Hermaphroditus in the Metamorphoses (“quisquis in hos fontes vir venerit, exeat inde / semivir” Met 4. 385–6 [whoever enters this pool as man, may he go forth half-man]).’

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more fluid and blurred, so that one might also read the ‘ego’ and ‘alter ego’ as representing a male voice and a female voice, and appreciate that these might coexist within the same person. One of Ovid’s most famous river myths, after all, is the story of Salmacis, the origin of the hermaphrodite, a story which Oswald inscribes into her own river song: ‘I could sing the welded kiss / continuous of Salmacis’ (12).¹¹ Oswald’s river song, voiced by herself, also carries the echoes of male-authored poems so that the identity of the river itself belongs to both genders. This is illustrated still further by the fact that Oswald emphasizes that all echoes, all voices, must be heard by the reader as being spoken by the river. As well as allusions to other poets, Oswald includes fragments of recordings she has made of locals who frequent the river, or who still gain a living from it. The song of the river is overlaid by local accents and patterns of speech, locutions that are both contemporary and regional. As Oswald describes her project she uses the term ‘songline’, a word that leads us to Australia and to the Aboriginal practice of mapping out the landscape by the songs that were created by their ancestors during the Dreamtime. In the front matter of the book she observes: I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters—linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.

By blending highly poetic allusions with the utterances of local inhabitants, Oswald ensures that the poetry on which she draws is unable to remain a ‘fixed fiction’. At the same time she evokes the Ovidian rivers which shelter and tell the stories of others, such as Achelous who appears in Metamorphoses VIII and IX. The poem opens with an image of ‘frogs singing in the new year’, an image that both vividly evokes the natural world, and reminds us of the turning of the seasons. This conjunction is highly reminiscent of Virgil’s Georgics. Almost immediately, however, Oswald introduces a human figure into the landscape:

¹¹ Oswald (2002). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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This must be the stones, the sudden movement, the sound of frogs singing in the new year, Who’s this issuing from the earth? [ . . . ] I’ve done all the walks, the Two Moors Way, the Tors, this long winding line the Dart

(1)

The narrative voice almost seems to belong to the human figure in the second stanza, who charts an attempt to claim and control the natural world by tracking it. But the ludicrous nature of such an enterprise is revealed by a reminder of the age of a river that has been flowing since the beginning of sound. The efforts of a person, whose lifespan is infinitesimal in comparison, to appropriate the landscape are futile, and the futility of the enterprise emphasizes the smallness of a human life when pitted against the landscape of Dartmoor. As Dart progresses it is a Devonian landscape, an English landscape, that unfolds before our eyes. Every so often Oswald, or her interlocutors from the Dart, name the places through which it travels. The lists possess their own brand of poetry, the vividness of place names, but also evoke the list-making that is an intrinsic feature of ancient epic: ‘meanwhile the West Dart pours through / Crow Tor Fox Holes / Longaford Beardown and Wystman’s Wood’ (9). We hear the speech patterns of those who belong to this world, whose sense of being is affirmed by their relationship with the natural world: ‘What I love is one foot in front of another, South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out’ (2). Oswald charts the shifts in narrative voice between those speaking the river’s course by indications in the margin. We see the river from the point of view of the stonewaller, the ferryman, the dreamer, and the dairy worker, among others. It is in the margins also that Oswald includes helpful comments that clarify these people’s relationship with the river, such as ‘the Woollen mill has a license to extract the river water for washing the wool and for making up dyes’ (19). Within Oswald’s poem the echoes caught in the bowl of the moor include the literary and cultural echoes that shape her relationship with the Dart, and it is striking how many of these, too, convey a sense of Englishness through being strongly associated with the national tradition.¹² In one of the ¹² Deryn Rees-Jones sees parallels between Oswald’s project and Ted Hughes’s volume, Rivers. The comparison is highly suggestive, given Hughes’s own interest in Ovid,

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embodiments of the river’s self, the river chants a song, whose rhythms and language are highly reminiscent of Ariel’s songs from The Tempest. The song darkens as it moves from the dappled, rippling surface of the river to the power surging within its depths, capable of splintering bone. The metamorphoses depicted in Ariel’s song ‘Full Fathom Five’¹³ are not far away from Oswald’s such am I who flits and flows and seeks and serves and swiftly goes— [...] the eye blinks, the bone shatters, the sandflea jumps and so does water (37)

Shakespeare’s Ariel summons the sea nymph to toll the funeral bell, while Oswald’s interlocutors in the twenty-first century describe the water nymphs whom they have seen. It is no accident that Oswald is evoking what is one of Shakespeare’s most Ovidian plays.¹⁴ It is significant, also, that among the many speakers within the poem, all of whom are connected to the river, Oswald includes a water nymph who depicts the river as a voyeuristic, predatory character: ‘woodman working on your own / knocking the long shadows down / and all day the river’s eyes / peep and pry among the trees’ (11). Oswald’s marginal notes at this stage explain that in old Devonian Dart meant ‘oak’ and immediately her poem is chilled with danger. The river, which takes its name from the oak, is spying on the forester, is watching the woodman at work. We are not far from the crimes and fate of Erysichthon felling the mighty oak with its votive offerings and killing a dryad as he does so, and thereafter being punished by insatiable hunger (Metamorphoses VIII, 738–878). culminating in his acclaimed translation Tales from Ovid. Rees-Jones (2005), 235: ‘It is hard when reading Dart not to be aware of the influence of Ted Hughes, whose series of poems River (1983) consists of poems inspired by rivers, largely in the British Isles, but partly in America. Dart also seems to recall more particularly Hughes’ poem “Wodwo” in which an unidentified creature begins to take form through language, nosing itself into consciousness as it enters the water.’ ¹³ Sarah Annes Brown observes of the song that ‘It is not simply death that Ariel suggests Alonso has undergone, but metarmorphosis. [ . . . ] Any perceived contradiction in Prospero’s ineffectual “demi-puppets” helping him raise people from the dead is explained if we accept that this apparent necromancy consists of no more than the conjunction of a haunting song, an impressionable young man and an audience which is open to suggestion.’ Brown (1999), 75. ¹⁴ See Bate (1993), viii. Bate argues that The Winter’s Tale is also especially Ovidian.

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But the cultural memories are not exclusively literary. As Oswald evokes the song of the lark, in a crescendoing ladder of words that mimics the bird’s liquid song, it is impossible not to have Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending playing in one’s mind: a lark spinning around one note splitting and mending it (2)

But the loveliness of the song is quickly counterpointed by the evocation of the pollution and rubbish that the river drags with it on its course. When the Dart observes, ‘but there’s roots growing round my mouth, my foot’s / in a rusted tin’ (4), the river appears to us in human form, like one of Ovid’s river gods, but this is a god whom we have failed to nurture and to protect. It is no accident that Oswald’s language is shot through with echoes from Eliot’s The Wasteland. At the start of the twenty-first century Eliot’s bleak vision shadows even England’s lushest scenes; the classical, Ovidian world that Oswald reveals to us in Devon is being polluted by the negligence of the contemporary world.¹⁵ As she describes the water purification plant on the river, she points to the potential metamorphic processes that generate illnesses within humans if left unchecked: ‘You don’t know what goes into water. Tiny particles of acids and salts. Cryptospiridion smaller than a fleck of talcum powder which squashes and elongates and bursts in the warmth of the gut’ (25).

¹⁵ It is striking that Ali Smith parodies the pollution of the Scottish landscape by the natural water production plant in Girl Meets Boy, her modern retelling of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe set in contemporary Scotland: ‘Team, Keith is in the dark. Thank you all for being here. Water is history. Water is mystery Water is nature. Water is life. Water is archaeology. Water is civilisation. Water is where we live. Water is here and water is now. Get the message. Get it in a bottle. Water in a bottle makes two billion pounds a year in the UK alone. Water in a bottle costs the consumer roughly ten thousand times the amount that the same measure of tapwater costs him. Water is everything we imagine at Pure. The Pure imagination. That’s my theme today. So here’s my question. How, precisely, do we bottle the imagination?’ Smith (2007), 35. See Cox and Theodorakopoulos (2013), 287–98.

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But Oswald also includes instructions to a Devon chambermaid as part of the poem: ‘Brush them away, squirt everything, bleach and vac and rubberglove them into a bin-bag’ (5). The inclusion of these rules reminds us of the cost that the tourist industry exacts. In order to keep visitors to Devon’s hotels happy, the landscape must be polluted, and underpaid workers must continue to perform their menial tasks. As the dreamer lurks by the river, he dreams into being those whose dreams need to soothe the travail of everyday living: ‘Tillworkers, thieves and housewives, all enshrined / in sleep, unable to look round; night vagrants / [ . . . ] / freetrading, changing, disembodied / blind dreamers of every kind’ (28). It is significant that they are described as both ‘disembodied’ and ‘changing’, as it means that every new generation is accompanied by its throngs of the lost and dispossessed. This passage is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s visions of those to whom the night belongs in urban Paris, articulated in ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’.¹⁶ The darkening of Oswald’s vision at this point is illustrated by the importation of these urban elements into what had seemed to be a pastoral idyll. Towards the end of the poem we see the violation of the river by an attraction laid on for tourists: ‘Pitch-dark, waiting for the net to fill, then / BOOM BOOM BOOM—a pleasure boat / with full disco comes flashing round the corner’ (40–1). At every turn there appears to be poison associated with industry, just waiting to choke the life from the river. The irony is that much of this industry is associated with products that represent healthy fertility in our minds, such as the milk from Unigate, whose proteins (that are so beneficial to humans) clog and pollute the river. Moreover Oswald makes it clear that the river is threatened not only by the pollutants that are channelled directly into it, but also by those that are sluiced in from elsewhere by rainwater. This bleak depiction of the price paid in order to keep attracting visitors to the area reminds us of our responsibilities in preserving our heritage. Oswald emphasizes that the industries that depend upon the river exact a human toll from those who thereby earn their living. One of the crabbers tells of the toll exacted by the river in terms of arthritis and

¹⁶ Baudelaire (1972), 128: ‘Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; / Il vient comme un complice, à pas de loup; [ . . . ] Et les voleurs qui n’ont ni trêve ni merci, / Vont bientôt commencer leur travail, eux aussi’ (128–9) (Here comes bewitching evening, the criminal’s friend; It comes, stealthily, like an accomplice; [ . . . ] And the thieves who know no reprieve or thanks /Are themselves soon going to start their work’) [My translation].

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heart attacks. The deaths of today (Oswald also makes mention of a canoeist who drowned) become part of the tally of countless deaths that the river has exacted over the course of human memory. Another character of the poem describes his awareness of the ‘perilous relationship with time’ in his struggle with the river. On the one hand, he may be speaking of the consciousness that every second counts if you are being starved of oxygen; on the other hand his description of his endangered body as frail, already ragged, suggests that he knows how easily he too could have become one of the ghosts from all ages who haunt the river: ‘I was pinioned by the pressure, the whole river-power of Dartmoor, not even five men pulling on a rope could shift me. It was one of those experiences—I was sideways, leaning upstream, a tattered shape in a perilous relationship with time’ (15). Oswald ensures that her song of the river flows back to antiquity, by glancing at Aeneas as she evokes Roman Britain: ‘There was a man, Trojan-born, / [ . . . ] Brutus, grandson of Aeneas’ (30–1). However, her allusion to Brutus points to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who depicts Brutus in his History of the Kings of Britain (c.1136) as landing in Totnes, next to the Dart, in order to establish Roman Britain. Totnes was then named after Brutus.¹⁷ The river Dart is infused with medieval echoes, as well as with voices from the classical past. Aeneas and his men, in Oswald’s poem, are instructed by the gods to include the Dart on their ordained journey: ‘Trojans, you’ve got to sail / till the sea meets the Dart’ (31). The creation of Roman Britain, the shaping of British culture by its relationship with ancient Rome, is recognized by this current within the poem. Its importance is indicated by the invocations and explanatory marginalia that appear towards the beginning of the poem, which refer to the Rex Nemorensis, the River of Zeus, and the Flamen Dialis (13). These ancient resonances become especially marked when Oswald depicts the plethora of identities, the many voices out of which the river is composed. As she describes the different types of water she evokes once again the convention of listing in ancient epic: Glico of the Running Streams and Spio of the Boulders-Encaved-In-The-River’sEdges

¹⁷ I owe this point to Dick Collins.

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[...] Cymene and Semaia, sweeping a plectrum along the stones and the stone’s hollows hooting back at them off-beat, as if luck should play the flute [ . . . ] Syrinx and Ligea. (17–18)

By depicting the rush of water on stones as the river sweeping a plectrum, Oswald vividly and cleverly presents the river as Orpheus, the archetypal poet, whose song incorporates all the myths recounted in Metamorphoses X.¹⁸ It is worth noting that after Orpheus had been torn to pieces and his body parts had been cast into the river, his head continued to sing his unending song, mirroring Ovid’s ‘perpetuum [ . . . ] carmen’ (Metamorphoses I, 4), as it was borne downriver. The Dart, too, carries the stories of Ovidian myth—we have already seen that there is an allusion to the myth of Salmacis, and in the above extract Oswald mentions Syrinx, whose story appears in Metamorphoses I. It is no surprise to find that many of the yachts that make their way down the Dart also carry classical names, such as Proserpina and Minerva. At various moments in the poem the river expresses an awareness that it is becoming anthropomorphized, is performing the function of poet: the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in motion sing-calling something definitely human . . . (16)

Through its emphasis on its multiplicity of voices the above extract edges the river from an identification with Orpheus towards the final identification which it will assume within Dart, namely the figure of Proteus in his guise as river.¹⁹ The poem’s close is open-ended. The open-endedness ¹⁸ These include the stories of Ganymede, Hyacinthus, Cerastae and the Propoetides, Pygmalion, Myrrha, Venus and Adonis, and Atalanta and Hippomenes. ¹⁹ ‘sunt, quibus in plures ius est transire figuras, / ut tibi, conplexi terram maris incola, Proteu. / nam modo te iuvenem, modo te videre leonem, / nunc violentus aper, nunc, quem tetigisse timerent, / anguis eras, modo te faciebant cornua taurum; / saepe lapis poteras, arbor quoque saepe videri / interdum, faciem liquidarum imitatus aquarum, / flumen eras, interdum undis contrarius ignis’ (Metamorphoses VIII, 730–7) (Others again have power to change into several forms. Take, for instance, Proteus, the god who dwells in the sea that encircles the earth. People have seen him at one time in the shape of a young man, at another transformed into a lion; sometimes he used to appear to them as a raging wild boar, or again as a snake, which they shrank from touching; or else horns transformed him into a bull. Often he could be seen as a stone, or a tree, sometimes he presented the appearance of running water, and became a river, sometimes he was the very opposite, when he turned into fire).

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of the poem also, of course, ensures the continuation of Oswald’s song, and of Ovid’s song within Oswald’s song. It is impossible to know which, of the river’s many voices, is the one that is speaking, and impossible to recover the identity to which it was once attached: This is me, anonymous, water’s soliloquy, all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, [...] driving my many selves from cave to cave . . . (48)

Rees-Jones observes that ‘Oswald’s second collection, Dart (2002), is a book-length poem in which, at first glance, the ghosts of Eliot’s Waste Land meet Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, where the modernist chorus of emergent subjectivity of Woolf ’s The Waves intermingles with voices garnered from a project not a mile away from the mass observation exercises of the 1930s.’²⁰ It is interesting, and moving, that within the current of Oswald’s river Rees-Jones can hear Woolf ’s voice being borne along, a voice that reminds us of Woolf ’s own hurt at her exclusion from the world of classical learning, a voice which campaigned for the voices of other women to be heard. Oswald does not perpetuate these concerns: the unheard voices which she brings to life are the voices of drowned workers, underpaid chambermaids, but also the voice of a river which is threatened by the waste and negligence of the contemporary world. As Ovid flows into the work of this twenty-first century poet and classicist, his gender is no longer a cause to fight against. We have already noted Oswald’s allusion to the myth of Salmacis. She is a poet who is acutely sensitive to the plenitude within Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a quality derived in part from Ovid’s ability to inhabit both female and male perspectives. This is a perception that she shares with Ali Smith who observed in Girl Meets Boy: ‘And also, don’t forget, the story of Iphis was being made up by a man. Well, I say man, but Ovid’s very fluid, as writers go, much more than most. He knows, more than most, that the imagination doesn’t have a gender’ (97). In the following chapter we shall explore the fluidity and malleability of Ovid’s characters, as they gather around a pool in Mary Zimmerman’s play entitled Metamorphoses.

²⁰ Rees-Jones (2005), 233.

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5 Mary Zimmerman The playwright and opera and theatre director, Mary Zimmerman (born 1960), has always been fascinated by oral tales, by the ways in which ancient literature continues to live in the modern world, and by stories of transformation and transfiguration. Her work is heavily allusive—the influences she cites include Freud, Rilke, Jung, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman, and she has reworked tales from the Arabian Nights, from Shakespeare and Proust, as well as from the ancient world.¹ It was during the nineties, at the ‘cusp of a new millennium’,² that her burgeoning interest in the classical world led to a dramatization of the Odyssey (1998) as well as to her decision to stage selected myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. An early version of this enterprise was produced at Northwestern University in 1996, and was followed by her play that we now know as Metamorphoses (for which she relied upon David’s Slavitt’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses), which had its world premiere in Chicago in 1998. Zimmerman writes of the exhilaration of community, of uniting with other writers whose imaginations have been fired by Ovid’s mythical universe: I’ve never been particularly intimidated by these big, grand old masterpieces of world literature. To me, they are our inheritance—all of our inheritance. Ovid inherited these stories, as did Homer; they arose, I believe, in a time before the idea of authorship. I’ve been drawn to the heart of them, and believe I’ve been very faithful to their spirit, but even if I weren’t, I’ve always felt that whatever I did with them I was just one voice in a chorus that has been singing throughout the centuries. I step into that stream of song, perhaps momentarily bending it this way or that, but then I step out again.³

¹ See Garwood (2003), 70. ³ Personal email to author.

² Chirico (2008), 149.

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The image of ‘stepping into the stream’ of Ovid’s tales and the metamorphoses they themselves have undergone at the hands of different tellers over two thousand years is suggestive of the ‘carmen perpetuum’ that Ovid used as the image of his work, in order to assert its immortality. Although Zimmerman self-effacingly presents herself as ‘just another person’ responding to Ovid, her staging is nevertheless highly distinctive and had resonances for the Zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century beyond even her own imaginings, as we shall see. Zimmerman’s interest in Jung and Freud is evident from the earliest staging direction, which is that ‘The stage is entirely occupied by a square or a rectangular pool of water.’⁴ This body of water represents, at various stages of the play, the subconscious of different characters—an image enhanced by the presence of a therapist who meditates upon the difficulties we experience in understanding our dreams, and the significance of myths to us; it also represents the visible displays of the wealth of a character such as the modern-day Midas, who is eager to show off his swimming pool; at the same time its smooth, unruffled surface allows a modern-day Narcissus to gaze into its depths, just as Tawada’s narcissistic teenage boy gazed into his pornographic desires displayed upon the computer screen. In order to enter this magical, destabilizing world the audience, too, must gaze upon the same images as the actors and so Zimmerman urges that ‘it is essential that the audience look down at the playing space in such a way that the entire surface of the water is visible’.⁵ The pool represents a plethora of different worlds within Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, while also offering an image that binds the different myths together. So imaginative a use of a body of water also invites the reader to recall the dangers that water presents in Ovid’s world, both as a site of metamorphosis (perhaps especially in the Heroides, where so many of Ovid’s spurned heroines utter their laments upon the seashore), or as the element into which various characters return. As Zimmerman expounds upon the significance of the swimming pool to her play, she emphasizes the blend of loss and possibility that is so characteristic of Ovid’s transformations and that informs the emotional charge of the victorious assertion of the last lines of the Metamorphoses. Ovid, the human, must die; he must lose everything, but the plasticity of his poetry,

⁴ Zimmerman (2002), 3.

⁵ Zimmerman (2002), 3.

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which has enabled it to alter and adapt over the course of two millennia, has ensured his survival. Change is liberating and painful for Zimmerman also, and she uses the swimming pool to reflect this: The idea of the show for me was never ‘I’d like to do these Greek myths, how shall I do them?’ It was ‘I want to do Greek myths in water.’ That was the originating impulse—just instinctively. It has everything to do with metamorphosis. Water is the most changeable of elements: it is a liquid that can be frozen to a solid or burned into steam that evaporates in the air. Whatever goes into it for any length of time is changed: it corrupts or it purifies. It is used in ritual throughout the world to signal change—to cross the river, to undergo baptism is to undergo a ‘sea-change.’ I imagined, when I started out, that the water would amplify everything, every gesture, every feeling—and it did. It stood for overwhelming grief or desire; it was a placid mirror or a stormy sea and then suddenly, comically, an actual swimming pool. It occupied the theatre like a living thing.⁶

This idea of water functioning as ‘a living thing’ is clear also from the staging directions, where Zimmerman sees the body of water as a character in its own right, a gesture that echoes the Ovidian rivers, which were embodied by their own characters, able to speak their minds, and to act of their own volition.⁷ The play opens with the image of a figure gazing like Narcissus into the smooth depths of the pool, before turning to the audience with an opening that draws from the opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as they appear in Slavitt’s translation:⁸ Bodies, I have in mind, and how they can change to assume new shapes—I ask the help of the gods, who know the trick: change me⁹

These Ovidian lines are voiced by a woman, a woman who utters the cry voiced by so many of the women writers studied in this volume, ‘change me’.¹⁰ Zimmerman is not content, however, to allow the story of the universe to be represented simply through mythology and so, hot on the heels of this first female character, arrives ‘The Scientist’, who is also a ⁶ Personal email to author. ⁷ See Garwood (2003), 71: ‘The pool almost seems like a character, too, with sovereign power to shift symbolic meaning while always remaining itself.’ ⁸ Slavitt (1994), 1. ⁹ Zimmerman (2002), 5. ¹⁰ See in particular Chapter 11 for a discussion of Alison’s translations of Ovid, entitled Change Me.

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woman. Through such decisions Zimmerman indicates a desire to stage an Ovid who will not only speak for women, but who will be voiced by women,¹¹ while also reminding us of the scientific element of the Metamorphoses, where Ovid attempted to explain how the universe came to be, using his understanding of Pythagoras. The scientist challenges Zeus’ explanation of how the world came to be; in this way, through Slavitt’s translation, Zimmerman inserts the modern antagonism between science and creationism into her play. Zeus observes: ‘Some say the god perfected the world, creating of his divine substance the race of humans’ (7), to which the female scientist responds with cool, calm rationalism: ‘others maintain that we come from the natural order of things’ (7).¹² A woman then cuts into their debate: ‘But one way or another, people came—erect, standing tall, with our faces set not to gaze down at the dirt beneath our feet, but upward toward the sky in pride or, perhaps, nostalgia’ (7). Such an observation radically alters the Ovidian passage, which shows humans lifting their faces to the stars in a gesture that distinguishes them from animals.¹³ Through the figure of the scientist Zimmerman probes the shifting roles played by women in the contemporary world. The scientist removes her white coat, the indicator of her professional life, and settles down to sit with two laundresses, whose conversation over their work turns to money, their lack of money, and what they would do if they were suddenly to find themselves rich. Nouryeh states of the laundresses that ‘Ovid’s masculine narrative is thus interpreted by lower class women whose reasons for telling this tale clearly illustrate the perspectives of those whose backbreaking labor makes the rich and luxurious life of

¹¹ Nouryeh (2009) points out how Zimmerman’s Ovid was transmitted to her by retellings of his myths by Edith Hamilton. Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) was a favourite book in childhood. Nouryeh observes: ‘Thus, a woman teacher with a didactic agenda that eschews the Ovidian stories of lust and violence spoke to and influenced the young Zimmerman whose sense of the Greco-Roman world and its literature was formed by Hamilton’s perspective. In this way Ovid became transformed in the psyches of both his interpreter and her reader, and his stories became theirs. They appropriate the classical text, “becoming in Claudia Herman’s phrase, voleuses de langue, ‘women thieves of language’ (or of the tongue), taking myths and re-seeing them” ’ (64). ¹² Slavitt (1994), 3. ¹³ Once again, the alteration stems from Slavitt’s translation (3), described by Genevieve Liveley as a ‘beautifully idiosyncratic translation, or rather, “adaption” of the Metamorphoses’. Liveley (2010), vii.

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wealthy capitalists possible.’¹⁴ The workplace fantasies of winning the lottery are transported back to the classical world and facilitate a smooth segue into the myth of Midas. Midas does not feature as a character from the ancient world, however, but rather as a vulgar, brash, self-made entrepreneur. Zimmerman takes the characters from ancient myth and represents them as grotesque, stock figures from the contemporary world, whom we easily recognize. In this way the ancient world shimmers behind the contemporary narratives, reminding us of the versatility and timelessness of Ovid’s myths. For Midas the swimming pool is a status symbol, a visible endorsement of his achievements in amassing wealth. His sense of identity is inextricably linked to the possessions that are his only through the hard graft that he has put in, and that others could easily have also, if only they had the savoir faire and work ethic: ‘You see this pool? It cost a pretty penny, I can tell you. But all it takes is hard work. Plain and simple. And those who haven’t got it in them, well, what can anyone do? They just haven’t got it’ (9). He enumerates his possessions, themselves timeless trappings of wealth. The act of listing recalls the epic convention of listmaking, but also indicates Midas’ ability to use his wealth to generate more wealth. Zimmerman opens her play by meditating upon the implications for the contemporary world of Ovid’s creation myths and his interest in science. It is a small jump, thematically, to move to a modernday Midas, who generates enough money to be able to construct his own world around him, a world designed to display his achievements which are all measured in material terms: ‘It wasn’t always this way with me—the boats, the houses by the sea, the summer cottages and the winter palaces, the exotic furnishings, the soft clothes, the food and—’(9). Midas breaks off his bragging to tell his small daughter to stop jumping around him and interrupting him, before resuming his litany of self-congratulation: ‘I was born with a head for business and it’s always been as though everything I touched has turned to gold. Not literally, of course—wouldn’t that be something?’ (9). Midas must, however, learn that wealth on this scale can lead to a host of unforeseen difficulties and responsibilities. Some inkling of this surfaces when a rather drunk vagrant, a modern incarnation of Silenus,

¹⁴ Nouryeh (2009), 67.

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joins Midas in his pool and keels over face first. Anxious to avoid the scandal of a drunkard drowning in his pool, Midas instructs his servants to flip him over with their feet. Silenus confesses to Midas that he feels ‘lost’ in the modern world, despite being widely travelled. Furthermore, before losing consciousness he tantalizes Midas with tales of a country he has visited which offers one of the few things that money cannot buy and for which Midas immediately longs: ‘King, I tell ya, it’s like a dream, a dream. I. Am. Telling. You. That in this place the people . . . they see each other. [ . . . ] And the people live forever’ (13). Midas demands to know the magic formula for eternal life, but upon discovering that it lies within people’s hearts dismisses the story as pointless claptrap: ‘Oh, that,’ he sneers. ‘The “inner life.” What uselessness’ (15). Nevertheless, an idea has been planted, and firms Midas’ resolve to turn the bricks and everything around him into gold, to counter the fragility of human existence by solidifying as much of his environment into wealth. Such impulses and longings glance back at Ovid’s world, at Augustus’ famous ambition to turn the bricks and mortar of ancient Rome into gold and indeed look back to Ovid’s belief that he had found the formula of eternal life in poetry. When Silenus’ friend Bacchus appears, ready to grant Midas a reward for keeping a watchful eye on Silenus’ drunken vulnerabilities, Midas is prompt to name his terms—he demands that everything he touch should turn to gold. True to his dogged, single-minded approach to business, he refuses to listen to Bacchus’ warning that ‘That’s a really, really bad idea’ (17),¹⁵ but instead flicks aside any objections with the stock response that ‘We had a deal for god’s sake. Now follow through.’ Immediately Midas’ world turns golden, and he maniacally touches as much as he can. Zimmerman’s stage directions demand that each of his steps should from now on be ‘accompanied by the ring of little finger cymbals, perhaps played by one of the LAUNDRESSES’ (18). It is a direction that punctures Midas’ pomposity, by evoking the sort of New Age music that is practised by precisely the people Midas most despises. It is also reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem about Midas, focalized through his wife, in which he

¹⁵ Zimmerman offers a vivid translation into a contemporary vernacular of the Ovidian lines where Bacchus experiences disquiet at the nature of Midas’ request. Metamorphoses XI, 104–5: ‘adnuit optatis nocituraque munera solvit / Liber et indoluit, quod non meliora petisset’ (Bacchus, though sorry that Midas had not asked for something better, granted his request, and presented him with this baleful gift).

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also appears as ridiculous and exasperatingly dim.¹⁶ Such barbed humour serves only to make the inevitable tragedy all the more poignant, however. The small daughter, whom Midas had scolded for driving him ‘nuts’ with her skipping and running around, hurtled towards him and threw herself into his arms. In one ghastly moment both his wishes are fulfilled—at last she is still, as he requested, and she has acquired an eternal form by being frozen into a symbol of his wealth. Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses thus opens with an image of the most searing loss—the loss of a child, and a loss brought about by parental carelessness and greed.¹⁷ As Midas walks away in stunned grief the cymbals continue to accompany his steps, but have acquired the tones of a knell, lightly pitched, fitting for a child. His last gesture is to pick up the skipping rope of his quicksilver daughter, which immediately solidifies to gold. His only hope of undoing his loss is to become like one of the spiritual folk he so despises—his quest will take him back to a pool, in which he must cleanse and purge himself. Bacchus tells him that he must ‘Walk as far as the ends of the earth. Look for a pool of water that reflects the stars at night. Wash your hands in it and there is a chance that everything will be restored’ (19). In his shame and humiliation Midas must look down at the stars, but Zimmerman maintains the Ovidian association between gazing upon the stars as a way of asserting one’s humanity. It is, perhaps, fitting that a man who invested so much in wealth, at the cost of personal integrity, should be condemned to cast his eyes down rather than upwards. Although Zimmerman’s play was written before the financial crisis of 2008, the tale of Midas acquires especial resonance in a world that has seen many of the wealthy lose everything overnight, having staked all that they have on the bet of becoming richer. In this context it is worth considering Darrieussecq’s belief that Ovid, of all writers from the ancient world, understood this modern terror of losing all that you

¹⁶ Duffy (1999), 11–12: ‘Mrs Midas’: ‘I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob. / Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich. / He toyed with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the forks. / He asked where was the wine. I poured with a shaking hand, / A fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched / as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank. / It was then I started to scream. He sank to his knees.’ ¹⁷ See Chirico (2008), 159. ‘The effect of her transformation is powerful and introduces the overriding motif of the play: death as an alteration of form.’

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value at one fell swoop, through being suddenly sent into exile, and separated from his family and the world of letters at Rome.¹⁸ Loss, especially loss of loved ones, underpins Zimmerman’s selection and staging of the myths. The laundresses ease us from the horrifyingly still form of Midas’ small daughter to Zimmerman’s next selection— the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. Once again Zimmerman uses Ovid’s myths to destabilize her audiences, to remind them of the fragility of happiness. The narrator sets the scene: ‘There once was a king named Ceyx, who had as his queen Alcyone, daughter of Aeolus, master of the winds. These two adored each other and lived in a monotony of happiness. But nothing in this world is safe’ (20). Unhappily Ceyx is compelled to embark upon a voyage from which Alcyone fears he will never return. The pool on the stage metamorphoses from Midas’ status symbol to a representation of the sea; and Alcyone immediately becomes one of Ovid’s abandoned heroines, mourning the partner who sails away from her, as well as one of the characters from his Metamorphoses, who eventually finds new life as a bird.¹⁹ Wealth cannot protect her from the cruellest of losses—the pool offers a cruel image of the blankness and emptiness that she fears will be her life after the loss of Ceyx, and as she grieves the bed seems too large without him:²⁰ ‘She gazed still at the empty and desolate blue and then went to her empty bedroom to lie on the huge and vacant bed and give herself over to weeping’ (22).²¹ As Alcyone’s world diminishes to accommodate nothing more than her pain, so too Ceyx has only one word, one thought in mind, once the inevitable storm has arrived and the sailors can do nothing but await death. As the other men gaze dumbstruck at the terrifying waves, or curse the gods or fate, we are told that ‘one says one word’: CEYX :

Alcyone, Again and again, CEYX : Alcyone, my treasure, Alcyone NARRATOR : And this is the end of the world. (24) NARRATOR :

¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹

See Darrieussecq (2013). See also Chapter 8 where I discuss this. Ovid tells her story in Metamorphoses XI. Zimmerman, here, appears to be echoing Dido’s distress from Aeneid IV, 82–3. These words are from Slavitt’s translation. Slavitt (1994), 228.

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Once more, the reduction of the world to a single world foreshadows Darrieussecq’s translation of the Tristia,²² where Ovid’s humiliation and loss is indicated visually by single words. Furthermore, as Alcyone continues to grieve for her vanished husband, she adopts the imagery of shipwreck to depict the devastation of her own life. Paradoxically, the further the ship recedes from the shore, the more pinched and narrow become her own future prospects. The rhythm of her sentences punctuates the beating of the waves as they bear Ceyx away: ‘The ship, my hopes, and my life grew smaller all at the same time,’²³ she complains. She uses the imagery of the shipwreck she fears to depict the wasteland of her own life in Ceyx’ absence, and thus makes the pool on stage not only represent the sea that washes Ceyx away, but also represent metaphorically the empty meaninglessness of a world for her without Ceyx in it. She utters the eternal lament of the bereaved—the cry that demands to know where the loved one has gone: ‘This is no good, no good—that I should be living / and you be elsewhere or nowhere? I’m drowning now in the air, I’m wretched here on the land where the currents are just as cold and cruel’ (29). It is through a dream that Alcyone discovers the plight of Ceyx. Again, like the heroines abandoned in the Heroides, she paces fruitlessly up and down the shore in search of her ‘drowned, dreamed husband’, as Zimmerman so beautifully describes him (30). The dream also allows Zimmerman to represent the Ovidian personification of Sleep, and to emulate Ovid by injecting humour onto the stage by stripping divine figures of their dignity. In our first encounter with SLEEP we are witness to his unguarded snoring, before he is awoken by IRIS, who appears in a modern technicolour shirt, and whose lofty paean to sleep stands amusingly at odds with his inarticulate half-grunts and bewilderment: [ SLEEP snores. IRIS creeps in, wearing an illuminated rainbowcoloured shirt and carrying an alarm clock.] [ . . . ] SLEEP : ‘Wha—?’ IRIS : ‘Mildest of all the gods, soother of souls, and healer of wearied and pain-wracked bodies and minds—’²⁴ SLEEP : ‘Iris! Let me rest a moment.’(26–7)

²² See Chapter 8. ²³ Slavitt’s translation. Slavitt (1994), 234. ²⁴ This line is taken from Slavitt (1994), 232–3.

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Zimmerman also challenges the status of the gods, by introducing them into the play as commentators upon the action, even upon divine action. As Aphrodite beholds the tragedy of Ceyx and Alycone, she muses: ‘But better ask, How could the gods not have felt it? Seen this, and not had compassion?’ (31) The gods do indeed take pity upon Ceyx and Alcyone, allowing the readers and spectators to anticipate the retelling of the Orpheus myth where, once again, they soften in the face of raw, human grief. Ceyx and Alcyone are reunited, having changed their forms and become birds. From death stems new life, which accounts for why one of Zimmerman’s narrators of this myth is Lucina, the goddess of childbirth. It is she who outlines this cycle of life: ‘For the dead body was changing, restored to life, and renewed as another seabird’ (32). The myth of Ceyx and Alcyone has entered modern parlance, by standing behind our phrase ‘halcyon days’, as Lucina explains: ‘and every year gives seven days of calm upon the ocean—the days we call halcyon days’ (32). Zimmerman opened her account of the myth by reminding us of the fragility of human happiness and here, too, at its close, she alerts us to the fact that a heavy price has been exacted for these halcyon days—the carefree, sun-bathed days we now call halcyon are darkened by a history of piercing human grief. Once we are aware of this and have heard of the story, the myth of Ceyx and Alycone casts a shadow that cannot be dispelled. Just as the myth of Midas allowed Zimmerman to cast a light upon the blight of modern greed in the form of material wealth, so the story of Erysichthon (punished for sacrilege with insatiable hunger) enables her to meditate upon the twin scourges in the Western world of anorexia and overeating. Her depiction of Hunger is very close to the Ovidian original,²⁵

²⁵ Metamorphoses VIII, 799–808: ‘quaesitamque Famem lapidoso vidit in agro / unguibus et raras vellentem dentibus herbas. / hirtus erat crinis, cava lumina, pallor in ore, / labra incana situ, scabrae rubigine fauces, / dura cutis, per quam spectari viscera possent; / ossa sub incurvis exstabant arida lumbis, / ventris erat pro ventre locus; pendere putares / pectus et a spinae tantummodo crate teneri. / auxerat articulos macies, genuumque tumebat / orbis, et inmodico prodibant tubere tali’ (There, in a stony field, / that creature gleaned with her filthy fingernails and her teeth/ among the stones for their bits of moss. Her hair hung down / in lank and matted knots. Her eyes were sunken and circled, / and were all the more marked in her pallid invalid’s face. Her lips were slack and cracked, and her skin was crazed with chilblains. / Beneath her eczematous throat, her breasts hung down like purses / emptied and long forgotten. The vaults of her ribs stood out, / as did every bone in her body. One could count the knobs of her spine. / Only her legs and feet were swollen and waterlogged). Slavitt (1994), 170.

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and alerts us to quite how astute Ovid was in pinpointing and charting the symptoms of anorexia. Hunger crawls from the pool onto the deck: pulling from between the rocks, with her teeth and filthy fingernails, some tiny bits of moss. Her hair hung down in lank and matted locks. Her eyes were sunken and circled, her lips were slack and cracked. The vaults of her ribs stuck out, as did every bone in her body. One could count the knobs of her spine. (35)

As Hunger approaches Erysichthon, ready to infect him with her fatal poisoning, Zimmerman describes her as ‘curdling through the halls’, a verb which vividly depicts the way in which starvation in a world loaded with food is a psychological affliction every bit as much as a physical one. Hunger’s embrace of Erysichthon recalls the words of countless teenagers, describing the way in which anorexia appears to them as a friend, their only real friend, allowing them to exert control in at least one area of apparently chaotic lives; only when considerable damage has been done can they recognize that the relationship was always malign. The Narrator depicts the way Hunger infiltrates Erysichthon’s life: ‘It is night when she arrives at Eryschithon’s home and curdles through the halls until she finds him sleeping in his room. She wraps cadaverous arms around him in an embrace as strong as love, but quite the opposite of love’ (36). Like Midas, Erysichthon suffers a greed that can never be sated, a greed that enables Zimmerman to employ the device of listing that is a staple of classical epic. And as she lists the various foods that he ingests in a desperate attempt to silence his longing, she of course sharpens the appetite of her audience, whether readers or spectators, so that we are able to identify in some measure with Erysichthon’s plight: ‘Baked shrimp and marshmallows, salami and ice cream, liver and doughnuts, everything in every possible combination’ (37). Though Ovid himself does not dwell in such delicious detail on the selections of Eryschithon’s food, he does once again anticipate our understanding of the psychology behind compulsive overeating—the need to fill a gap that can never be filled by food alone: ‘cibus omnis in illo / causa cibi est, semperque locus fit inanis edendo’ (Metamorphoses VIII, 841–2) (His hunger is unabated; his fortune is swallowed up in gorging, but still his wolfish / hunger gnaws at him as he gnaws bare bones [Slavitt (1994), 171]). In Ovid’s myth Erysichthon is reduced to sacrificing his daughter in order to be able to acquire more food (though she escapes her grim fate through her ability to change her form), but, as Ziolkowski observes, Zimmerman

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plays upon the modern jibe of being mean enough to ‘sell your own mother’ and so Zimmerman’s narrator sadly tells us that ‘His hunger led him to sell his poor, his darling mother’ (38). Zimmerman nevertheless pays homage to the Ovidian version by allowing his mother to recapture her form as a little girl, and so be able to save herself. The image of the young girl she becomes, playing happily on the seashore, movingly recalls both Midas’ small daughter and perhaps also a young Alcyone, able to take pleasure in the seashore before it became for her a site of doom: From the briny deep, Poseidon heard her prayer, pulled her into the water, and changed her back into the little girl who used to play along his shores. The salty water licked the years away, until she emerged: the one who gave him praise in childhood, shouting as she ran among the waves. This is the kind of sweet, unbidden praise the gods adore and do not forget. (39)

Just as in Ovid’s version Erysichthon’s daughter is spared any suffering (though he has been ready to sacrifice her), in Zimmerman’s account his mother is also saved from an unhappy end. She achieves the impossible, manages what many long to attain—a return to childhood and a reuniting with the girl she had once been. The image of a carefree, young child splashing through the waves is, of course, an iconic image of childhood happiness; through it Zimmerman allows us to glimpse again the ghosts from our own childhoods, and perhaps, in doing so, to plan the happiness of future children. It is for this reason that she emphasizes the timelessness of such an image, her narrator observing that ‘To this day, at this hour, somewhere in the world, you can still catch a glimpse of that child playing by the shore’ (39). The poignant urgency and failure to keep children safe is also explored by Zimmerman through her retelling of the myths of Myrrha and Phaeton. Myrrha is one of the Ovidian victims who portrays the agony of unnatural, ‘perverted’ love, as she falls in love with her father. Her plight illustrates the impossibility of protecting children—despite being looked after in a secure household, despite being watched over by a nursemaid, love finds a way to destroy her. The warning Zimmerman issues recalls the warning that preceded the Ceyx and Alcyone episode in the play: the monotony and security of married life is no insurance against future calamity. Similarly Aphrodite warns Myrrha about the impossibility of protecting herself from unnatural loves, once she has been selected as a target by the gods:

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You can shut yourself in a room, bolt the door, But love will come through the window. Draw the curtains, lock the casement, But love will seep through the walls. Never, think, never think that you can be safe from love.

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(53)

Before Myrrha dupes her unwitting father into this terrible act, Vertumnus (enlisted, like Aphrodite, as a commentator on the action) observes curtly: ‘Part Four: Unnameable’, a statement which glosses the Ovidian ‘nefas’—those crimes that are so dreadful that it is unlawful even to speak of them. Once she has succumbed to her desires Myrrha is consumed by a self-loathing, every bit as pernicious as the Hunger that took over Erysichthon. She utters the cry voiced by so many of Ovid’s hapless heroines and their descendants—‘change me’: ‘O Gods, I pray you, change me; make me something else entirely; let me step out of my own heart’ (60).²⁶ It is the cry of all those who know themselves to be monstrous. These cries of emotional pain offer points of recognition within Ovid’s mythical world to today’s readers or spectators, especially given the long association between myth and psychoanalysis.²⁷ Zimmerman draws upon this history in her presentation of the myth of Phaeton, another myth in which the relationship between father and child goes badly awry. Whereas the gods commented to the audience upon Myrrha’s predicament, towards the end of the play it is the more contemporary figure of the therapist who offers her understandings and insights. She appears as a version of the female scientist from the start of the play, and indeed establishes a link with her by observing that ‘Myths are the earliest form of science’ (67). Phaeton lies on a raft upon the pool, articulating his grievances to the therapist, whose interpretations appear to be more directed at the audience than at the young boy. Phaeton appears as the materially spoilt son of a wealthy father, and launches immediately into a complaint of emotional neglect: ‘But I never knew him, and he wasn’t really around. I mean not around around’ (62). Immediately the therapist maps Phaeton’s case onto the psychoanalytic models at her disposal: ‘Where better might we find a more precise illustration of the dangers of ²⁶ This phrasing glosses Slavitt’s translation, which is itself already quite free. His reads: ‘I pray you, therefore, change me, / make me something else, transform me entirely, cleanse me . . . ’ (208). The Latin original is ‘mutataeque mihi vitamque necemque negate’. Metamorphoses X, 487. ²⁷ See Zajko and O’Gorman (2013).

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premature initiation than in this ancient tale of alternating parental indulgence and neglect?’ (63). The presence of the therapist serves as a reminder that the story of Phaeton is as contemporary as it is ancient. Phaeton is recognizably a teenage boy, full of bravado and hurt, aching to prove himself and convinced of his invulnerability and capability. When he brags to the other boys at his expensive school about his father being Phoebus Apollo, he gets beaten up, and uses contemporary teenage vernacular to voice his indignation: ‘And he just basically trampled me, just basically beat the shit out of me. Like I was lying’ (63). Apollo’s indifference to his son’s distress is indicated by the presence of Apollo in the background, humming ‘Un’ aura amorosa’ from Così fan tutte, as a counterpoint to his son’s narrative. So casual an approach to parenting kindles a version of hero worship within Phaeton, as the therapist points out: ‘The conventional exordium of the initiate from latent to realized potential is inevitably accompanied by a radical realignment of his emotional relationship with the imago of parental authority’ (65). Phaeton seeks to become his father by taking possession of the sky, and does so with the most typical of teenage demands—the keys to the car, which is in this case the chariot of the sun: ‘Give me the keys to your car. I want to drive it myself across the sky. It’s my turn. You promised. I want to light the world today’ (66). The childish ‘It’s my turn. You promised’ reminds us of quite how young and vulnerable Phaeton is, despite his bravado. And, of course, in lighting the world he brings about his own destruction. The emotional atmosphere of Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses is heavy with sadness for these lives, blighted or cut short at so young an age, so it is unsurprising that the myth of Orpheus should receive especial attention. Orpheus is the archetypal myth of love and loss, of the impossibility of accepting the power of death. Orpheus plumbs the underworld in order to rescue Eurydice from death, and loses her all over again through glancing back at her solicitously, in contravention of the dictates of the gods. Zimmerman cleverly mirrors the double loss by including versions based on two different models within the play—the first by Ovid and the second by Rilke, thus also neatly pointing to the importance of the cultural paths followed by the myths that have survived to the present day as part of Ovid’s ‘carmen perpetuum’.²⁸ Nouryeh points out ²⁸ Garwood (2003) points out that the two versions offer an image of the echo and glance of the original story.

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pertinently that Zimmerman’s decision to invoke Rilke’s version means that we also hear the Orpheus myth from Eurydice’s perspective.²⁹ Zimmerman’s beautiful evocation of the underworld visited by Orpheus suggests not only the ghosts of people loved by mortals but also the stories, the texts that have given shelter to Orpheus’ tale: ‘Through that dim domain, with all its shimmering, buried ghosts, he passed’ (41). The narrator meditates upon the various meanings that the myth has held for different people, asking: ‘Is this story a story of an artist, and the loss that comes from sudden self-consciousness or impatience?’ (44) and ‘Is this a story of how time can move only in one direction?’ (44) It is of course a story that can mean all of the above, and a great deal more besides. Above all it is a story about how the dead haunt us and demand to be remembered. Zimmerman describes the predicament of all the bereaved who see the last faces of their loved ones over and over. ‘That was his last sight of her. But he saw it again and again’ (43). And because it has been so resonant a myth in Western culture Narrator Two, responsible for the meditation on Rilke’s version of Orpheus, is quite right to observe that ‘A woman so loved that from one lyre there came / more lament than from all lamenting women’ (45). The story of Orpheus carries the griefs of all those who have turned to it in order to gain more insight into their own process of mourning, and so Ovid’s version has become saturated with its echoes in later works. From this point of view the myth defies time. It may be a myth of how time can move only in one direction in so far as it highlights the irrevocability of death, but it is also a myth that illustrates, more than any other, quite how much resonances from modern and contemporary literature travel backwards to deepen our understanding of the Ovidian text. The play itself closes with the promise of survival. The last myth to appear is that of Baucis and Philemon, the devout couple who gave shelter to the gods when they were disguised as vagrants, and whose reward was to die at the same time so that they would never have to mourn each other’s loss. Their reverence enables Zimmerman to add a Christianizing gloss to the play, thus acknowledging an important aspect of Ovid’s transmission to the present day. When Philemon welcomes the visitors to their house he cries: ‘Why you are children of God. Come in, come in’ (79). In their story the pool is transformed into a festive table,

²⁹ Nouryeh (2009), 68.

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alight with floating candles. At the point of their death Baucis and Philemon are transformed into trees, symbolizing steadfastness and strength, and enabling a lengthy old age in another form. It is in this form that they remain alive for us today, suggests Narrator One, who can hear their story and the promise of the redemptive power of love in the whisper of leaves: Walking down the street at night, when you’re all alone, you can still hear stirring in the intermingled braches of the trees above, the ardent prayer of Baucis and Philemon. They whisper: ALL: ‘Let me die the moment my love dies.’ NARRATOR ONE: They whisper: ALL: ‘Let me not outlive my capacity to love.’ NARRATOR ONE: They whisper: ALL: ‘Let me die still loving, and so, never die.’ (83) By ensuring that it is all who voice the power of love to overcome death, Zimmerman offers this hope to us all as a collective gift. Through the series of myths enacted on stage, freighted with loss, we have been asked to relive or to imagine our own personal losses. The staging of these myths has been a collective experience that demands reflection upon the implications for each individual, as Phaeton’s therapist acknowledges: ‘It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions’ (67–8). Because Zimmerman creates a dream world for us in which to explore these public dreams, she has the power to soften the close of the dream, to make the ending of the myth less brutal. The medium of the theatre, especially via the constant transformation of the pool into various different forms and signifiers, facilitates her creation of magical illusion.³⁰ Just after the collective chorus of ‘Let me die still loving, and so, never die’ she inserts a coda, one final scene which takes us back to the opening of the play. Midas reappears, and because he has changed his values, he is able to reverse death. The first sign of this comes when he drops his daughter’s skipping rope into the water and is able to pull out a ³⁰ See Chirico (2008), 153: ‘Ovid’s motif of bodily transformation as a sign from the gods is doubly reinforced by the medium of the theatre—where actors are converted into characters and a bare stage is transformed into a magical locale.’

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pliant, supple rope, rather than a solid gold length. He looks up to see his daughter miraculously in her warm human form. Zimmerman alludes to Virgil’s Aeneid and the futile attempts of Aeneas to embrace the ghosts first of his lost wife, Creusa, and then of his father Anchises,³¹ as she evokes the clumsiness of the embrace between the living and the recently lost: ‘They move toward each other in the pool. She tries two times to embrace him, but he starts away, frightened. The third time, she succeeds. They kneel together in the water. The members of the company all blow out the floating candles’ (83). Zimmerman has staged Ovid in such a way that her audiences reflect upon his transmission to us, even as they recognize their own sorrows and defeats in the myths that he has bequeathed to us. The fragility of happiness, the inevitability of loss, the random and brutal plague of mental illness, the consequences of poor parenting are all themes that are explored on stage and that require us to identify with them and to evaluate our own histories as we watch. It is because Zimmerman recognizes the searing pain of such identification that she allows us the gift of the final scene, a brief moment, where everything is restored and all is well. When the play was first produced in 1998 nobody could have imagined quite how powerful an afterlife it would have; just three years later it was being staged in a country where nothing could ever be the same again after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Just as in the France of the Occupation, classical myth allowed people to explore their responses to a febrile political landscape,³² but also spoke to the bewilderment of those whose world had been transformed in ways that had seemed previously unimaginable. Miriam Chirico noted that the tragic events of 9/11 were also read onto the play by William Meyers, another reviewer, who said:

³¹ Aeneid II, 792–4; also Aeneid VI, 700–2: ‘ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno’. Sarah Ruden’s translation for Book II—‘Three times I threw my arms around her neck. Three times her image fled my useless hands, Like weightless wind and dreams that flit away’—adapts the translation for the sixth book: ‘Three times he tried / To throw his arms around his father’s neck, / Three times the form slid from his useless hands, / Like weightless wind or dreams that fly away.’ ³² Chirico (2008), 149: ‘Theater, when it responds to social or political events in compelling ways, can serve as a political barometer for our times.’

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When Metamorphoses opened in New York shortly after the World Trade Center attack, audiences responded with open emotion to the way it confronted the ineluctable . . . Even today, nothing one sees happening on Zimmerman’s stage is any more unbelievable than that the World Trade Center should have been metamorphosed from twin towers of steel and glass to two insubstantial beams of light. (151)

In the wake of so brutal a transformation of their world Americans were particularly responsive to the narratives and images of loss represented within Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. In her fascinating article about how Zimmerman’s play offered its audiences an outlet for their bewilderment and grief, Chirico surveyed many of the reviews of productions staged after the 9/11 attacks. One reviewer, Ben Brantley, described how her Metamorphoses ‘speak with a dreamlike hush directly to New Yorkers’ souls’ and claimed that through ‘Ovid’s tales of transformation, themselves the product of an era of uncertainty and a shaken empire, Ms Zimmerman gives physical life to the forms that grief assumes.’³³ In an interview with National Public Radio, also cited by Chirico, Brantley spoke of the importance of the myth of Orpheus to thousands of New Yorkers, haunted by those whom they had lost and prey to the cruel tricks that grief plays upon the living—those moments of catching a glimpse of the dead person on the street and gazing, until the person’s features settle back into being the face of a stranger. Grief turns us all into Orpheus, gazing so hard in our belief that we may recover the dead that the image of the loved one recedes and melts away. Chirico writes that New York audience members in particular would recognise the desire to strike a deal with God or with Death for the return of the beloved, no matter how irrational the belief is. Brantley, in an interview on National Public radio, summed up this sense of loss: ‘The retelling of Orpheus, I think, is quite extraordinary, because I think recently, especially, we’ve all had that sense of looking over our shoulder and finding the person we thought was there is not.’³⁴

Zimmerman’s play, which had already spoken powerfully to the modern world, through its warning against capitalist greed, its meditation upon creationism and science, its allusions to psychoanalysis, suddenly acquired a new and poignant urgency in the wake of the attacks through its multiple articulations of grief. Not only does this illustrate the ways in which books ³³ Cited in Chirico (2008), 151. ³⁴ Chirico (2008), 170–1. See also Ziolkowski (2005), 205.

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and plays transform themselves in response to shifting political and cultural landscapes, but it also added an extra classical veneer to the production of the plays, since the audiences underwent the process of catharsis. Zimmerman, who had been very nervous about how audiences might respond to her depictions of raw grief, in the wake of the attacks, described the moment of witnessing catharsis as a kind of epiphany: ‘Oh, so that’s what catharsis is. This thing I’ve read about my whole life, that the theater is supposed to do, I’ve just witnessed it: going through pity and terror, and surviving it.’³⁵ Zimmerman’s play stages an Ovid of the new millennium, an Ovid whose tales are voiced and interpreted not just by males, but also by women of different classes and of different levels of education— laundresses and scientists and therapists, as well as grieving wives and tortured young girls. Zimmerman adapts and transforms Ovid, and so helps to ensure his survival. Through the extraordinary afterlife of her play, however, when it spoke to Americans directly of what they had suffered in the autumn of 2001, her presentation of Ovid acquired a new dimension, as it enabled Americans both to map onto these ancient myths their sense of loss, their fear, and their bewilderment in the face of terrorism and to emerge from such an encounter with renewed hope of their own survival.

³⁵ Cited in Chirico (2008), 152.

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6 Saviana Stanescu Born in Bucharest in 1967, the poet and playwright Saviana Stanescu emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York a few days before September 11th. She depicts her emotions on seeing the city of New York for the first time: ‘I was overwhelmed by the City as a whole / an abbreviation of the big old new world.’¹ As Stanescu emigrated from Romania to the USA, the centre of the Western world, she was reversing the journey made by Ovid from Rome, the then centre of the Western world, to Romania to spend the last eight years of his life in exile. Stanescu, who grew up visiting the statue of Ovid every summer on holiday in Constanţa,² invokes Ovid in her extended poem ‘GOOGLE ME!’ (2006) which she says ‘aims to capture my creative response to the immigrant experience and my on-going love relationship with the English language’. As Stanescu moves into the English language she moves into a tradition shaped by writers such as Shakespeare, e. e. cummings, Virginia Woolf, and Angela Carter, but ‘GOOGLE ME!’ is both an exploration of Stanescu’s experience of emigration, of uprooting, and a homage to the poet who died in the land where she was born, and who exerted a vital influence over her as a writer. Within ‘GOOGLE ME!’ Stanescu writes her own ‘Tristia’, except that in her version they are poems written by a Barbarian woman, Tristia, to Ovid. In this way Tristia performs the same role as the writing women of Ovid’s Heroides. Stanescu explores the possibilites of the Tristia character further in the play that grew out of this idea; it is an extended response to Ovid’s exile, entitled ¹ Stanescu, ‘GOOGLE ME!’ All citations are from the online edition and so have no page numbers. ² Ranger (2016), 333: ‘Stanescu herself learned Latin in the seventh and eighth grades at school. But from a young age she was also familiar with the story of Ovid from his statue; Constanța is a popular sea-side holiday destination for the inhabitants of Bucharest and so every childhood holiday for Stanescu also “meant a little encounter with Ovid.” ’

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For A Barbarian Woman (2011), which I shall discuss in the second half of this chapter. Stanescu lends a classical flavour to her poem even through the explanatory notes at the beginning, where she states that ‘‘GOOGLE ME!’ inhabits that space created by the global gods of internet and migration.’ The evocation of the gods is not simply a device by which she might define the forces that govern modern life, it establishes a link with classical poetry where poets conventionally invoke the gods whose blessing they seek for their work. Stanescu’s choice of the ‘god of migration’ offers some explanation of the resurgence of interest in Ovid’s exile poetry, while the conjunction of the ‘god of [the] internet’ with the title ‘GOOGLE ME!’ points to a contemporary obsession with fame, a variation of Ovid’s persistent assertions about the capacity of his poetry to ensure him lasting glory and to outlive his mortal frame. The title ‘GOOGLE ME!’ is not just a challenge to do a web search for Stanescu, to explore the self that is constructed for the internet, for public consumption, but is also an invitation to look up the multiple literary allusions that she makes, including the Ovidian ones. We have already considered the rather beautiful scene, imagined by Darrieussecq, of the poet, Ovid, standing at her shoulder and gazing in astonishment at this computer screen from which his words fly into the ether and continue to dominate the world. We have also seen the way in which Tawada transforms the smooth screen into the mirror in which contemporary descendants of Narcissus can gaze lovingly as their self-obsessed longings play themselves out online as tawdry porn. Stanescu’s ‘GOOGLE ME!’ offers a further version of Ovid in the internet age, an age where identities are forged and shattered in the wonderland of the world wide web. As it does so it adds an extra twist to Ovid’s assertion that his name, his fame would travel through the ether and would outlive any physical monuments or engravings. The net, as an infinite space which ensures global fame but is also a place from which one can be instantly and brutally eradicated, offers an afterlife to Ovid that surpasses his wildest imaginings.³ Ovid depicted his House of Fama as a site that never sleeps, that has limitless entry and exit points:

³ For Ovid’s obsession with his fame see Philip Hardie (2012), 167: ‘In the Epilogue (to the Metamorphoses) Ovid predicts his own eternal life in the medium of a fama which now appropriates to itself both the spatial superiority of a Jovian fate (15.875–6 super alta . . . astra ferar ‘I shall be carried above the high stars’), and the fixity of the engraved or inscribed word, 876 nomenque erit indelebile nostrum ‘my name will be inerasable’.’

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Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce, innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis. nocte dieque patet. tota est ex aere sonanti, tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit. nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte, nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis, qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis esse solent, qualemue sonum, cum Iuppiter atras increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt. (Metamorphoses XII, 43–52) (There Rumour lives, in a home she has chosen for herself on a hilltop. Night and day the house lies open, for she has given it a thousand apertures and countless entrances, with never a door to barricade her thresholds. The whole structure is of echoing brass, and is full of noises, repeating words and giving back the sounds it hears. There is no quiet within, no silence in any part, and yet there is no loud din, but only murmured whisperings, like the sounds of the sea’s waves, heard at a distance, or the last rumbles of thunder when Jupiter has crashed dark clouds together.)⁴

As the world has expanded to the dimensions of a limitless internet, the forces of globalization make the physical world seem diminished. Stanescu muses upon her reasons for emigrating, observing that ‘I had to move into another language / Mine was too small too poor too lazy.’⁵ However, on arrival in this new world, where English is the dominant tongue, she was disconcerted by its familiarity: So why do I need to move at all? Why do I need to travel? There’s a McDonalds on my block in Bucharest There’s a cinema with Hollywood movies Two blocks away I’ve got a laptop a DVD player an American Dishwashing machine

Immediately following the author’s statement, to which Stanescu conveys a classical feel by invoking the ‘global gods of internet and migration’, is the injunction, ‘Welcome!’ Stanescu thus creates the illusion that we are ⁴ See Hardie’s careful comparison of this passage with the descriptions of the Underworld in both Ovid and Virgil, an analysis which closes with the observation that ‘The underworld and the House of Fama are equally capacious and insatiable, the former for human souls, the latter for news.’ Hardie (2012), 174. ⁵ In this, of course, she is the exact reverse of Ovid, who moaned a great deal about the barbarism of the Getic language.

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entering a website, that once we press click, or turn the page, we will be in a different world. Like Tawada, she explores the dangers of belonging too eagerly to this world. It is a world that encourages a blunting of sensibilities, a dehumanization: In a war People become numbers. Robots. Cartoons. Video games. Booooom—bazoom! Done. Exit. Start a new game? Yes. Click. PLAY.

As we negotiate this new, online world, where it is possible to have a virtual identity, to become little more than an avatar, we risk losing sight of our identities off the screen. Validation and endorsement arrive in the form of an approved online presence: Google me! Google me! Everyone I know googles me now Google is my proof that I exist I think therefore I am?

‘GOOGLE ME!’ is a heavily allusive poem, which reaches into a number of literary traditions. In the above extract Stanescu is, of course, subverting Descartes’s famous declaration ‘cogito ergo sum’. The addition of the question mark indicates that this philosophy no longer suffices—only the internet can confer the illusion of a stable identity. Such a predicament, in a poem so suffused with Ovidian references, looks back to Ovid’s conflicted attitude towards his fame, his overweening self-confidence always undermined by his fear of disappearing. Stanescu’s own ambivalence to her hybrid life straddling two countries, two continents, is to give herself the new name of SUSPENDIDA, and to depict her identity via the imagery of metamorphosis. Though still a young woman when she moves to the States, she steps into the much older stance of one who has seen too much and declares: ‘I am a tree, you can tell / how many corpses I’ve seen / by counting my wrinkles.’ She is both tree and old woman at one and the same time, an effect achieved by the choice of ‘wrinkles’ rather than ‘rings’. As the poem continues she develops these dual identities. She experiences herself as ‘an immigrant fish / in the sandland / of land-lords and land-shores’. As she merges into these different forms, she desperately tries to ground herself: ‘And here I am / here I am

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here I am / SUSPENDED.’ She is plant and human, fish and human, belonging to Romania, belonging to America, and both young and old. Her story is her own, but it belongs to many, many others at the same time. Her new name reflects this: ‘SUSPENDIDA / my new name / is the beginning of a new old story.’ She signals the stories on which she bases her new identity through the literary allusions of the poem. That she is drawing upon a feminist tradition of re-visioning the ancient world, the world of both myth and fairy tales, becomes clear by the title of one of the poem’s subsections: ‘DANCING WITH WOOLF (or After Hours).’ Stanescu’s title reminds us of Woolf ’s conflicted relationship with the ancient world, and the limitations of her educational opportunities, but she also follows Anne Carson in filtering her responses to the ancient world through her readings of Virginia Woolf.⁶ Moreover the title also looks to Angela Carter, and her famous re-tellings of well-known fairytales, Dancing with Wolves. Stanescu invites herself into Woolf ’s room as her literary sister: hey Virginia shall we dance [ . . . ] in a room a room of our own it’s high time for us Virginias two cloned sisters condemned to dance with wolves⁷

What does it mean for Stanescu to think of herself as Woolf ’s clone? Clearly, through the invocations of Woolf, Carter, and Carson she is looking back to her literary mothers, authors engaged both in recognizing and expanding the educational limitations placed upon women, and in reshaping the literary tradition to accommodate female perspectives. But to think of herself as Woolf ’s clone suggests that she is attempting to address at the start of the twenty-first century those issues that would preoccupy Woolf, if she were here to witness them. Where Woolf ’s feminism is first-wave, and Carter’s second-wave, Stanescu is embroiled in the ‘lived messiness’ of the third-wave and her response to Ovid is ⁶ Anne Carson opens her volume Men in the Off Hours with an essay about Thucydides and Woolf: ‘Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War.’ Carson (2000), 3–9. ⁷ Virginia and her husband Leonard were frequently known to their friends as ‘the Wolves’.

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embedded in a world in which the internet has both facilitated and metamorphosed pornography, and radically altered our ideas of celebrity and fame. In one section of the poem Stanescu divides her voice between ‘S’, a woman, and ‘U’, an inflatable woman. The initials clearly belong together as ‘US’, but only ever appear separated. The image of the inflatable woman evokes sex toys, an idea that is reinforced with the designation of a CV as FLASH BACK FLASH FORWARD. FLESH BACK. FLESH FORWARD. Even in the twenty-first century a woman’s CV is still, all too often, accompanied by expectations that she will need to fulfil in order to advance.⁸ In the exchange between ‘S’ and ‘U’ it becomes apparent that the ‘real’ woman is always under threat of becoming lost. ‘U’ demands, in a tone that recalls the title ‘GOOGLE ME!’, ‘Look at you!’ But ‘S’ feels as overlooked, and as silenced, and as invisible as one of the lost women of the ancient world. She replies: ‘I can’t. I disappeared thousands and thousands of years ago.’ As their conversation continues ‘S’ complains about her loneliness—‘I am alone’, she laments, but ‘U’ counters, ‘See, you are not alone.’ ‘S’ becomes increasingly distressed that nobody recognizes her true self, saying, ‘Nobody can see me’, to which ‘U’ responds: ‘Everybody can see you.’ The exchange points to the paradox of internet identities, which present selected, chosen facts about a person’s identity available to millions of people at a click, while the real self can long to be seen and validated. In her frustration ‘S’ kills the doll, but its death brings her no peace: ‘I cannot stop. / I cannot stop. / I cannot stop.’ Stanescu also appears in ‘GOOGLE ME!’ in the guise of an Ovidian heroine, and is given five sections under the name of ‘Tristia’. As Holly Ranger points out, Tristia is a ‘poetic embodiment of Ovid’s work in exile’;⁹ it is also tempting to see a parallel in the educated, articulate ‘Tristia’ and the learned female poet, Perilla, to whom Ovid addressed letters from exile. Stanescu has already told us that in order to become Woolf ’s double and to follow in the footsteps of Carter and Carson, she

⁸ Darrieussecq’s novel of metamorphosis, Truismes, opens distressingly with an account of the narrator being interviewed for a job in a beauty parlour, and becoming so enchanted by the promise of a paltry salary and discounted beauty products that she barely notices the sexual favours that are demanded of her in order to get the job. ⁹ Ranger (2016), 338. See also footnote 37 of 338 where Ranger observes that ‘As a neuter plural form of the adjective tristis, “Tristia” is an impossible name for a girl; yet Stanescu’s choice of character chimes nicely with the other conveniently metrical trisyllabic mistresses of elegiac poetry, Corinna, Cynthia, Lesbia, and Delia.’

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not only had to move country, but also had to ‘move into another language’. In the persona of Tristia, however, she uses Romanian to challenge Ovid’s prejudices about civilization and barbarism. Her interventions are called the ‘Letter of a Barbarian Woman’, and are prefaced by citations from ‘Ex Ponto, a stupid translation found on the internet’.¹⁰ The passage that Stanescu selects for citation contains Ovid’s realization that in this foreign land he is the outsider, he is the tongue-tied, monoglot barbarian:¹¹ We’re scarcely protected by the fortress’ shelter: and even the barbarous crowd inside, mixed with Greeks, inspire fear, for the barbarians live amongst us, without discrimination and also occupy more than half the houses. [ . . . ] I have to make myself understood by gestures Here I’m the barbarian no-one comprehends . . . ’

Tristia’s bilingualism throws Ovid’s reluctance to learn Getic, and his difficulty with integration, into stark relief. Her first intervention is accompanied by the observation ‘(when Tristia can’t help it anymore and starts writing)’. On the one hand she is the descendant of Ovid’s heroines from the Heroides, whose plight is voiced through a female focalization. On the other hand, however, she is very much not controlled by Ovid, and therefore breaks away from the female figure of traditional love elegy, the fabricated portrait, whom Maria Wyke identified as the scripta puella.¹² With an intelligence that soars past Ovid’s frozen, mind-blocked grief she observes: I’m the Barbarian you don’t comprehend Ovid Nu ma intelegi Ovidiu

¹⁰ The translation Stanescu is referring to is by A. S. Kline. See Ranger (2016), 337–8: ‘The opening poem [ . . . ] consists of a translation of Tristia 5.10. 13–37 lifted directly from poetryintranslation.com.’ ¹¹ It was this realization in particular that persuaded Darrieussecq of Ovid’s modernity. Darrieussecq (2013). ¹² See Ingleheart (2012) where she sums up Wyke’s position, before demonstrating that Ovid’s approach to Perilla expands the boundaries of the ‘scripta puella’: ‘the way in which scholars have assigned a real existence to Perilla constitutes a striking exception to the widespread acceptance of the thesis of Maria Wyke that the women of Roman elegy are fictional constructs, scriptae puellae written to meet the needs of the male elegist’ (227). See also Ranger (2016), 338: ‘A bitter homage to Ovid’s poetic women, Stanescu’s own literary puella deconstructs and challenges his constructed elegiac scriptae puellae.’

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You’re trapped inside your Latin language and your past of love and ease I’m trapped too in my childhood of danger and blood I wear a dagger You wear a pen.

Tristia recognizes that both she and Ovid are trapped, that both of them need to forge a voice that will allow them an escape from pasts that have been shaped for both of them by discourses of power. Ovid’s past bestowed a pen upon him, while hers provided her with a dagger, accoutrements that mark them respectively as ‘civilized’ and ‘barbaric.’ As she looks back to her ‘childhood of danger and blood’ the reader looks through her eyes to the Romania of Ceauşescu, which was the landscape of Stanescu’s childhood. In her first letter to him Tristia maintains the distance between what she perceives as his ‘civilized’ world and her more brutal background. As she does so she begs him to become her praeceptor amoris, to teach her the arts of love that he set out in his Ars Amatoria. This reminder to the reader of the ‘carmen’ that is likely to have offended Augustus’ family values and brought about Ovid’s exile also enables us to evaluate the distance between Ovid’s scurrilous verse and the ‘inflatable dolls’ or ‘internet images’ that constitute so much of contemporary pornography: you wrote the Art of Love ars amatoria teach me the amateur the barbarian the language of your thoughts, Ovid [ . . . ] teach me Ovid [ . . . ] I’ll teach you something too

Stanescu’s language acquires the cadences of e. e. cummings’s love poetry, as she attempts to achieve equality with Ovid through a love that would transcend their linguistic differences: ‘maybe my heart will learn the language of your heart / maybe I can talk and you can listen / maybe I can listen and you can talk.’¹³ However, Tristia’s quest is doomed to failure, and she joins the ranks of the lamenting women of the Heroides,

¹³ See e. e. cummings’s poem ‘I carry your heart with me’.

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themselves no more than scriptae puellae, as she complains to him that ‘you don’t see me Ovid you don’t hear me / you listen to the rain and to the snow’. She becomes still more abject and desperate in her next poem, where her words echo the language of the Catholic Mass: ‘I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs from under your table, but only say the word and I shall be healed,’ a connection which is strengthened later in the poem when she prays ‘give us our daily Goddy’. Stanescu begs: ‘help me Ovid / to sweep myself among the pile of crumbs / of bread / after your meal so you can hold me / in your fist.’ But the image of the fist is suggestive of brutality and abuse, so it is not surprising that the violence in the poem escalates. At first Ovid is simply cold, and unresponsive to Tristia’s emotions, a situation which allows Stanescu to exploit the imagery of metamorphosis: ‘with your fish-fingers / you cannot touch the fire / of my heart.’ However, as their relationship develops, the ‘Chorus of Men’ appear. Unlike the chorus of ancient Greek tragedy, they don’t simply comment upon the action for the benefit of the audience, they egg Ovid on to increasingly dehumanizing acts. A game of chess is depicted, where it becomes apparent that Tristia’s body is the chessboard: ‘he was quite inventive / but he couldn’t give up 19 / then B7 became his resting place.’ In their next intervention the word ‘fairytale’ appears in parentheses after the indication ‘Chorus of Men’. Stanescu may be commenting upon the brutality that darkens the fairytale world, or she may be highlighting the lies that men tell themselves to justify doing whatever they like: ‘it’s not difficult to hit her all you’ve gotta do / is squeeze the trigger when / she screams nooo with women this always / means yessss.’ To the ears of those who refuse to listen to women, who see women purely as sexual objects, the terrified howl of ‘no’ metamorphoses easily into a satisfied cry of ‘yessss’. Tristia’s frustration becomes still more acute, when she discovers that, as a scripta puella, she has enabled Ovid to win the Nobel prize ‘for inventing her’.¹⁴ By reading male theorists and philosophers on love and language Ovid has created a fictional woman whose presence drowns out Tristia’s own voice, so that all she is left with is a small, lonely assertion—‘me’:

¹⁴ Her annoyance parallels that of Carol Ann Duffy’s Eurydice in The World’s Wife, who remained unconvinced of Orpheus’ supposed literary talent.

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you’re sure you’ve authored each mark scrawled on my skin [ . . . ] rolandbarthes of my pleasures austin of my performative utterances phd academic scholar researcher nobel laureate for inventing me¹⁵

This shrunken voice foreshadows Stanescu’s anxiety of not really existing outside of Google, her sense that ‘I disappeared thousands and thousands of years ago’, and thus strengthens the connection between the scripta puella of Roman elegy and the cultural and social forces that script online identities in the contemporary world. This difficulty of establishing a coherent, stable identity becomes especially acute at the point of having to write a CV, of having to sift through the activities, achievements, and moments of a human life, in order to determine the self that one wants to project. In a gesture that recalls the FLASH BACK FLESH FORWARD conceit, Stanescu entitles the CV section of the poem ‘EUROTIC’, but it is also here that she makes it clear that she is, above all, Romanian: Who the hell do you think you are? EU means I in Romanian RO is an abbreviation of Romania. EURO might be read as ‘I’—an abbreviation of Romania I am a breathing abbreviation of Romania Question mark.

Where once Ovid felt himself to be quintessentially Roman, Stanescu asserts a Romanian pedigree. And where Ovid declared that the best of him was to be found in his books, and would outlive his mortal frame,

¹⁵ Once again the imagery is close to that of Duffy’s Eurydice, who complains about being ‘trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, / octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, / elegies, limericks, villanelles, / histories, myths’. Duffy (1999), 60. Ranger (2016), 342, reads this passage differently: ‘The final word of the poem “me” reveals Stanescu’s identification with her Tristia character and is visually and emotionally striking as the final word in the poem, a single word in the final line and a return to the first-person voice that the reader feared lost in the fairground poem. The “me” feels assertive—just as Ovid’s final word in the Metamorphoses, vivam, asserts authorship—and looks forward to a new beginning; now that Tristia has been fully deconstructed, dehumanized, over-analysed by theory and torn apart, Stanescu can start to re-build her and redress the wrongs of previous receptions and create new representations of Romanian (immigrant) women.’

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Stanescu, also, lists the books that have shaped her—both books she has read and books she has written: Black Milk The Outcast Compte au rebours Diary of a Clone I am my books.

The statement looks back to Ovid’s decision to send his books back to Rome to stand in place of himself, but also recalls the language used to depict Prospero in The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s most Ovidian plays. As the books she reads and writes meld into her identity, so Stanescu’s Fulbright grant metamorphoses into a series of images, all of which promise freedom, all of which fire her imagination: ‘(to be imagined: the Fulbright grant as a plane, a boat, a helicopter, a broom, a door, a submarine, a magic carpet).’ In order to gain entry to America, however, Stanescu must fulfil certain criteria and offer certain details about her identity and her life: I am a name, a number, a list A native, a woman, a foreigner, a New Yorker, a European, a Balkan girl, a GO-GO EAST, a GO-GO WEST, a poet, a playwright, a critic, a teacher, a scholar, a hi/story told by an idiot

The last line of the extract evokes, of course, Macbeth’s conclusion that life is little more than a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. In Stanescu’s work it seems likely that the idiots are those authors who define the identities of others, without troubling themselves to look beyond the convenient labels. Moreover, in a world dominated by the internet, by the need to construct a self that can be discovered on Google, or promoted in a job interview, the risks of discovering that she is a scripta puella are as high as they would have been in Ovid’s day. In order to root herself she moves backwards through her life, in the way that one does through an employment history on a CV: 1975—I am declaiming poems with Ceausescu 1974—I am reading poems with Ceausescu 1973—I am taught poems with Ceausescu

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But this process leads only to the hissing, angry voices, spitting out the questions most likely to be levelled at immigrants and/or women— people who have failed to learn their place: ‘Who the hell you think you are? Where the hell you think you are?’ Stanescu’s response is to experience herself as SUSPENDIDA—caught between the ancient and contemporary worlds, caught between two different continents, caught in a web of shifting, varied lives. In order to enable so plural an existence, she devises the Saviana Stanescu fellowship, the aims of which allow us to hear her poetic creed: It’s a fellowship that allows you to travel wherever you want. There are no money or visa problems. There are no economic or censorship issues. No racial/ ethnic/ gender inequities. There is no war. There are no superpowers. There is everything you need. There’s nothing to worry about. We are all free to do whatever.

This negotiation of her relationships with the ancient and contemporary worlds, with male canonical authors, with global powers, and with fame underpins the play Stanescu wrote in 2011, which extends and expands many of the themes in ‘GOOGLE ME!’. For a Barbarian Woman is set in Tomis/Constanţa—a direction that underlines the different time periods through which the action travels, as the present Constanţa is the Tomis of the past. These time periods are also indicated by Stanescu’s indication that the play is set in AD 9 and also two millennia later. Once again we meet the young girl, Ovid’s lover, Tristia, whose modern counterpart is a young research student named Theo, who is returning to Romania to find a lost manuscript by Ovid as she is writing a PhD in English and Latin for the University of Bucharest ‘on Ovid’s letters from Tomis, his EPISTULAE EX PONTO’. Significantly, Theo is an interpreter—a role that enables her to reflect upon the ways in which Ovid’s Latin can still be understood and received in the modern world. The tensions and anxieties that she experiences in her relationship with her older lover, Rich, a war veteran, echo the insecurities characterizing the relationship between Ovid and Tristia. The stage directions indicate that the same actress can play the parts of Theo and Tristia, and the same actor the parts of Rich and Ovid. The same dance of love is choreographed against different millennia. Fittingly for a play that takes Ovid as its inspiration, the cast of characters is not confined to humans. Indeed, one of the central characters is the Black Sea; he offers commentary on the action in both the ancient and the modern world, functioning rather like one of Ovid’s river gods, such as Achelous from Metamorphoses VIII. The Black Sea is

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described in the dramatis personae as ‘a beautiful and powerful black man in a long flowing dress’.¹⁶ Despite his power his utterances convey a sense of sibylline weariness—he has lived so long that he has seen the same heartbreaks, triumphs, and despairs over and over again, and is doomed to keep seeing them. But, of course, such a situation also allows us to see the way in which the griefs of the Heroides continue to play themselves out today. It is the Black Sea who sets the scene and introduces the play as a whole: ‘I’ve seen it all [ . . . ] The same sand, the same shore / The same darkness / [ . . . ] People / As they call them now / People.’ The repetition of ‘people’ and the querying tone of ‘As they call them now’ establishes this world still further as Ovidian, since Ovid’s Metamorphoses delight in querying and challenging the limits of what we think of as human. Furthermore, the Black Sea has lived for so long, through so many changes of regime, that he is prone to forget the correct sequence of the rise and fall of empires, a lapse that has little consequence, since the human stories of grief and hope and loss remain: I’m not sure which empire is now in power It feels like yesterday we had the Romans here Before them the Greeks Or was it the other way around? When did the Ottomans come? No, that was centuries after, centuries after the Romans I guess I liked them the best, the Romans The name they gave me PONTUS EUXINUS Had some dignity.

This soliloquy, reflecting upon who is in power at any one particular moment, and the ways in which this power is abused—in war, in love, between nations, between sexes—highlights a theme that underpins the play as a whole, and that Stanescu explored in the wake of one of her exchanges with Ovid: last summer I went back to Constanta, the city of my childhood summer vacations and of my first poems, and went to the statue of Ovid to have a ‘chat’ with him. I began to think about the power relationship between empires and the small nations they conquered and assimilated; [ . . . ] about the relationship between a western man and a woman from the poor East. A woman objectified by her history, by her upbringing, by her ‘luck’ of having been born in a powerless

¹⁶ As the only available edition of For a Barbarian Woman is an online one, there are no page references.

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country. All these issues resonate for me in the current social and political context, when sex-traffic from Eastern Europe flourishes and Balkan women still have to struggle to get a voice and life of their own.¹⁷

Nevertheless, there are certain human stories that have lodged in the Black Sea’s memory, and one of those is Ovid, especially in his distressed pacing up and down the seashore, like one of his characters from the Heroides. The Black Sea sifts through his memories and concludes that ‘I guess it was when that poet OVID was still walking and whining along this shore.’ Ovid does not cut a heroic or dashing figure in the memories of the Black Sea, who remembers with a certain fondness those who lost their lives in his waters in the name of a cause: ‘Revolutionaries, rebels, outcasts, / Those are the types I do support. / Maybe because I’ve seen so many of their deaths, / They’re like my children. / I give them death.’ Ovid’s name does not belong on the list of those who died in honour of a noble cause, but the Black Sea records his existence, nonetheless, because it was Ovid who gave him immortality through literature: ‘And Ovid, that poet Ovid, / He wasn’t that bad after all, / He wrote EPISTULAE EX PONTO, / Letters from my shore! / He made me famous / So I am ready to forgive him.’ In addition to the commentaries offered by the Black Sea on the love stories of Ovid/Tristia and Theo/Rich, three Muses appear from time to time, who also express concerns about their reputation and survival. Despite having names that link them strongly to the ancient world, Verba, Euxina, and Ponta cross the centuries to the modern world through the teenage vernacular that they use. During one of her early appearances Ponta sympathizes with the Black Sea’s longing for an end to the suffering and suicides that he witnesses year after year, century after century: ‘OK, I’m all up for something new and joyous. No more wars! No more deaths! No Greek tragedy. No sad romantic poetry. Just family dramas. Soap-operas. Telenovelas. Love stories.’ There is an irony in her demand for both ‘No more deaths’ and ‘Love stories’, as any reader of the Heroides could tell her. There is a further paradox in her rejection of literature and culture in favour of soap-operas and telenovelas, when she herself is appearing in a play whose subject is the survival of Ovid and his poetry. It becomes clear to the Muses that forgetting Ovid is not possible, when they catch sight of Theo, who has come to Constanta/ Tomis in order to look for Ovid’s lost poem, the only one that he wrote in

¹⁷ Stanescu cited in Ranger (2016), 343.

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Getan. Tellingly, the minute they lay eyes on her, they take heed of their reputation: EUXINA :

Shhhh! Look, that Romanian girl Theo is coming over here. She’s writing a thesis about us, we better be nice to her. PONTA : She’s writing about Ovid. EUXINA : But she mentions us. VERBA : And the Barbarian woman. Verba’s reflections upon the relationship between Ovid and Tristia enable her to engage in Ovidian punning on Tristia’s name: ‘TRISTIA. She was no joke that gal!’ But as the three of them slide back towards the memories of the past, Verba sharply recalls them to the present: ‘You gotta update your memory, sisters. Upgrade your brain.’ The imagery Verba uses establishes the Muses as repositories of stories, of histories, blurring the boundaries of the human as it presents them as living hard drives. Theo’s first appearance is to walk along the beaches of the Black Sea.¹⁸ Significantly, she is wearing a Roman coin necklace, which further establishes the links between the ancient and contemporary worlds. She, too, echoes the gestures of thousands of humans before her, as she voices her concerns on the seashore. In a typically Ovidian flourish, the Black Sea reminds us of its protean, metamorphic qualities by switching gender at this point: ‘BLACK SEA sits on the ground watering her hands. She listens carefully to what Theo has to say.’ Theo speaks of the relief and comfort of coming home (paradoxically to the very place where Ovid himself felt least at home), but darkens her observations by thinking of the suicides that the sea has seen: ‘I missed this, Black Sea. There’s something in these waves, this smell, this breeze, it’s ‘home’ . . . The perfect place to start your life . . . (with a sad smile) And to end it, you would argue . . . ’ The sadness in her smile may point to difficulties in the relationship between Theo and Rich, a colonel from the US army. Rich also wanders along the seashore and meditates upon his past: ‘Yeah, I did what you asked me to do. I’m staring at the same Black Sea as Ovid did five millennia ago. It’s a strange feeling. To walk in the footsteps of our ancestors, the Roman empire, miss Valenti . . . sorry, Mrs Bloom.’ As Rich gazes back in memory to the days of Ovid, he travels past the Molly ¹⁸ In Ovid’s world walking next to water is a dangerous activity. It is on the seashore that many of the heroines of the Heroides cast their laments. See Rimell (2006), 186, quoted in Chapter 4 n. 9.

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Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses, a manoeuvre that allows Stanescu to indicate the literary tradition in which she wants to situate her play. Where the Black Sea spoke of his weariness in seeing the same stories play themselves out over and over again on his shores, often culminating in suicide, Rich expresses a parallel exhaustion, having seen endless horrors in the war zones where he’d worked: ‘I’m too old for that. For Iraq. Corpse after corpse after corpse. Like parts on a factory line. Mangled, burned, riddled with bullets like a watering can. Kids brought to the hospital with their legs and arms in plastic bags . . . I couldn’t even take the green zone anymore.’ The bodies Rich depicts are dehumanized, reduced to individual body parts, or likened to household objects such as watering cans. The world of war enacts its own metamorphoses, which are as brutal and as shocking as anything that Ovid envisaged. By overlaying her response to Ovid with the horrors perpetrated in the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, Stanescu interrogates the dissemination of Western values, the urge to dominate and control, the creation of empire, and the impact that global decisions have on the lives of helpless, ordinary people. Rich speaks of his growing disillusionment with the idea of establishing a Western model of democracy within Iraq: ‘My soldiers lost hope over there. And what could I tell them . . . I lost faith too . . . In 2003 when I got there, I believed in our mission. Helping the Iraqi people build a new democracy. Spreading our democracy into the world . . . But now . . . I’m dreaming every night of a house by the ocean.’ Rich recognizes the futility of the enterprise (as well as its questionable aims, on which he is challenged later by Theo). Even far away from the war zone he is haunted by the ‘gloomy Iraqi faces’ to such an extent that ‘I couldn’t even smile to these nice Romanian people’. His sense of superiority combined with an inability to fit in establishes striking parallels with Ovid who is, of course, supposed to be played by the same actor. Theo recognizes that both men are operating in: ‘English and Latin! Two powerful languages, two languages of power.’ Like Rich, Ovid also struggles with an innate sense of superiority, combined with an uncomfortable awareness that his values and his culture are the ones that are out of kilter in this alien land.¹⁹ As Ovid woos Tristia, his frustration with her lack of familiarity with Roman customs is barely concealed: ¹⁹ It was Ovid’s line ‘hic ego sum barbarus’ (Tristia) that convinced Marie Darrieussecq of his modernity. See Darrieussecq (2013).

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See, TRISTIA . . . I really wish you could understand my language. Its subtleties. The play on words. The cultural references. The jokes. The wit. The poetry. If you were a Roman woman, a noble woman, a beautiful woman . . . I’m not saying you’re not attractive, you are, you really are, in this . . . wild, Barbarian way.

It is interesting that Tristia displays greater intellectual openness than Ovid—while she recognizes that different languages shape different responses, her observations are free from value judgements. She observes simply: ‘We don’t say “I love you”. We say “I want you.” ’ The closest she comes to criticism is through her observation about the growth and development of her native language, which has become infected by the values of empire-building, imported by the Romans: ‘We borrowed those words from the Latin. We didn’t have them twenty years ago. Slave. Master. Funny words.’ Ovid’s inability to cope with an independent, intelligent Tristia, who doesn’t immediately fall at his feet, leads him to define her as ‘a witch? A spirit? A Goddess?’.²⁰ His difficulties in accepting her on her own terms as an educated, thoughtful woman cast doubt upon his sincerity in probing the hearts and minds of females throughout his oeuvre. The Muse Verba identifies the side of Ovid that manages to remain dispassionate and detached: ‘I dunno. He doesn’t strike me as sincere. He doesn’t write from his heart.’²¹ As he continues to contrast Tomis and Rome, he emphasizes that all of the deficiencies that he finds in Tomis make it a colder place for him. Ovid’s famous complaints about the barbaric conditions and fiendish cold of his exile have been disproved, but through her Ovid Stanescu intimates that Ovid’s psychological miseries manifested themselves as experiencing extreme cold. He challenges Tristia with the question: ‘Exile. Do you understand this word “exile”? No, you don’t. You never tasted it. It’s sour and bitter. [ . . . ] I worship hot rhetorical debates and hot sophisticated lovers. [beat]²² What do I have now, here? Cold winters, cold words, cold waters, cold walls, cold ceilings—and a cold bed.’ That Stanescu wants us to discern the original writer Ovid behind Rich and behind her imagined Ovid is evidenced by her decision to ²⁰ As Ranger observes, this parallels the Ovid of Jane Alison’s The Love Artist, who also thinks of his lover Xenia as a witch. See Ranger (2016), 338. See also Ziolkowski (2005), 217. ²¹ See Sarah Annes Brown (1999), 8: ‘The world of the Metamorphoses has its own peculiar atmosphere. Although pathos is not quite absent, the overriding impression is of a kind of aesthetic detachment, rather than a deep involvement with any of the characters.’ ²² This is a stage direction.

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incorporate extracts from the Tristia into her play, which appear sometimes in the original Latin and sometimes in translation.²³ It is significant that one of the passages that Stanescu selects is the one where Ovid evokes the pain of not being able to communicate in the language of the country, the way in which he feels silenced and stultified: ‘They hold communication in the local tongue, / I have to make myself understood through gestures. / Here I am the barbarian no one comprehends.’²⁴ Though he doesn’t make the connection himself, Ovid moves closer to the position occupied by minorities, who struggle to make themselves heard, and who are often denied the background—such as a classical education—that will give their words the gravitas needed to reach an audience. His inability to communicate outside his native tongue is especially frightening for him as a poet, since he is unable to garner any kind of feedback for his poetry, to monitor his chances of softening Augustus’ heart through his verse, and to take care of his posthumous survival through literature. He summons Tristia: ‘Come here! I need you to see this. I know you can’t read Latin, but I need you to look at this and tell me what you think. Oh Apollo, oh Gods, I need some feedback.’ Once again, he assumes the unhappy position of so many of his heroines, doomed to utter words of despair at the backs of their departing lovers, knowing that they would never be heard. Despite the cultural barriers, despite the frozen misery of exile, Ovid succumbs to Tristia’s charms. Stanescu makes it clear that theirs is a love story that belongs to different ages, different cultures, by echoing not the mythical stories of the Heroides and the Metamorphoses but one of the most famous and doomed literary relationships of modern times— the love affair and marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. When Ovid and Tristia embrace, they both wound and kiss each other passionately: ‘ “You witch. You’ve charmed me.” He kisses her passionately. She scratches his face. Ovid slaps her.’ This fictional scene echoes Hughes’s first, famous encounter with the young American poet, Plath, in Cambridge, after which she described in her Journals how he had ²³ This is the translation that Ranger (2016) identified as being by A. S. Kline. See footnote 10. ²⁴ Stanescu also quotes: ‘So the man who dares to farm the fields is rare / one hand grips the plough, the other a weapon. / The shepherd plays his reed-pipe glued with pitch, / under a helmet, and frightened sheep fear war not wolves.’ This is an interesting choice, as it reverses the ideal landscape, as depicted in Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue.

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violently kissed her²⁵ before tearing her hairband off her head and before she bit his cheek. Hughes’s memory of this episode closes his poem ‘St Botolphs’, where he describes how the bite marks scarred his face for a month and seared his sense of self forever.²⁶ These parallels add a poignant dimension to the Muses’ discussion of the literary rivalry between Tristia and Ovid, which centres especially on the issues of fame and a literary afterlife. As the Muses see it, the odds are weighted in favour of Ovid, largely because of the fact that he is a Roman, that he belongs to the most powerful empire of the ancient world. Verba observes that ‘We both know it’s gonna be Ovid. Roman civilisation takes care of memory slash history.’ Fired by the injustice of this imbalance, she agrees upon a bet with Ponta that she can also ensure immortality and fame for Tristia, the barbarian woman. ‘More famous than Ovid?’ asks Ponta archly. ‘Just famous. That should be enough given the circumstances. The differences in their birth and upbringing.’ Stanescu does not explicitly allude to the differences in gender, as she enumerates Tristia’s disadvantages compared to those of Ovid, but it is implied. And Stanescu herself performs the role of Verba (whose name, of course, means ‘words’) by ensuring Tristia’s literary afterlife through her sequence of letters that appeared in ‘GOOGLE ME!’. Furthermore, as Tristia’s modern counterpart, Theo, searches for the lost poem dedicated to the barbarian woman, Verba crosses the span of centuries to encourage and prompt her. In a spat with the older man who will become her lover, and who is threatening to sack her, Theo argues that she cannot afford to lose her job. Rich counters this by asking ‘Then what got into you?’, but it is Verba who replies: ‘Me! Me!’ The stage direction indicates that ‘Only Theo can vaguely hear her’. Theo, the interpreter, performs a role here that Stanescu is asking all of her readers to undertake—to listen attentively to the voices that can still be heard crossing the centuries from the ancient world, and to attempt to understand them. Theo condemns the military intervention in Iraq, pointing to its legacy of chaos and loss: ‘I wasn’t rambling. I only said it should be up to the Iraqi people. You’re not their Big-Daddy. You won’t be there forever, you’ll abandon them whenever it feels right for you not for them.’ Once

²⁵ Plath (2000), 212.

²⁶ Hughes (1998), 15.

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again, Verba’s voice from the past demands that she highlight the parallels between the empire-building of the Romans, and the twentyfirst-century decisions taken by the US government. She demands: ‘Read about declining empires! Read about the Romans!’, before instructing Theo to ‘challenge him. Americans like to be challenged. They’re warriors, you know.’ While Theo resents such political intrusions into her wish simply to lose herself in her work, in Ovid’s poetry, she recognizes the political responsibility of commenting upon events in the wider world: ‘What do I care about their war. I care about Ovid’s manuscript. Still . . . to be there when they’re talking about strategy, attacks, bombs . . . stuff that can be translated into corpses in real life . . . and that matter-of-fact tone . . . I don’t know, it just makes my heart shrink.’ As her lover, Rich, attempts to defend himself, he reveals that his presence in the Middle East was dictated partly by his need to flee his own personal ghosts: ‘I did as much damage control as I was able to. [beat] I couldn’t go back after my wife died. I couldn’t face the same street, the same house, the same backyard . . . Her absence would have hunted me down.’ There is an irony here that Rich’s longing for his dead wife parallels Ovid’s longing for his living wife, and that Rich’s dread of the familiar streets of home counterpoints Ovid’s longing to be walking those streets of Rome that led to his house. However, once again, Rich’s turn of phrase—the image of the ghost ‘hunting him down’—glances at Plath’s poem ‘Pursuit’, written to explore her dread of falling in love with Hughes, her sense that this could only lead inexorably to her destruction. She prefaces the poem with a citation from Racine’s Phèdre, in which Phèdre laments the impossibility of escaping the image of Hippolyte that she carries with her everywhere: ‘Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit’ (The image of you pursues me into the depths of the forests²⁷). In Plath’s poem the hunter Hippolyte becomes a wild beast, becomes a panther who pursues and threatens her.²⁸ Stanescu shows us that millennia earlier Ovid, too, was expressing reservations about the empire-building undertaken by Augustus. Like Theo, he is unwillingly forced to contemplate the effects of such ambitions upon ordinary lives, ordinary people. He recounts a dream to Tristia, ²⁷ My translation. ²⁸ Hughes ‘answers’ this poem with a poem of his own entitled ‘Trophies’, which opens with an image of the panther dragging Plath in its maw across Europe. Hughes (1998), 18.

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in which he was instructed by Augustus that ‘poetry is useless. And Love is self-indulgent. War is what we need now. We need to make our empire grow. We need to have everyone speak Latin. The language of culture and civilisation.’ When Ovid protested with ‘I’m a poet’, Caesar countered him dismissively. ‘Nonsense,’ he replied. ‘The Barbarians must learn Latin. You are the only one who can teach them.’ There is an irony in the fact that Ovid’s statue stands proudly in the square at Constanţa, as a reminder of the Latin culture that has become so important to Romanian culture. The irony is deepened further as Ponta gazes into the future to see the empirebuilders of the twenty-first century meeting on the site where Ovid expressed his unease. She glimpses ‘The American President—his name is Bush—and the Romanian President Basescu’, and reassures the Black Sea that he too can be seen in the background. The Black Sea is supremely uninterested in the politics of empire-building that he has seen, but is captivated by the idea of his future appearances, metamorphosed into an image that can be beamed around the world on a screen, at the touch of a button. His future fame leads directly to the exposure and construction of selfhood in the internet age that Stanescu explores in ‘GOOGLE ME!’: ‘Well there’s surely a time for everything. I never expected to be featured on the American TV. EUXINA : You’re on Internet too. VERBA : On YouTube! And Facebook! Everyone can google you now. BLACK SEA :

But excitement about his future fame cannot blunt the Black Sea’s abhorrence of the suicides who seek oblivion at the bottom of his waters. Theo, who is contemplating the cracks in her relationship with Rich, who is older, more powerful, more wealthy, gazes into the waters, as she weighs up her options and alarms the Black Sea, who fears that history may repeat itself: ‘I don’t like the way she (Theo) stares into my waters. She has her father’s eyes.²⁹ [beat] I can’t forget that day . . . He touched the water, looked up at the sun, then back at me, and said: “I’m ready.” ’ Though Ovid is not Theo’s father, he functions as a literary father figure and, indeed, is closely linked to her own father in her mind, since when

²⁹ The Black Sea appears to see Ovid as Theo’s literary father. This passage foreshadows an evocation of Ovid, walking desolately along the shore: ‘Ovid is alone by the sea, staring at it. He has a bottle of wine in his hand. He’s not drunk, but one could notice that his eyes are more intense than usual.’

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she tells us about Ovid’s missing poem, she points out that ‘My Dad found it and hid it somewhere. It was a perfect poem. The most beautiful poem Ovid ever wrote . . . ’ Two thousand years later Theo reaches the conclusion that the only way that she can achieve a harmonious equality with her much older lover, who also performs the function of a father figure for her, is through their deaths by drowning: ‘I want us to be the same, two naked entities entangled, growing into each other, at the bottom of the sea . . . ’ The image of a young, literary woman, grappling with her conflicting feelings towards the father figures in her life, and contemplating suicide, leads us inexorably once again to the figure of Plath. Theo, seeking both her father and death at the bottom of the sea, is performing a version of Plath’s poem ‘Full Fathom Five’, whose title is taken, of course, from The Tempest,³⁰ and whose last line speaks of breathing water rather than air.³¹ Readers of The Bell Jar, Plath’s fictionalized account of her breakdown and first suicide attempt, will recall her thwarted efforts to die by drowning, and her frustration at the way in which the ocean kept spitting her back out like a cork.³² The Black Sea closes the play with his refusal to accept Theo’s death in his waters: Black Sea is not to celebrate Death anymore, it’s way too late in the history and geography of his place here, you call it ‘home’. What’s ‘home’—a word! It could be Rome It could be Paris or Cancun, Tokyo, Beirut, Manzoon Tel-Aviv, New York, Bombay, Kinshasa, Madrid, Taipei. [ . . . ] And now I have to spit you out I have to kick you out and shout: What do you think you’re doing, sis? There’s life out there, there’s joy, there’s Bliss, You have no right to come in here, You’re in my sphere, Go out and LIVE!

³⁰ This passage is also explored by Ali Smith, Marina Warner, and Alice Oswald—see Chapters 1, 2, and 4. ³¹ Plath (1992), 93. ³² Plath (1963), 154.

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Stanescu adopts the epic convention of listing as she enumerates the different cities that could be home and, as she does so, emphasizes the plasticity of the Tristia, the poems’ ability to accommodate the ache of nostalgia experienced by a host of different readers who belong to different cultures. The catalogue of names also serves as a reminder of the rise and fall of empires, that dominance that was once lodged in Rome has moved to the United States, and is liable to shift again. The Black Sea attempts to shake Theo away from her identification with Ovid’s laments. Throughout the play there has been a conflict between the confidence exuded by the Ovid of the Metamorphoses and the despair of the Ovid of the Tristia, complaining that he is eking out the end of his life as a ghost. The Black Sea rejects Theo’s suicide and sends her back to the world of the living. In doing so he encourages the transformation and survival of Ovid’s poetry—its ability to speak of the USA’s empire-building missions in Iraq while also offering a narrative of loss to which Theo responds. Through Stanescu’s words Ovid contemplates a new dimension to the fame for which he craved so desperately, as he becomes a reference that can be googled on the internet, thus achieving indelible immortality, while at the same time losing the ability to control the narratives about him and about his poetry that currently proliferate and burgeon. Stanescu, along with Tawada, has forged a twenty-firstcentury Ovid, an Ovid of the internet age, and in doing so has challenged Ovid’s construction of female voices, while emphasizing the global reach of his afterlife and re-politicizing his narratives.

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7 Jo Shapcott In 2012 Ovid became part of the narrative that the United Kingdom wanted to tell about itself and to present to the rest of the world. In order to mark the 2012 Olympics hosted in London the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House joined forces to put on display a whole range of British art forms inspired by three of Titian’s paintings—Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and The Death of Actaeon. Choreographers responded to the poems through dance moves and artists in the sets that they created for the ballet; at the same time fourteen of Britain’s leading poets were invited to write poetic responses to Titian’s work, and their work was eventually published as a volume entitled Metamorphosis— Poems Inspired by Titian. The ‘Metamorphosis’ of the title points to the ways in which the choreographers, artists, and poets were responding through Titian to the work of Ovid, whose presence at the London Olympics is eloquent testimony to his abiding importance to British culture. We have seen repeatedly in this book how Shakespeare has mediated to us the figure of Ovid with whom women writers currently engage, but it is also striking that two of the last three Poet Laureates— Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy—should draw so extensively and openly upon his poetry. It is also significant that when the Costa Book of the Year was awarded in 2010, unusually it was a poetry anthology that won the overall competition—Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability—and, furthermore, it was an anthology that was shaped by Ovid, as the title suggests. As we shall see, Ovid has been a central figure in Shapcott’s poetry for decades—tantalizingly the title of her lectures on poetry to be published by Bloodaxe is The Transformers. She was one of the poets to contribute to Lasdun and Hofmann’s volume After Ovid, and therefore has strong credentials for her invitation to contribute to the National Gallery’s project of responding to Titian. She elected to respond to Diana and Callisto, in part because of its presentation of females as both powerful

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and victims,¹ and to present the myth from Callisto’s point of view. Callisto’s story is recounted in the second book of the Metamorphoses. Jupiter espied Callisto, one of Diana’s followers, when she was out hunting alone one day and raped her. Nine months later when Diana sees her pregnant form she drives her away and Callisto’s misery is compounded when Jupiter’s wife, Juno, takes revenge upon her by turning her into a bear. Fifteen years later the son whom she bore is about to kill her in her bear form, when Jupiter saves her by whisking both mother and son away and transforming them into constellations. Titian’s painting depicts the moment that Diana realises that Callisto is no longer a virgin. In an introductory essay to the poems inspired by Titian entitled ‘Ovid, Titian and English Poetry’ Nicholas Penny observes: This is the moment—and the words—which Titian chose to depict. The expression on the faces, and the matching ‘body language’, are among the most remarkable in any of his paintings. The status of Callisto as favourite of the goddess has been emphasized earlier in the poem. Now the envy of her compassion finds an outlet in a new sort of blood sport. The character of the sky and the woods, and the broken stream of water that falls from the fountain, quivering in sympathy, hint at the tragic outcome.²

Shapcott imagines a Callisto transformed into stars, gazing down upon her earlier self as depicted in the painting where she is being chastised and driven away by Diana. By presenting a Callisto who is looking back to this moment from the future, from the stars that she becomes, Shapcott reverses the end of the Metamorphoses where Ovid looks forward into the future where he will live among the stars.³ By making us view the painting from this perspective, Shapcott directs our gaze also ¹ Shapcott (2013): ‘I chose to write about the Callisto painting, which is fascinating because it’s an image of real feminine power and vulnerability at the same time. Callisto is lying on the rock, obviously pregnant and with her navel bared, and there’s that strong gesture of Diana pointing at her. There are so many diagonals in the picture. And I’m really interested in the question of direction in poetry, how a poem looks on the page. We tend always to approach poetry horizontally, line by line, but its verticals are important as well. When I was writing the poem I tracked the direction of each character’s gaze with a ruler, and the one gazing out at the reader is the dog.’ ² Penny (2012), 16. ³ See Shapcott (2013). Fiona Cox: ‘I listened to the interview that you and George Szirtes did, and loved your observation that in your poem Callisto is looking back to this moment from the future, from the constellation that she becomes, because of course that’s the exact opposite of Ovid, who closes the Metamorphoses by looking into a future where he will exist amongst the stars.’

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onto the humiliated, ashamed figure of Callisto, desperate to avoid all eyes and to hide the shame of her swollen belly that was, she laments, ‘o*so*noticeable*’. We enter the myth and compound her misery. Shapcott offers a visual representation of Callisto’s new identity as a constellation, by inserting an asterisk between each word, so that the poem itself is built of both words and stars. Indeed the poem is framed by stars, since the close of the last line echoes the start of the first line: *stars*stars*stars*stars*and*I* *am*made*of*them*now* [ . . . ] *alive*with*stars*stars*stars*stars*stars*⁴

Such an emphasis on the stars directs us back to Metamorphoses I and Ovid’s assertion that what distinguishes human beings from beasts is our ability to stand upright and raise our heads to the stars.⁵ The poem rescues the violated, humiliated figure of Callisto, and asserts the humanity that she retains throughout her transformations into both a bear and then into a constellation. In her guise as constellation she has acquired immortality, and Shapcott’s closing lines with their repeated ‘alive’ across the enjambment testify to the miracle of art’s survival, its capacity to remain vibrant, and confirm Ovid’s hope, expressed at the end of the Metamorphoses that his poetry would afford him eternal life among the stars: parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. (Metamorphoses XV, 875–9) (Yet, with my better part I shall soar, undying, far above the stars, and my name will be imperishable. Wherever Roman power extends over the lands Rome has subdued, people will read my verse. If there be any truth in poets’ prophecies, I shall live to all eternity, immortalised by fame.)

Ovid’s fame had already been perpetuated through Shapcott’s earlier poetry, especially the volume Of Mutability, which charts Shapcott’s experiences of breast cancer and its treatment, as well as her responses ⁴ Shapcott, ‘Callisto’s Song’, in Penny (2012), 50. ⁵ Metamorphoses I, 84–6: ‘pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus’ (Whereas other animals hang their heads and look at the ground, he made man stand erect, bidding him look up to heaven, and life his head to the stars).

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to global warming, the 2008 financial crisis, and the wars in the Middle East. Like Warner, like Smith, her reception of the classical world is infused with an approach to politics that identifies the need for change. In an interview held with Shapcott after Of Mutability won the Costa Book of the Year Award, Kira Cochrane observed: There are repeated references—open and oblique—to the Iraq war in Of Mutability; does she consider her work to be political? ‘Yes’, she says. ‘First it’s poetry by a feminist. There’s that, straightaway. Then there are a lot of meditations on landscape in the book, which are informed by climate change. And, I guess, there’s a political with a small ‘p’ spirit active in the work, in that you hope readers will walk into the poems and come out somehow changed.⁶

Shapcott’s pleasure in winning the award was sharpened by the hope that it might help introduce a new set of readers to poetry.⁷ At the same time as leading new readers into the world of poetry Shapcott is, in this volume, also showing readers how one of the foundation texts of the Western tradition, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, can be refigured to help Shapcott articulate her changing experience of her self, and of the world, in the wake of a diagnosis of breast cancer. The ‘Mutability’ of the title evokes not only the fragility of a delicately poised existence, but the rampant proliferation of cells that have mutated out of control.⁸ While Of Mutability is the main focus of this chapter, it is worth noting that this is not the first time that Shapcott has invoked classical literature in her meditations upon health, and women’s experiences of their bodies in the modern world. Prior to Of Mutability she was most famous for her ‘Mad Cow’ sequence of poems which appeared in Her Book (1999). ‘The Mad Cow Talks Back’ begins with the observation that she is just a little bit tetchy, not mad; this comment immediately calls to mind the misogynist joke that did the rounds when fears about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) were at their peak: ‘What’s the difference between BSE and PMT?’ ‘One’s Jakob Creutzfeld’s Disease; the other’s Mad Cow’s Disease.’⁹ In Shapcott’s poem the irritation is quickly ⁶ Cochrane (2011), 8. ⁷ Shapcott in Cochrane (2011), 6: ‘I think the special pleasure is that it might mean that readers who usually just like novels, or memoirs, might pick up a book of poems.’ ⁸ It is interesting that Warner’s study Fantastic Metamorphoses (2002) is organized according to the following processes of metamorphosis—Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, Doubling. ⁹ It is significant that Shapcott’s ‘Mad Cow’ sequence was published in close proximity to Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1997), translated into English by Linda Coverdale as Pig Tales, a work which also examines the themes of metamorphosis and misogyny through its

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forgotten as the human-cow marvels at the stories that are able to course through the sponge of her brain: There are wonderful holes in my brain through which ideas from outside can travel at top speed and through which voices, sometimes whole people, speak to me about the universe¹⁰

The sequence looks to Ovid not just in the ways in which the fear and clumsiness of a changing body are experienced, but also in the way in which the endless storytelling and myth-making can be a source of wonder, as above, or a source of confusion which generates panic, as in the poem ‘Volumes’, where The thought of those thousands and thousands of stories— the crush and babble of other minds— makes the whites of my eyes show and roll¹¹

The Mad Cow careers through the shop causing havoc in her desperation to find help, and lurches between the classical tradition and the contemporary world as she searches for the answers to her confusion about her changed form in a self-help book, which she hopes will teach her ‘how to stand upright, how not to fall / and how not to cry out when you do’. The line glances back at the opening of the Metamorphoses and Ovid’s observations that it is our ability to stand upright and gaze at the stars that distinguishes us from animals (Metamorphoses I, 84–6). As her brain disintegrates further, and she sinks lower into her deluded state, the Mad Cow refers to her own birth in legendary terms, bestowing a classical feel upon the poem ‘The Mad Cow Believes She is the Spirit of the Weather’ with her use of the phrase ‘They still tell’: They still tell how my mother pushed me out of her body on to a rock and I split the stone in two while the rain washed me and the thunder broke overhead.¹² depiction of the ways in which women experience their bodies and their subjectivities. Edith Hall observes of Truismes that ‘What is interesting here is the female writer (an avowed feminist) making her point about male treatment of female bodies by inscribing her own subjectivity on one of the paramount foundation texts [ . . . ] of subjectivity in fiction.’ Hall (2007), 135. ¹⁰ Shapcott (2000), 69.

¹¹ Shapcott (2000), 75.

¹² Shapcott (2000), 79.

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Even as we are invited to marvel at this ‘monstrum’, the terrible tales of legend, such as the horror of Pasiphae and of the Minotaur, rush into the spaces in the readers’minds, and colour our vision of the ‘mad cow’. The abiding impression of the ‘Mad Cow’, however, is one of exultation, as Rowena Fowler observes: Other writers such as Ruth Padel and Jo Shapcott are also essentially metamorphic in the post-modern mode, driving an exuberant energy from their sense of the poet herself as shape-shifter. Shapcott’s ‘mad cow’ persona runs cheerfully amok, discovering a happy coincidence in classical myth and topical scandal; elsewhere she gives full rein to the poet’s sense of being able to change form at will, as in the opening poem of My Life Asleep: Watch as I stretch my limbs for the transformation, I’m laughing to feel the surge of other shapes beneath my skin. (‘Thetis’)¹³

But the irrepressible laughter is shadowed by mania as Thetis’ chain of transformations is still unable to save her from being the object of perverted and violent desires or to save society from the consequences of tolerating such subjugation. The imagery of voyeurism used by Shapcott edges her poem closer to the ‘sex-club’ world inhabited by Darrieussecq’s woman-pig: ‘voyeur, if you looked a little closer, would see / [ . . . ] the bark [ . . . ] harden over my trunk.’¹⁴ The depiction of the gradual process of transformation looks back, of course, to the myth of Daphne and Apollo, and to Bernini’s iconic statue of Daphne’s legs turning into roots, even while she is in full flight. Shapcott maintains the Ovidian tension between darkness and lightheartedness as her Thetis declares that ‘No man can frighten me’¹⁵ and that her life has been composed of nothing but play right up to the moment that she is ‘raped until I bleed from my eyes, / beaten out of shape and forced to bring forth War’.¹⁶ The poem’s close is horribly reminiscent of the accounts of mutilation and brutality that were coming out of Bosnia at around the same time that Shapcott was writing these poems. As Thetis gave birth to Achilles, the personification of War, she gave birth at the same time to all those women who, from generation to generation, have paid the price of war with their bodies.

¹³ Fowler (2006), 386. ¹⁶ Shapcott (2000), 88.

¹⁴ Shapcott (2000), 87.

¹⁵ Shapcott (2000), 87.

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Shapcott offers new variations on these themes in her volume Of Mutability, a volume that is shadowed by her experience of breast cancer, an experience that she likens to moving into a different geography: ‘It is like stepping into a different world, where there are different rules, different ways of behaving, ways of seeing,’ says Shapcott. ‘Woolf [in the essay ‘On Being Ill’] talks about the amount of time you spend lying on your back, so that the horizontal view is suddenly much more typical than the vertical view. And that means you see life anew—you’re open to the sky.’¹⁷ The new insights afforded from these different angles are an unexpected gift from the world of illness. Such moments helped to dictate Shapcott’s decision not to bind her book in black, but rather in green, the colour of change, of metamorphosis. ‘In early decisions about the book’s cover: “I had imagined it being quite dark”, she says, “even black, but I think mutability—a word I love—suggests death and decay, but also change, which is quite twinkly and green” (the colour they ultimately plumped for). It quickly became clear to me that mutability has these twinklings of joy sometimes ecstasy, which comes through in the poems, I think.’¹⁸ Shapcott evokes this shift in perspective in the first poem of the volume whose opening lines highlight the ‘mutation’ in ‘mutability’, as she depicts an itchy, raw feeling, almost as if she can actually feel the cells proliferating rampantly beneath her skin. The effect of this is to make her readers acutely aware of their own bodies, and their experience of them, right from the start of the book. Ovid begins his Metamorphoses with a promise to tell of bodies that have mutated into new shapes—Shapcott offers us an insight into what shapes these might be, given contemporary treatments for cancer.¹⁹ Her reaction to her changing appearance veers between fear and euphoria. Like the ‘mad cow’, her primary focus is to remain upright, and to draw whatever benefits are possible from the new perspective of ¹⁷ Cochrane (2011), 6. ¹⁸ Cochrane (2011), 6–7. See also Shapcott (2013): ‘I’m not interested so much in the ancient world as in myths and fairytales. And change. I’m very interested in change and transience, so Ovid was very appealing to me from that point of view.’ ¹⁹ Shapcott, cited in Cochrane (2011), 6: ‘ “The body has always been a subject for me,” she says. “It is the stage for the high drama of our lives, from birth to death and everything in between. When you observe your own body under physical change like that, there’s a new kind of urgency. I had a lumpectomy, my lymph glands out, chemo- and radiotherapy. You go through several different stages, so you don’t know how ill you are for a while, and the verdict keeps getting worse and worse, until you can actually take action, start treatment.” ’

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lying horizontally. Her discomfort with her body as depicted in Her Book prefigures the depiction of illness in Of Mutability. When her vision is drawn towards the earth she slips and stumbles, and the world feels unsafe: ‘Everything’s big—the rhythm of your body / too large, too loud in the effort to keep / your torso pointed straight down the pavement.’²⁰ When she looks up, however, her vision is cleared and the fragile beauty of a winter landscape is revealed: Sick, dizzy and squinting in the sunshine I looked up to see a spread of branches filled with frost, every twig cluttered with wings, haloes, stars.²¹

Shapcott is not just looking back to Virginia Woolf as she glories in this new and unexpected world; she is looking back to the very qualities which Ovid claims make us human, as defined in Metamorphoses I, where the human capacity to gaze upwards at the stars differentiates us from the animal world. In the title poem of Of Mutability, after she has depicted the raw discomfort of her cancer, she contrasts her outlook when she looks down ‘to see your feet / mistrust the pavement’ and looking up ‘to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets / angels, chandeliers’.²² This poem depicts the weird and wonderful aspects of the world that keep it perpetually interesting, subjects such as astrophysics, folksong, human sacrifice, mortality, flying, fishing, sex—all subjects that provide inspiration for the Metamorphoses. When she concludes this first poem with the injunction ‘Don’t bother, though, to head anywhere but the sky’, she echoes the end of the Metamorphoses where Ovid contemplates the survival of his name, written among the stars,²³ and offers an Ovidian apotheosis to all those who manage to untether their gaze from the earth. Ironically, however, in the poem ‘Era’, it is when Shapcott looks to the sky that she suspects the source of her illness in the form of pollutants that are the result of hubristic technological advances. The flight paths of aeroplanes are etched against the clouds, while the swarming stream of traffic on the earth resembles a shoal of fish with teeth. The air is saturated with carcinogens, which are responsible for some of the most grotesque metamorphoses of our era, and which must be countered by

²⁰ Shapcott (2000), 77. ²¹ Shapcott (2000), 78. ²² Shapcott (2010), 3. ²³ Metamorphoses XV, 875–6: ‘parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar’ (Yet with my better part I shall soar, undying, far above the stars).

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developing ever more powerful medications. Shapcott casts a wry glance at the power of the pharmaceutical industry when she observes in ‘His ’n’ Hers’ that there were ‘so many tablets / you’d think his cells had shares / in GlaxoSmithKlein’.²⁴ She situates herself firmly within this era of the twenty-first century by starting the poem ‘Era’ with the date ‘The twentysecond day of March two thousand and three’.²⁵ On the one hand the specific details of the date are an entirely human way of recording an event that is such a traumatic watershed in her life; on the other, the sheer weight of numbers in the date makes each individual human life seem even more fragile, reminds us of how easy it would be to slip away unnoticed, while Ovid’s poem continues to stretch into the future. Shapcott’s response to such a threat is also to defy death through her voice. In ‘Stargazer’, in order ‘mainly, to stay present / and straight up’, she speaks of the necessity of forgetting ‘what’s / happening in my cells’ as with her ‘voice thrown upwards, / to you I’m speaking, you.’²⁶ In ‘Hairless’ the changes wrought by cancer become a part of the beauty of this new, defiant female: ‘It was clear just from the texture of her head, / she was about to raise her arms to the sky; / I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, to roar.’²⁷ The element of triumph here recalls the ability of Cixous’ Medusa to laugh in the face of her misfortune; where once Cixous was able to forge centuries of suppression into a powerful new discourse, here Shapcott challenges contemporary discourses about beauty, femininity, and power. Shapcott had already established a solidarity with Medusa in Her Book—Poems 1988–1998 where a poem entitled ‘Watching Medusa’ depicts her efforts to keep still so that she might not ‘do wrong to her and / close the sweet hissing mouths’.²⁸ One of Shapcott’s devices for establishing her own distinctive tones of defiance in her bid for survival is to blend her voice with the voices of those who have shaped her as a writer. She is especially fond of joining an intertextual chain, as is indicated by the title of her poem ‘Shapcott’s Variation on Schoenberg’s Orchestration of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E[♭] major, “St Anne” ’, in which she muses: ‘Where does it come from this passion / for layers? [ . . . ] I love it, like this, when I lose touch / with whose the voice is.’²⁹ It is unsurprising, then, that she does not declare a direct link to the Metamorphoses, but instead establishes a ²⁴ Shapcott (2010), 27. ²⁷ Shapcott (2010), 8.

²⁵ Shapcott, (2010), 4. ²⁸ Shapcott (2000), 116.

²⁶ Shapcott (2010), 52. ²⁹ Shapcott (2010), 22.

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connection to Ovid through Pushkin’s response to his exile poetry. The Tristia and poems Ex Ponto (which themselves allude frequently to and build upon the Metamorphoses) are also central intertexts of Of Mutability and allow Shapcott to explore her feelings of having shifted into a different world, of being irrevocably separated from the world she had previously inhabited.³⁰ One of the central themes of Ovid’s exile poetry is his hope that his poetry will save him, both by softening Augustus’ heart sufficiently for him to be granted pardon, and by ensuring that his name is not forgotten by those whom he has been forced to leave. That he was successful in at least half of his quest is indicated by Shapcott’s poem ‘The Gypsies Tales of Ovid after Pushkin’ whose title once again foregrounds her fondness for intertextual layers. In this poem she points out that ‘There’s a story still doing the rounds / the Roman Emperor once deported a man / from the South’³¹ and she depicts his raging, his cries of injustice at the fate that singled him out in particular. Shapcott’s Ovid feels his exile physically: ‘he cursed and screamed instructions about his bones / which he swore were pulling south inside him.’³² Despite the tragedy that has befallen him he is unable to cease the act of creation, of transforming everything into poetry. ‘He was old under the skin, had always been, / but his soul was young and shivering with life / so that everything he touched turned into song.’³³ He is a poetic Midas—everything he comes across is transformed by his song, an image that evokes the first poem of the volume Of Mutability with its rich array of subject matter.³⁴ The parallels that Shapcott draws between Ovid’s enterprise and her own poetic project establish her as a female Ovid, beset by anxieties about her own survival in this dangerously strange, yet beautiful, twenty-first century. Her diagnosis of cancer must have made it seem all too bleakly probable that she, like Ovid, would be sending her book back into a world where she herself no longer had a place, where her words would be

³⁰ Susan Sontag explores the idea of illness as exile: ‘Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’ Sontag (2009), 3. ³¹ Shapcott (2010), 24. ³² Shapcott (2010), 25. ³³ Shapcott (2010), 24. ³⁴ See also ‘Gherkin Music’, ‘where fragments of poems, / words, names fall like glory / into the lightwells’. Shapcott (2010), 19.

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the only part of her to survive. She had already played with allusions to the first poem of the Tristia in the introductory poem to Her Book entitled ‘To Her Book’, written long before her cancer had manifested itself and in which she addresses the volume that must travel to London without her ‘under plain cover, or on screen, / disk, by phone’.³⁵ The imagery recalls the sober appearance of Ovid’s tomes sent from exile,³⁶ while also expanding her presentation of her own self as a book, neatly packaged under her mother’s arm: I went too in 1953, under her arm like a book. Teachers were scarce; it was a small defect to go along with a new baby, the prize that was soon to become myself.³⁷

The child’s body, safely tucked up, is destined to unfold and develop, before its mutation (possibly as a result of the toxins flooding the modern city), transformation, and fragmentation attendant on the brutal treatments for cancer. Yet these very assaults on Shapcott’s body fit her for life in a twenty-first-century metropolis, as she acknowledges in her poem ‘Religion for Girls’, in which she describes happening upon body parts of the gods scattered through the streets, such as Mithras’ giant hand, Minerva’s head, and a tiny figurine of Mercury: And all, all of these gods and bits of gods left here to chew over the wandering mortals of London, as we chant our Evening Standards to ourselves in our stalled commuter trains.³⁸

Once again Shapcott constructs an image that is based upon layers of allusion, here evoking T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland, which is itself indebted to Ovid.³⁹ These shards of marble statues, scattered over the streets of contemporary London, recall Eliot’s ‘stony rubbish’, the ‘heap of broken ³⁵ Shapcott (2010), Prefatory poem. Shapcott’s italics. ³⁶ Tristia I, 1: ‘vade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse: / infelix habitum temporis huius habe./ nec te purpureo velent vaccinia fuco: non est conveniens luctibus ille color’ (Be gone then, but looking unrefined as befits an exile. Unhappily you must bear the marks of this time. Purple covers will not clothe you, as that colour is not suitable for mourning) [My translation]. ³⁷ ‘1953’ in Shapcott (2000), 9. ³⁸ ‘Religion for Girls’ in Shapcott (2010),14. ³⁹ Stephen Medcalf discusses Eliot’s debt to the Metamorphoses, in particular the myths of Philomela, Procne, and the Sibyl. Medcalf (1988), 233–46.

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images’, while the ‘wandering mortals’ evoke his stream of the dead processing over London Bridge. Shapcott wittily transforms the image, however, into a depiction of modern London as a place where all traffic has stalled, where all movement is clogged by the weight of overpopulation and congestion, two of the curses of modern life. And while Shapcott’s London is not a city that has been ruined by war, it is nevertheless a city over which the spectre of wars being fought in far-off lands hangs heavy, where its citizens look in the newspapers at ‘pictures / of soldiers in places they didn’t want / to understand’, embroiled in a conflict over oil, and where there is ‘the smell of print and ashes in my nose’.⁴⁰ In 1988, in one of the most influential volumes to examine the extent and power of Ovid’s influence on Western culture, Charles Martindale observed that ‘at its best, as in most of the Metamorphoses, the world of Ovidian myth is a wonderful amalgam of old and new, of the glamorously remote and the familiarly human, as Ovid with a uniquely sympathetic detachment unfolds, in a world of wonders, all the wonders of the human heart’.⁴¹ Martindale’s volume contains no analysis of Ovid’s presence in the work of a female artist or writer, yet his words testify to the flexibility of Ovid’s work, its capacity for endless reinvention. Ovidian myths and themes counterpoint Shapcott’s depiction of a society obsessed by business and bodily perfection, even as it sends its young off to fight in a war which appears to make little sense. Her engagement in the political concerns shaping our culture, her concerns about issues such as the environment, the financial crisis of 2008, and the war in Iraq align her with the pluralist, multi-faceted third-wave agenda, as outlined in the Introduction to this volume. In her poem ‘A Letter to Dennis’ she writes of the need to ‘find a use for fury’,⁴² invoking the shade of Dennis Potter in her conviction that literature needs to address political concerns, so as to transform the world. In an interview she explains: ‘We don’t have a figure like Dennis Potter anymore, who was so angry and involved, and who used his work so powerfully. Of course I’m writing about the world we live in, and I’m interested in the way in which Ovid helps us to think about the world around us, and about such matters as where do our selves, our bodies end and the rest of the world begin.’⁴³ Of Mutability is both a deeply personal autobiographical response to ⁴⁰ ‘St Brides’ in Shapcott (2010), 17. ⁴¹ Martindale (1988), 18. ⁴² Shapcott (2000), 125. ⁴³ Shapcott (2013).

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serious illness, as well as the vehicle through which Shapcott voices her anger about war, about the financial crisis, about our mistreatment of the earth. As she experiences her odyssey through cancer and its treatments in a world that appears bent on destroying itself, she is able to stretch a hand back across two millennia to a poet, who understood the fear and rage consequent on losing one’s world, and who knew that survival depended on one’s capacity to remain open to the wonders of the universe, so as to create them anew for successive generations. * * * Part of this chapter is reworked material from Fiona Cox (2012) ‘Metamorphosis, Mutability and the Third Wave’, in Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos (eds.) Contemporary Women Authors and Classical Reception [special issue], Classical Receptions Journal 4/2, 163–75.

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8 Marie Darrieussecq Just as Shapcott welcomed fury as a catalyst for responding to contemporary society through poems shaped by Ovid, so the French novelist and translator, Marie Darrieussecq, was also prompted to write through anger. She sprang to literary fame with the publication of her first novel in 1996 entitled Truismes, a book which recounts the metamorphosis of a young, poorly educated working-class woman, who undergoes a transformation into a pig. Many critics have written lucidly and persuasively about the links between this metamorphosis and Ovid;¹ this makes it even more surprising that Darrieussecq seems a little bemused by the parallels, and states that she did not have Ovid in mind when she was writing the novel.² The title points to this metamorphosis by evoking the French word truie, which means ‘sow’, but also highlights Darrieussecq’s wish to challenge practices that are unchallenged and accepted within contemporary society, that have become ‘truisms’, and that lead directly to the degradation of less-educated women, who are unable to speak out to defend themselves, and who, in many cases, don’t even realize that it would be appropriate to do so. ‘J’ai écrit ce livre dans un état de colère. Je n’aime pas la société dans laquelle je vis. Tout me révolte’ (I wrote this book in a state of fury. I don’t like the society I live in. Everything revolts me).³ ¹ Warner (2002), 209–10; Hall (2007), 135; Ziolkowski (2005), 213; Hamel (2012), 194–212. ² Darrieussecq (2013): ‘Ovid wasn’t on my mind at all. Everyone talked about Kafka, which is daft. It’s completely different from Kafka. There’s a gulf between Kafka and women, and Kafka and women’s bodies. In actual fact Ovid and even Homer with the transformation of Ulysses’ men into swine belong to a tradition that I found much more inviting, but it was pretty subconscious.’ ³ Cited in Hamel (2012), 196. [My translation.] Eleven years later Darrieussecq was still being prompted to write by fury. Having been accused of plagiarism by Camille Laurens (an allegation that was not accepted as having substance), she wrote a study of plagiarism and explained her motivation: ‘Il y a un moment où il faut se mettre en colère, par survie’ (There comes a time when you have to get angry in order to survive) [My translation]. Cited in Payot (2010).

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Twenty years later another novelist and translator of Ovid, Marie Cosnay, spoke with passion of the way in which Ovid walked by her side in her campaigns for justice.⁴ Darrieussecq’s Truismes shows not just the metamorphosis of the narrator into a sow, but points to the animal behaviour of the other human beings to whom she is connected, including high-profile politicians. Cosnay’s wrath was provoked by the sight of the vice president of the Front National, François Philippot, posing for a photograph at the Fête des Cochons at Hayenge, a festival initiated by the Front National and that is seen by many as an anti-Muslim gesture: Je lis ou traduis le vieil Ovide d’il y a 21 siècles. Cependant les horribles grimaces d’un ancien président qui se sert avec indécence d’un micro-événement—une tenue estivale—me rendent malade.⁵ Ou le déguisement de cochon adopté—ou presque—par un autre homme politique plus haineux encore que le premier, quoique ce genre de haine ne se mesure pas—me rend malade. [ . . . ] Faire tenir Ovide et ce que m’inspire la tête de cochon de Philippot dans une même journée. Avoir l’impression—assez sûre, hélas—qu’est en train de se dessiner depuis quelques dizaines d’années, lentement, mais sûrement un sale destin. On laisse mourir en mer et à nos frontières une population désespérée. On déteste regarder le désespoir, d’ici créé à force de rejet et de perte de liens, de signes. On joue—il n’y a plus d’autre mot—à exaspérer ce désespoir. Bref. Je n’ai pas le choix. J’ai de la peine et une immense colère. Les personnages que j’aime, les auteurs que j’ai cités ne sont pas loin de cette peine et de cette colère. Ils s’y tiennent tout proche.⁶ (I read or translate the old Ovid of twenty one centuries ago. Yet the horrible grimacing of a former president indecently exploiting a non-event—a summer outfit—makes me sick. Or the pig disguise, adopted or as good as adopted, by another man in politics who is even more hateful than the first (though this kind of hatred can’t be quantified) makes me sick. [ . . . ] Fitting in Ovid and what Philippot’s pig head provokes in me on the same day. Having the impression— alas, pretty much a conviction—that slowly but surely a dreadful destiny has been building up over the last ten years. We leave a desperate population to die at sea and at our borders. We hate looking at the despair, that is brought about from here through rejection and through a loss of bonds and of signs. We play—there’s no other word for it—at exacerbating this despair. So there we are. I don’t have the choice. I feel heartache and an immense anger. The characters that I love and

⁴ As well as teaching Latin at school, writing novels and translating classical texts, Cosnay is an active campaigner on behalf of refugees living in France, and has written books about her experiences in this domain also. ⁵ Cosnay is referring to the burkini ban enforced in many French coastal resorts in the summer of 2016. ⁶ Cosnay (2016).

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the authors I have cited are not far away from this heartache and this anger. They hold onto these emotions very closely.)⁷

It is the heartache rather than the anger provoked by the modern world to which Darrieussecq responds in her translation of the Tristia. In her view Ovid’s experience of exile makes him the ideal mouthpiece for the insecurities and losses that beset so many today: That’s it—the possibility that you might lose everything. The possibility that everything is going to disappear and that you’re going to lose everything personally, individually. Ovid is a prototype of modern man—he was rich, surrounded by material goods and he lost it all. His story is our story. That’s what we most fear. And the rise of the barbarians, the contact with the barbarians is, deep down, like the take of the far right on the Islamists. And what’s really beautiful about this book is that it’s humanist. In fact Ovid tames his own fear and he says ‘I’m the one who’s a barbarian.’ And that’s an observation that is completely humanist. It’s an anachronism. It’s a fantastic observation. He reaches the point where he can say: ‘I’m the barbarian.’ His intelligence just blows my mind. He understood that we are always a barbarian in the eyes of someone else. Maybe that’s why the book was successful—perhaps because of its content. Ovid’s torment is the story of our times.⁸

Darrieussecq’s sense of Ovid’s presence in the contemporary world is, indeed, so strong that in the Préface to her 2008 translation of his exile poetry—the Tristia and the Letters from the Black Sea—she conjures him up as a ghost. She imagines his astonishment—having been dead for over two thousand years—to witness the translation into French of his poems from exile, in which he tells of his grief at his banishment from Rome as punishment for what he famously calls his ‘carmen et error’. The ‘carmen’ is the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Making Love which was perceived to be detrimental to the ‘family values’ that Augustus was attempting to restore, and there is wide speculation about the nature of his ‘error’. The ghost of the heartsick poet stands at Darrieussecq’s shoulder, looking at her computer screen and its ability to send around the world, at the click of a button, his laments at the nature of his exile, the cruelty of sending a poetic genius to live at the end of the earth in a land where there is no civilization and where nobody speaks his language: ‘Entends-moi, lecteur’, demande Ovide depuis l’ancien bout du monde. Ce lecteur, c’est moi. Ce lecteur, c’est vous. J’ai souvent imaginé son fantôme sur ⁷ My translation.

⁸ Darrieussecq (2013).

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mon épaule, éberlué de me voir à la tâche devant mes outils modernes—et une femme en plus! Plusieurs traductions existent déjà. Ovide est sur Internet dans toutes les grandes langues du monde. Qu’on ne s’y trompe pas: ses lecteurs modernes sont beaucoup plus nombreux que les quelques lettrés qui le lisaient dans un monde antique ou médiéval largement analphabète [ . . . ] sa voix morte s’est métamorphosée en voix vivante, logée dans les signes, dans les livres et sur les écrans. Je ne comprends toujours pas comment ça marche, cette trace qui me bouleverse: l’écriture, la voix des fantômes. J’ai eu besoin de traduire pour entendre parler en moi cet exil, et pour faire entendre, à nouveau, cette voix.⁹ (‘Hear me, reader’, asks Ovid from the ancient ends of the earth. This reader is me This reader is you. I’ve often imagined his ghost at my shoulder, dumbfounded to see me hard at work with my modern equipment—and a woman, what’s more! There are already several translations in existence. Ovid is on the Internet in all the world’s major languages. Let there be no mistake: his modern readers far outnumber the few literate souls who read him in an ancient or medieval world that was predominantly illiterate [ . . . ] his dead voice has metamorphosed into a living voice, lodged in signs, in books and on screens. I still don’t understand how that works, that trace that blows my mind; the writing, the voice of ghosts. I needed to translate so that I could hear this exile voiced within me, and so that I could make this voice heard once again.)¹⁰

The exile that Darrieussecq hears inside herself is one that she has explored extensively within her fiction. As we have seen, her first novel Truismes (1996) explores the dislocation experienced by a young woman whose transformation into a sow prompts her readers to reassess the values of a civilization that can blindly treat working-class young women as pieces of meat. Naissance des fantômes (1998) opens with an epigram from Alice in Wonderland, a move which sets up the feelings experienced ⁹ Darrieussecq (2008), 18–19. All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given in the text. See Darrieussecq (2013) for her further comments on the ghost of Ovid: ‘to my mind, the Tristia is his best book. It really is, because it’s the most contemporary, it’s the one that speaks to us most directly. We can actually hear his voice. The sheer presence of his voice is unbelievable. When I was translating him, I could hear him speaking. And in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti his voice is far more enmeshed within Roman culture generally. In the Tristia he is isolated, a Roman trying to survive, all alone in the middle of nowhere, and I think you can hear the isolation of that voice, as if it’s the voice of a ghost, the solitary ghost of a world that has disappeared. At the time he was writing, his world hadn’t disappeared, but he knows that it’s going to, and for him it’s as if it has disappeared because he’s left all alone somewhere else. It’s as if he were talking today. I think it’s a literary masterpiece.’ ¹⁰ Translations of Darrieussecq are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

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by the protagonist of being shuttled into an unreal world, a world which hovers between the living and the dead, when her husband quite simply vanishes one day into thin air.¹¹ White (2003) is the story of a young woman, Edmée, posted on a European science project to Antarctica for six months. The novel is haunted by the ghosts who roam the South Pole, but also by the European ghosts whom they have imported, including that of Medea (Edmée being an anagram of Médée, Medea in French).¹² Le Pays (2005) is an analysis of the story of origins that each person tells to themselves, but is situated within a country at risk of losing its native language and of being engulfed by globalization. Tom est mort (2007) is the novel written just before Tristes Pontiques, and Darrieussecq describes it as the precursor to the translation. It is the story of a French woman who has emigrated with her family to Australia, and whose four-year-old son is killed in a freak accident. Again, Darrieussecq moves us into a different psychological landscape—a place in which the world appears to have fallen off its axis, and where the depictions of the extreme landscape go some way towards mirroring a grief which is intense enough to fill the world. Darrieussecq fascinates herself with the terror of her world being destroyed in an instant, of losing everything from one day to the next. And this is what she finds so compelling about Ovid’s story for the contemporary reader. In her imagination he appears to her as the Tom Cruise figure from Eyes Wide Shut, attempting to hang out with the big boys, but ultimately overwhelmed and destroyed by the forces that he has unleashed. And though disasters have, of course, always marked human history, Ovid’s account of living in exile as a ghost, reduced to silence, enduring the bitter cold and forced to associate with barbarians who, he suspects, laugh at him in a language he doesn’t understand, has a peculiarly modern flavour. Darrieussecq highlights this by selecting as ¹¹ See Warner (2002), 209: ‘The French writer Marie Darrieussecq first produced a Swiftian fable of moral and political degradation in her book Truismes, translated into English as Pig Tales, about a woman who (jubilantly) turns into a sow. Then, in La Naissance des phantômes [sic] (My Phantom Husband), she moved as it were naturally from this Circean scenario of bestial transmogrification to the language of quantum physics, to create a gripping story of a man who vanishes into thin air (into a black hole) when he goes out to buy bread for breakfast one morning. Darrieussecq’s career embraces both poles, the interest in selfdisclosure and self-fashioning through animal transformation at one end, and, at the other, the impact of impalpable and inscrutable forces on the stability of individuals.’ ¹² See Darrieussecq (2013).

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her title Tristes Pontiques, alluding not only to the Tristia but also to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, an anthropological study in which he claims that the barbarian other is a fictional construct invented to bolster one’s own identity.¹³ In a postcolonial society Ovid’s realization that, in fact, he is the barbarian in this new land is particularly resonant: barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli, et rident stolidi verba Latina Getae (Tristia V, 10, 37–8) (Here I’m the barbarian, understood by no-one, and these stupid peasants mock my Latin speech)¹⁴ le barbare ici c’est moi personne ne me comprend et ces Gètes stupides rigolent quand je parle latin (216)

But Darrieussecq’s belief that Ovid’s story reflects the fears and experiences of the contemporary world, coupled with a conviction that his story deserves to be told, met the obstacle of existing French translations, which to her mind were fusty, out-of-date, and unappealing.¹⁵ It was this realization that prompted her to move from the project of writing a fictionalized autobiography (and thus pursuing a comparable project to Christoph Ransmayr, The Last World; David Malouf, An Imaginary Life; Jane Alison, The Love Artist; and Vintila Horia, Dieu était né en exil) to rendering his verse in a language that would speak directly to the French readers of the twenty-first century. She decided, early on, to translate his poetry into blank verse, on the basis that a reader picking up a translation that was all in alexandrines would be likely to re-shelve the book immediately, as might one faced with poetry rendered into solid prose. The power of this decision is evident from the start:

¹³ See Ranger (2016), 350. ¹⁴ Ovid (1994), 100. All translations in English will be taken from this edition. ¹⁵ Josephine Balmer also comments on the language of translation of classical texts, and of the urge she felt to modernize it: ‘Firstly, even in the late twentieth century, a faux “archaizing” language was still often seen as the standard for classical translation. And so a new breed of translators such as myself were looking back to the example of the Modernists, such as Ezra Pound and H.D., to strip away what we saw then as an element of (to us) unpalatable poesy.’ Balmer (2013a), 80.

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Parve (nec invideo) sine me, liber, ibis in urbem: ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo! (Tristia I, 1–2) (Little book—no, I don’t begrudge it you—you’re off to the City Without me, going where your only begetter is banned.) (3)

Darrieussecq’s version immediately conveys Ovid’s sense of humiliation. Even visually it is clear that his voice is tiny, the voice of a broken man: petit livre hélas va sans moi dans la ville où je suis interdit¹⁶

Furthermore, where Ovid’s version starts with a future tense ‘ibis’, Darrieussecq replaces this with an imperative, as if acknowledging that for Ovid the future, a future in Rome, no longer exists. A few lines later this lack of a future life is emphasized again by Darrieussecq: siquis, qui, quid agam, forte requirat, erit: vivere me dices, salvum tamen esse negabis

(18–19)

(And if, in the throng, there’s one [ . . . ] who should chance to ask how I am, tell him I live (not ‘he’s well’!)) (3) si par hasard il reste encore quelqu’un pour se demander ce que je deviens tu lui diras que je vis mais sans vie (26)

And when Ovid suggests the dangers that face those who might openly support his cause in Rome, the use that Darrieussecq makes of parentheses functions as the visual equivalent of a covert whisper: invenies aliquem, qui me suspiret ademptum carmina nec siccis perlegat ista genis, et tacitus secum, ne quis malus audiat, optet, sit mea lenito Caesare poena levis (27–30) (Find one who sighs at my exile, and who can’t read those poems dry-eyed,

¹⁶ For a further example of this broken voice, see Darrieussecq’s translation of the first line of Tristia I, 2: ‘Di maris et caeli (quid enim nisi vota supersunt?)’ (You gods of sea and sky—what’s left me now but prayer?) ‘dieux de la mer et du ciel / je n’ai plus que la prière / pitié’ (30)

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and who prays (but in silence, lest the malicious hear him) that Caesar’s wrath may abate, my sentence be lightened.) (3) trouveras-tu quelqu’un pour pleurer mon absence les visages penchés sur toi sont-ils mouillés y aura-t-il un lecteur qui souhaiteras tout bas (par peur des malveillants) que César adouci allège un peu ma peine (26)

Darrieussecq’s elliptic, lapidary style, however, highlights the inexorable nature of Caesar’s rule, which is mechanical and therefore not subject to human appeal. The opening lines from the second poem are a little less hopeless, a little less bleak: saepe premente deo fert deus alter opem. Mulciber in Troiam, pro Troia stabat Apollo: aequa Venus Teucris, Pallas iniqua fuit. oderat Aenean propior Saturnia Turno. ille tamen Veneris numine tutus erat. saepe ferox cautum petiit Neptunus Ulixem: eripuit patruo saepe Minerva suo. (Often when one god’s hostile another will bring help: Hephaestus stood against Troy, on Troy’s behalf Apollo; Venus was pro-Troja, Athena pro-Greek, Juno hated Aeneas, had more sympathy for Turnus— Yet through Venus’ power Aeneas stayed safe. Time and again Poseidon made savage assaults on prudent Odysseus; time and again Athena deflected her uncle’s wrath.) (6–7)

Darrieussecq condenses the original, omitting the references that might not be familiar to a modern French audience, and employs balancing phrases which convey a sense of absolute logic governing Ovid’s fate, a message which is emphasized by her addition ‘telle est la loi du monde’ (such is the law of the world). un dieu punit un autre sauve Apollon est pour Troie Vulcain est pour les Grecs quand Vénus est l’amie Minerve est l’ennemie Neptune chassait Ulysse Minerve l’a sauvé telle est la loi du monde (30)

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This strategy of eliding certain elements, while adding others, in order to ensure a version with which a modern French audience might reasonably be expected to be conversant is one that Darrieussecq employs throughout the translation. In the second book of the Tristia Ovid points out the injustice of his punishment by reminding his readers of all of the other works of literature that contained lewd material, easily available for any of the readers of his own Ars Amatoria: numquid in Hippolyto, nisi caecae flamma novercae? nobilis est Canace fratris amore sui. quid? non Tantalides agitante Cupidine currus Pisaeam Phrygiis vexit eburnus equis? tingeret ut ferrum natorum sanguine mater, concitus a laeso fecit amore dolor. fecit amor subitas volucres cum paelice regem, quaeque suum luget nunc quoque mater Ityn. si non Aeropen frater sceleratus amasset aversos Solis non legeremus equos. inpia nec tragicos tetigisset Scylla coturnos, ni patrium crinem desecuisset amor. qui legis Electran et egentem mentis Oresten, Aegisthi crimen Tyndaridosque legis. (383–96) (Take Hippolytus: a stepmother blinded by passion. Why’s Canace famous? Her love for her brother. Was it not lust that pricked on ivory-shouldered Pelops to drive those Phrygian mares away with his Pisan bride? What roused Medea to kill her children? The agony of rejection. It was desire transformed into instant birds King Tereus, his mistress, the mother who still mourns for Itys. If that criminal brother of hers had never loved Aërope, we shouldn’t read, today, how the horses of the Sun turned back in their course. If Scylla had never severed her father’s lock of hair, she wouldn’t now be a tragic theme. When you read of Electra and crazed Orestes you’re reading Aegisthus’ and Clytemnestra’s crime.) (35)

Darrieussecq simply glosses the first half of this section—the only proper name that she retains is Hippolytus, but she also names Phèdre, his stepmother, safe in the knowledge that all of her French readers will be remembering Racine’s Phèdre. And having prepared her readers for the shockingly unnatural nature of perverted loves, in the second half of the

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extract she juxtaposes the lovers’ names, so that the shock of their shared crimes is recognized visually as well as cognitively: et la tragédie pourtant le genre le plus grave parlons de Phèdre et Hippolyte et de tous les incestes le frère la sur la mère le fils le père la fille la bru le gendre et les assassinats matricides parricides infanticides et toutes les métamorphoses par amour Canacé Tantale Erope Itys Electre Oreste Egisthe et la fille de Tyndare et Œdipe (80)

She also relies on the power of naming for poetic effect in her translation of Tristia V, 14. Ovid’s original lines are: aspicis ut longo teneat laudabilis aevo nomen inextinctum Penelopea fides? cernis ut Admeti cantetur et Hectoris uxor ausaque in accensos Iphias ire rogos? ut vivat fama coniunx Phylaceia cuius Iliacam celeri vir pede pressit humum? (Tristia V, 14, 35–40) (Do you see how Penelope’s faith wins praise down the ages, How her name never dies? Do you perceive How the wives of Admetus and Hector still figure in poems— Evadne too, who burnt herself on her husband’s pyre; How Laodamia whose husband Protesilaüs Was first man ashore at Troy, still lives on men’s lips?) (106)

Darrieussecq allows Penelope’s name to stand alone, and one of the effects of this is to act as a brake on the reader, so that all the resonances attached to Penelope’s name and fame might enter our minds. Pénélope vois comme ce nom nous est parvenu vois comme on loue sa fidélité

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Alceste Andromaque Évadné Laodamie avons-nous oublié qui gît derrière ces noms ne meurs pas aime-moi tu vivras (228–9)

It is significant, also, that Darrieussecq has allowed the wives of Admetus and Hector to go by their own names—within the French literary tradition, the name of Andromache is well-known both through Racine’s play, Andromaque, and through Baudelaire’s poem about exile, ‘Le Cygne’, which opens with the famous words ‘Andromaque je pense à vous’ (Andromache, I think of you). Darrieussecq also cleverly uses the word ‘gît’, predominantly found on gravestones, to evoke the dead presences haunting these names, while the short sentences with which this extract closes have a conversational feel to them, absent from the original, but are also suggestive of a mind which is unravelling with desperation—‘don’t die / love me / you will live.’ Rather than follow Ovid’s observation in Tristia II that his book scarcely has enough room for all the names, Darrrieussecq offers her own twist on this—that the very resonance of these names, and the works in which they have featured throughout Western culture, offer poetry enough to fill a whole volume: ‘on pourrait faire un volume avec les noms seulement’ (80) (you could make a volume just with the names). This comment not only points to her strategy of investing her poetry with the power of the unspoken, but also acknowledges the importance of resonances to Darrieussecq’s translation. Just before the extract cited above, when Ovid admits to having written erotic verse, saying ‘sic ego delicias et mollia carmina feci’ (349) (Yes, I’ve written frivolous verses, erotic poems) (34), Darrieussecq is able to rely upon the term ‘vers galants’. But her simple translation ‘j’écris des vers galants’ evokes a whole literary tradition that is quintessentially French. Likewise, when Ovid complains that he is addicted to poetry, the source of all his current woes, lamenting ‘sed nunc quid faciam? vis me tenet ipsa sacrorum, / et carmen demens carmine laesus amo’ (Tristia IV, 1, 29–30) (but what to do now? I’m hooked. Creative inspiration / has got me. Though verse-ruined, I’m mad enough / to love verse still) (64), Darrieussecq is able to gloss the word ‘carmen’, knowing that any reader of Valéry’s Charmes will be attuned to its dual meaning of ‘song’ and ‘spell’: ‘carmina—chant et charme / elles

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m’ont ensorcelé / que faire contre ce charme’ (138). Through this choice of translation Darrieussecq also looks back to the poetry of Baudelaire, and the many instances in Les Fleurs du mal where he curses the ‘charmes’ by which he is so often bewitched.¹⁷ And while her decision to translate into blank verse allows her to invest single words with hugely powerful subtexts, there are moments when the lure of a classical alexandrine in the style of Racine cannot be denied: ac veluti ventis agitantibus aera non est aequalis rabies continuusque furor sed modo subsidunt intermissique silescunt, vimque putes illos deposuisse suam: sic abeunt redeuntque mei variantque timores, et spem placandi dantque negantque tui. (Tristia II, 149–154) (And just as the winds whipping up the ocean don’t rage in a non-stop gale, but subside at times, have lulls, dwindle to stillness, so that you’d think they’d shed their violence—so my fears fluctuate, now swell, now vanish, now promise, now deny the hope of your appeasement) (29)

Darrieussecq’s translation of this passage begins with a lonely, small voice admitting to being afraid, but then the balancing phrases of a classical alexandrine convey the ebb and flow of heaving waves, the ebb and flow of Ovid’s vain hope: j’ai peur je pense à ta clémence, je pense à ton courroux mon espoir va et vient flue et reflue comme le vent comme la mer (70)

While ‘je pense à ta clémence, je pense à ton courroux’ has the flavour of classical French poetry, the balancing phrases in the rest of this extract are more reminiscent of twentieth-century poetry, and indeed Darrieussecq points out in her Préface that Ovid’s style reminds her of Apollinaire. ¹⁷ Darrieussecq (2013): ‘We learnt Baudelaire at school, so there must be some very, very deep-rooted influences in me.’

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A translation such as the following where Darrieussecq intensifies the image of Ovid talking to his absent wife, conjuring up her absent form, evokes memories of Paul Eluard’s elegies after the death of his wife, Nusch: te loquor absentem te vox mea nominat unam nulla venit sine te nox mihi, nulla dies (Tristia III, 3, 17–18) (though absent you’re always on my lips: no other woman do I mention, no night, no day passes without you) (44) je parle à ta forme absente je t’appelle à voix haute tu me visites chaque nuit tu me visites chaque jour (94)

Even as the poem carries echoes of Eluard, however, it is also suggestive of the thwarted dialogue that Jacques Roubaud attempts, and fails, to establish with his dead wife in Quelque chose noir (1986), a work by which Darrieussecq was influenced when writing Tristes Pontiques: Je n’ai jamais pensé à un poème comme étant un monologue parti quelque part de l’arrière de ma bouche ou de ma main Un poème se place toujours dans les conditions d’un dialogue virtuel L’hypothèse d’une rencontre l’hypothèse de quelqu’un

l’hypothèse d’une réponse

Même dans la page: la réponse supposée par la ligne, les déplacements, les formats Quelque chose va sortir remonter jusqu’à moi

du silence, de la punctuation, du blanc

Quelqu’un de vivant, de nommé:

un poème d’amour

Même quand dans l’omission, l’indirection, l’adresse pronominale rendent possible cette translation: qu’un lecteur soit devant la page, devant la voix du poème comme au moment de sa naissance Ou de sa réception: lecteur lecteur

ou

lecteur auteur

Ce poème t’est adressé et ne rencontrera rien¹⁸

¹⁸ Roubaud (1986), 124–5. © Gallimard. The English translation is my own. Darrieussecq also inserts the image of a conversation with absent forms into her translation of the opening

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(I’ve never thought of a poem as being like a monologue that emerges from somewhere at the back of my mouth or from my hand A poem is always placed in the conditions of a virtual dialogue The hypothesis of a meeting the hypothesis of a reply the hypothesis of someone Even on the page: the answer presupposed by the line, the displacements, the formats Something is going to emerge from the silence, the punctuation, the gap and surface towards me Someone living, named:

a love poem

Even when in omission and vagueness the reflexive form of address enables this translation: that a reader should be in front of the page, in front of the poem’s voice as if at the moment of its birth Or its reception: reader reader

or

reader author

This poem is addressed to you and will meet nothing). The pain of failing to summon the longed-for presence by these dialogues voiced by only one person is, perhaps, soothed by the hope that other readers may respond, even if they are not the primary object of the poet’s address. Darrieussecq seeks this passionately on Ovid’s behalf. As we have seen, in her Préface, she reminds us of Ovid’s demand: ‘Entends-moi, lecteur’ [ . . . ] Ce lecteur, c’est moi. Ce lecteur, c’est vous’ (18) (Hear me, reader [ . . . ] This reader is me. This reader is you). She is, here, of course evoking Hugo’s Préface to Les Contemplations, a volume published while he was in exile and written in homage to his dead daughter: ‘On se plaint quelquefois des écrivains qui disent moi. Parlez-nous de nous, leur crie-ton. Hélas, quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez-vous pas? Ah, insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas vous’ lines of Tristia III, 14, 1–4: ‘Cultor et antistes doctorum sancte virorum, / quid facis ingenio semper amice meo? / ecquid, ut incolumen quondam celebrare solebas, / nunc quoque ne videar totus abesse, caves? (Patron and reverend guardian of letters, you always / befriended my talent—but what’s your attitude now? / In the days before my downfall you used to promote me— / and today? Are you taking care I don’t become / an unperson). (62) ‘toi mon ami amoureux des livres / et protecteur de ceux qui les écrivent / me lis-tu encore et me celebres-tu/ comme au temps de ma faveur/ suis-je grace à toi un peu moins absent / entretiens-tu des traces de ma présence’ (132)

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(Sometimes people complain about writers who say me. Speak to us about ourselves, they cry to them. Alas—when I speak to you about myself, I’m speaking to you about yourself. How is it that you don’t feel that? Ah, you crazy fool to believe that I am not you’).¹⁹ The effect of these echoes haunting Darrieussecq’s translation is to root her version strongly within a French literary tradition, to show us what it means to create a twenty-first century-image of Ovid who is able to speak to a French reader. But Darrieussecq is also conscious of working within an established tradition of writers responding to the exile poetry. In the Préface she observes that ‘Ovide a inspiré quantité de poètes. Dante, du Bellay, Pavese, Danilo Kis, Celan . . . Mandelstam aussi l’a lu, au point d’intituler Tristia son deuxième recueil (1922)’ (13) (Ovid has inspired lots of poets—Dante, du Bellay, Pavese, Danilo Kis, Celan . . . Mandelstam read him as well to the point of calling his second anthology Tristia). And, indeed, it is from Mandelstam’s Tristia that Darrieussecq takes her epigram to the Préface: ‘On m’enseigna la science de l’adieu / Dans les plaintes échevelées, nocturnes’ (I was taught the science of farewell / In the unravelled, night-time laments). And, of course, if we look back from Darrieussecq’s version of Ovid to her novels it is possible to see the strong intratextual paths binding her work as a translator into her oeuvre more generally. At the end of the Préface she recognizes the fact that Ovid, of course, can have had no real certainty that his exile would be redeemed, in some sort, by more than two thousand years of future readers, but she asserts the importance of entering into a humanity that links us with Ovid: ‘Je ne peux plus sauver Ovide, et il ne saura pas que je le lis. Le lire, pourtant, c’est participer à quelque chose qui, malgré tout, ne disparaît pas. Un monde commun. Une humanité, un espoir atemporel, une gravité. Partager la cambrure aux reins, la parole, la pensée. Quelque chose qui fait que nous sommes debout sur la Terre, à tourner dans le vide, sous des étoiles qui restent inconnues’ (19) (I can no longer save Ovid, and he won’t know that I’m reading him. And yet reading him means taking part in something which, in spite of everything, is not disappearing. A common world. A humanity, a timeless hope, a seriousness. Our bodies share the same small of the back, we share a voice and thoughts. Something which

¹⁹ Victor Hugo (1943) Les Contemplations. Paris: Gallimard, 28 [My translation].

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means that we stand upright on the earth, wheeling through the void beneath stars which remain unknown to us). Not only does this passage allude to Ovid’s observation in Metamorphoses I that what distinguishes humans from beasts is our ability to stand upright and gaze upon the stars, but it also looks to the closing lines of Truismes, where the heroine occasionally chooses to abandon her pig form, in order to recover her humanity while gazing at the moon: ‘moi c’est pour retrouver ma cambrure d’humain que je tends mon cou vers la Lune’²⁰ (in my case it’s to regain my human curves that I stretch out my neck towards the Moon). The fascination exerted upon Darrieussecq by the idea of the vast, cold expanses to which Ovid had been banished is evidenced by the fact that she expands her translation, at times, in order to emphasize this aspect of his ordeal. In Tristia III, 2, where Ovid writes: ‘Ergo erat in fatis Scythiam quoque visere nostris, / quaeque Lycaonio terra sub axe iacet’ (So it was my destiny to travel as far as Scythia, / that land lying below the northern pole), Darrieussecq offers a version where her starkly beautiful imagery heightens the bleakness of his plight: ‘il était donc écrit que j’irais en Scythie / sous les étoiles froides.’ But then a writer who had to negotiate the challenges of evoking the endless expanses of uniform Arctic landscape in White is bound to have her imagination fired by Ovid’s depictions of the ice-bound expanses to which he was condemned. The landscape of White anticipates the language that Darrieussecq will use to evoke Ovid’s frozen wastes. It is set in a land where ‘rien ici ne les accueille. Rien ici ne veut d’eux. La glace tourbillonne, le blanc gagne. Edmée est arrivée. Nous nous éloignons sur quelques mètres humains: plus rien. Dans cet état qui est le nôtre. Nous nous fondons dans le blanc, si quelque chose ressemble à une fonte dans le vide, si quelque chose est à nourrir, à abreuver en lui, en nous. [ . . . ] Pas un souffle, pas un événement. Se projeter au Nord, au Sud, à l’Est, à l’Ouest: rien. Le temps s’enroule’²¹ (nothing here welcomes them. Nothing here wants anything to do with them. Ice whirls, white takes over. Edmée has arrived. We distance ourselves over a few human metres—there’s nothing more. In this state we’re in. We melt into the white, if something

²⁰ Darrieussecq (1996), 149. And see Hamel (2012), 201–2, where the connection between stargazing in Truismes and the Metamorphoses is noted, as is the link between ‘la cambrure’ of Truismes and that of Tristes Pontiques. ²¹ Darrieussecq (2003), 66.

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resembles a melting into emptiness, if there’s something to nourish, to quench in it, in us [ . . . ] Nothing breathes. Nothing happens. Turn to the North, the South, the East, the West: nothing. Time coils up). Paradoxically, however, it is Tom est mort, the novel set at the other end of the world, in the arid heat of Australia, that most vividly anticipates Tristes Pontiques. In the exile poems Ovid repeatedly compares his plight to the tragedy of Niobe, transformed into rock by the weight of her grief for the twelve children she loses. In fact he views Niobe’s predicament with a degree of envy, believing that it is easier to endure intense pain once you have been petrified by your sorrow. The grieving mother of Tom est mort also undergoes a gradual descent into silence, as she experiences exile into a world that is utterly transformed by the death of her child: ‘Je suis bannie, parce que j’ai vu et j’ai entendu. Je crois toujours errer parmi les innocents, à peine un peu plus seule peut-être, je crois être restée parmi les autres (qui?) sur ma chaise, empêchant Vince de courir, avec Stella lourde endormie dans mes bras. Mais je suis bannie’ (94)²² (I’m banished because I’ve seen and heard. I believe I’m always wandering amidst innocents, scarcely a little more lonely perhaps, I believe I’ve stayed among others on my chair, stopping Vince from running, with the heavy weight of Stella sleeping in my arms. But I am banished). In the early stages of their grief, both she and her husband find that their voices have metamorphosed into an animal howl of sorrow: ‘Quelque chose est monté du ventre de Stuart jusque derrière ses mains. Son cri à lui. Nous étions transformés en animaux et nous découvrions, chacun, notre cri. Un zoo de douleur’ (129) (Something rose up from Stuart’s stomach behind his hands. His own distinctive cry. We were transformed into animals and each of us discovered our cry. A zoo of sorrow).Over the ensuing days and months she discovers that she quite simply loses the capacity to speak: ‘Alors je suis devenue muette. Ce sont mes lèvres, qui se sont pétrifiées. Le silence est descendu dans mes veines et a paralysé les muscles de mes joues. [ . . . ] J’étais morte. Je ne pleurais pas. Je ne criais pas. Je ne faisais rien. Ce qui restait de moi était là pour souffrir’ (121) (And so I became dumb. Those are my lips that petrified. Silence slipped down into my veins and paralysed the

²² Darrieussecq (2007). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given in the text.

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muscles in my cheeks. [ . . . ] I had died. I didn’t cry. I didn’t shout. I didn’t do anything. What remained of me was there to suffer). Perhaps, inevitably, in the internet age, the mother discovers that there is an internet support group for bereaved mothers, www.niobe.com: ‘Le logo a la forme d’une statue de Niobé, en pierre’ (118) (The logo is in the shape of a statue of Niobe, in stone). And like Ovid, she finds herself envying Niobe.²³ In her case this is because Niobe’s grief is at least dignified by its literary monument, commemorating both her and her lost children: ‘Niobé au moins a son petit mythe. Évidemment ce n’est pas Déméter aux Enfers. Ni même Hécube transformée en chienne. Mais pour moi, rien. Je ne me transformais en rien. Je n’avais même pas su crier longtemps: une piqûre, et paf. Faire quoi, pour Tom? Quel ravage? Ou quel monument?’ (120) (At least Niobe has her little myth. Obviously it’s not Demeter in hell. Or even Hecuba transformed into a bitch. But there’s nothing for me. I didn’t change into anything. I hadn’t even known how to shout out for very long: one injection, and there you are. What could I do for Tom? What ravages? Or what monument?) Like Ovid, the mother of Tom est mort has been reduced to little more than a ghost, wandering through the world of the living where she is condemned to be separate, outcast, an exile from the rest of the world. Darrieussecq’s response to Ovid is ghosted by the concerns that she explores in her fiction, where she is especially concerned by the figure of the outsider—the pig-woman, those who are ravaged by grief, those who have travelled to the ends of the world. She is fascinated by the pressures from within society that make it so difficult for such individuals to gain acceptance, as well as by the psychologies of experiencing oneself as an outsider, a freak, a monster. By exploring the interplay between society and the individual in this way Darrieussecq is able to articulate her anger against a society that continues to exclude its most vulnerable—the working class, women without clearly defined roles, the grieving whose raw sorrow is embarrassing. That so much of her work is infiltrated by Ovidian echoes is unsurprising when we see how drawn to the imagery of metamorphosis she is:

²³ See in particular Ovid, Ex Ponto I, 2.29–30: ‘felicem Nioben, quamvis tot funera vidit, / quae posuit sensum saxea facta malis’ (Niobe was lucky, despite all her bereavements, / whose troubles froze her to an insentient rock). (112)

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C’est vrai, je m’y connais en singes. Et en truies. Et en fantômes. Et en fantasmes. C’est mon métier, et plus que cela. J’ai un savoir-faire en métamorphoses. Parfois, mon front se couvre de très anciens coquillages, et je plonge rendre visite à des baleines, et nous devisons en flottant; et le plancton prend des formes extravagantes dans les rayons de soleil sous la mer.²⁴ (It’s true—I know where I am with monkeys. And sows. And ghosts. And phantasms. It’s my job, and more besides. I have a knack with metamorphoses. Sometimes my forehead is covered with very ancient shells and off I dive to visit the whales, and we chat as we float; and the plankton assumes extravagant shapes in the sunbeams beneath the sea.)

Apart from these echoes from her own work, however, Darrieussecq’s response to the exile poetry seems to be filtered through a network of allusions that are entirely from male authors. Perhaps this is inevitable. The exile poems are only just beginning to gain favour, as opposed to the Metamorphoses, for instance. Yet within the turn to Ovid on the part of contemporary women writers, they play a significant role by foregrounding themes that have offered fruitful dialogue between today’s world and the ancient world, such as changes wrought upon the personality by exile, the threat of being silenced and our treatment of those who are lost to us. In the following chapter we shall see how two contemporary poets respond to these themes.

²⁴ Darrieussecq (2010), 28 [My translation]. I am grateful to Sandra Daroczi for bringing this passage to my attention.

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9 Josephine Balmer and Averill Curdy In recent years there has been a quite extraordinary response to the Tristia—the most renowned instances of this are David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Christoph Ransmayr’s Die letzte Welt (The Last World) (1988), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988).¹ In addition to these male-authored novels there has been a flowering of responses to Ovid’s exile from women authors also—Julia Kristeva’s novel Le Vieil Homme et les loups (1991) uses Ovid to think about the life of the intellectual and exile; Benita Kane Jaro’s Betray the Night—A Novel about Ovid (2009) recounts the story of Ovid’s exile from the point of view of his wife, Pinaria, who ends up alone and cast into the same position as the protagonists of the Heroides; Jane Alison’s The Love Artist (2001) tells of Xenia, Ovid’s lover from the Black Sea, who serves as a model for his lost play, Medea. In contrast to the works of Rushdie, Malouf, and Ransmayr, these female-authored works have, to date, garnered very little critical attention.² This chapter will examine two very recent poetic responses to the Tristia—Josephine Balmer’s The Word for Sorrow (2009) and Averill Curdy’s Song and Error (2013), which have received little in the way of scholarly treatment. Josephine Balmer’s most recent book, Piecing Together the Fragments—Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry,³ ¹ For discussions of these see Kennedy (2002) Hardie (2002a), 326–37, Ziolkowski (2005) and (2009), 455–68, Michalopoulos A. (2011), Ziogas (2011), and Matzner (2011). ² Ziolkowski (2005) devotes two pages (141–3) to Kristeva’s novel and two pages to Alison’s (217–19). A discussion of Kane Jaro forms half of Lovatt (2011). See also Michalopoulos C. (2011). Cox (2012) on Shapcott has been expanded for this book where it appears as Chapter 7. ³ Balmer (2013a). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given in the text.

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meditates upon the role of the translator (especially the overlooked female translator) within literary history, before depicting the role that she plays as a classicist whose response to ‘translating’ literary texts is to ‘adapt’ them, an act she describes as ‘transgression’.⁴ The book is an autobiography of sorts, as Balmer demonstrates how her relationship with ancient texts has moulded her as a person, emphasizing the impossibility or undesirability of denying your personality within the act of translation; at the same time the ancient texts also offer her a conduit to voice experiences that would otherwise be unspeakable. It is striking how much she stresses ‘transformation’ and ‘metamorphosis’: translator and ancient text are engaged in a living relationship, whose life force ensures the continuing adaptation of ancient texts to ever-new contexts, while allowing the translator the space to develop creatively by entering into dialogue with ancient texts:⁵ translators become characters in their own narrative. These might be combative, apologetic, defensive, disingenuous, even downright unreliable but—or so one hopes—they are also intriguing and informative, an act of creative writing telling us as much about the translator as the work of translation. But above all they remain sparse. And like the silence of fragmented archaic poetry, of the lost and forgotten women poets of the ancient world, of a voice stilled by grief or exile or war, here is a silence that requires to be broken. (229)

As Balmer evokes the silences that risk submerging voices from the past, especially the voices of overlooked women writers, she is evoking her own poetic career. Her earliest volume was Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1984), produced at a time when Sappho was far less known than she is now. This was followed in 1996 by an anthology of women’s writing from antiquity entitled Classical Women Poets. In 2004 her translations of Catullus, Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate, was accompanied by a volume of poetry, Chasing Catullus, in which she used her creative responses to ancient poetry to talk about her niece’s death from cancer, observing that ‘By taking contemporary grief and placing it in the perspective of the

⁴ See also Balmer (2009b) and (2012). ⁵ ‘For through translation—and transgression—our ancient canonical texts only gain in stature, transformed again, as they have been so many times over the centuries, into a new and different work, becoming stronger, even more enduring. At the same time, as my experience here has illustrated, the translator herself is translated and transformed.’ Balmer (2013a), 232.

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distant, classical past, it finds a means of accepting the unacceptable.’⁶ Her most recent anthology of poetry, The Word for Sorrow, is a response to Ovid’s Tristia, which she blends with poems meditating upon the First World War and its legacy.⁷ At first sight it may appear that The Word for Sorrow is far removed from Balmer’s early work. However, in her discussion of the women poets selected for her anthology, Balmer speaks of the strategies used by ancient women writers, at how these anticipate comparable manoeuvres by writers such as Irigaray and Cixous, and looks ahead to the challenges of negotiating Ovid’s wordplay in the exile poetry: ‘In addition they often employ highly artificial wordplay, such as puns or neologisms, all strategies adopted by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray for their écriture féminine. As Susanne Jill Levine has pointed out, puns are the exile’s tool, offering a “binary” view of . . . language and culture . . . both one’s own and the other’ (137).⁸ For Balmer to write as a woman is still to feel on the outside, constantly attempting to find a way of entering the canon: ‘And, as so often with women’s literary history, there is still also the need to keep reinventing, or maybe redelineating, the mainstream canon into which, over and over again, the women poets are never quite assimilated’ (140). While The Word for Sorrow⁹ is not explicitly foregrounding the issue of women writers engaging with male-authored canonical works, matters of gender and exclusion are nevertheless present. In an interview Balmer argues that it is the Tristia’s focus on exile and displacement, in combination with their status as one of Ovid’s more overlooked works, which offers a foothold to women writers seeking an entry into mainstream

⁶ Balmer (2004), 198. ⁷ There are responses to Ovid in some of Balmer’s earlier work, also. For example she writes of a poem in Chasing Catullus: ‘This device is continued in the sequence’s next poem, “Cutting the Hydra”, a proverbial expression in classical Greek for attempting an impossible task (hudran temnein), which addresses a surgeon’s initially confident but unfortunately ultimately unsuccessful attempt to remove my niece’s tumour. Here, the poem’s first stanza is based on Ovid’s account of Hercules’s slaying of the monstrous many-headed serpent, the Hydra (Metamorphoses 9, 67–78). As heroic confidence is deflated, its second stanza returns to my own narrative voice, nevertheless referencing the later myth of Hercules, killed by his wife Deianira, who gave him a shirt dipped in the Hydra’s poisonous blood.’ Balmer (2013a), 185. ⁸ See also Balmer (2013a), 80: ‘This was the poetry I was inspired to recreate; elusive, disputed, the poetry of broken tongues.’ ⁹ Balmer (2009a). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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culture.¹⁰ In the title poem ‘The Word for Sorrow’ Balmer reminds us of what Latin has signified to many British people: ‘retired Major, doublebarrelled, / Master of the Hunt, local magistrate, / for whom Latin meant status, gender, / but never learning, love, literature?’ (45) Within the context of a volume evoking the First World War it is worth remembering that, for boys, Latin was one of the subjects that was taught to convince them of the glory of war. Wilfred Owen’s quiet anger at his discovery of ‘the old lie’, perpetrated by Horace’s verse ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ comes to mind.¹¹ But it is also pertinent to remember that recent responses to ancient epic on the part of women—such as Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Aeneid and Alice Oswald’s ‘excavation of the Iliad’, Memorial—do not respond to the ‘grandeur’ and ‘heroism’ of these works, unless it is to underplay these dimensions. Balmer’s volume, like the work of Ruden and Oswald, emphasizes the terrible losses of the First World War; the personal grief articulated in Chasing Catullus develops into an examination of a national horror that has never lost its grip on the British imagination.¹² Balmer states that what initially attracted her to the exile poetry, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, was the idea of working with exile and loss: ‘I’d come to Tristia anticipating—wanting—a moving, raw expression of grief and loss, an exposition of the plight of the exiled artist. But nothing in literature—particularly not in Latin poetry—is that simple. The more I translated Ovid’s verse, the more I realised that I had something far more complicated, full of literary in-jokes, knowing mythological references, jokes, puns, alongside the account of Ovid’s apparent misery in Tomis—a work constantly changing register from high tragedy to high comedy in the blink of a line.’¹³ The project changed shape still further when an electrical storm interrupted her translation of ¹⁰ Balmer (2013b): ‘Brodsky, I think it was, said that displacement is the commonplace now of our century, that's why so many writers were drawn to Ovid, the Tristia in particular. But I think [ . . . ] women feel that they are exiled from the mainstream literary culture and they are exiled also from the male literary Western canon. So yes, there’s a huge pull.’ ¹¹ See also Hall (2008), 319: ‘During the nineteenth century, as Stray, Majeed and recently Vasunia have demonstrated, training in Greek and Latin, at least in Britain, became identified with the preparation of young British males for administering the British empire.’ ¹² ‘The Word for Sorrow looked to an implicitly more objective narrative drive in order to approach wider, national traumas, and the conflicts and divisions inherent within them.’ Balmer (2013a), 201. ¹³ Balmer (2009a), xvi.

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the Tristia and forced her away from online resources to one of her old Latin dictionary books. Her glance happened on the faded inscription on the flyleaf and, on putting the name through internet search engines, she discovered that the book’s original owner had been posted to Gallipoli during the First World War, very close to the site of Ovid’s exile.¹⁴ The Word for Sorrow juxtaposes the poignancy of Ovid’s misery in exile and his mordant wit with the narratives of the heartbreakingly young men, stunned with the horror of the trenches which they attempted to alleviate through bravado and joking.¹⁵ It is striking that a volume of poetry consisting of poetic responses to and adaptations of Ovidian exile poetry should come illustrated by a photograph of a First World War solider with a blanked-out face. Balmer’s decision to call Ovid by his nickname ‘Naso’, a joke about his long nose, establishes a further parallel with the First World War soldiers depicted, who are also known in the volume by first names or nicknames. She names the owner of the dictionary ‘Geoffrey’ ‘not just to preserve his anonymity but also to widen my narrative net, to include the testaments not just of one man but of many who fought in the campaign’.¹⁶ In both instances the horror is heightened by a sense of absolute helplessness—Ovid lost everything from one day to the next when he was unexpectedly sent into exile at the political behest of Augustus, while the young men sent to fight in the First World War were responding to governmental fiats utterly beyond their control. The connections that Balmer draws allowed her to accommodate family history within this volume also; the book is ‘Dedicated to the memory of Edward Balmer d. Pip Ridge, Salonica, 24th April, 1918 and for my father his namesake’.

¹⁴ ‘old newspaper photos of the regiment lined up on the now demolished Malvern Road railway station in Cheltenham just before leaving for the East, suggested parallels with Ovid’s famous poem describing his last night before exile (Tristia 1.3., here ‘Naso’s Last Night’). The Word for Sorrow took shape, a series of poems exploring the story of an old second-hand dictionary and its owner alongside versions of the texts it was helping to translate.’ Balmer (2009a), xiv. ¹⁵ Balmer (2013a), 218–19: ‘Certainly their own writings and letters home from Gallipoli were veined with the same tonal changes, from horror to humour, caught between the need to express the daily trauma of their situation yet not wanting to alarm loved ones at home or pollute those comforting past memories with present reality. At the same time, these modern parallels could, in their turn, illuminate our understanding about Ovid’s own fluid verse and the challenges to which it might have responded.’ ¹⁶ Balmer (2009a), xvii.

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The book opens with the plight of Ovid juxtaposed to lines emerging from the trenches. Balmer’s version of Tristia III, 4 overlays Ovid’s exile with a contemporary feel through her use of the word ‘refugee’, while her emphasis on Ovid’s fear that his renown might dwindle highlights the sad paradox of Ovid’s fame enduring to the twenty-first century while Ovid the man contemplated speechlessly the loss of everything that he had achieved:¹⁷ I drank in your faith, your praise and now I must drink in your tears. So live quietly, steer clear of fame; keep them close, your good friends. And nurture what little now remains of this sad refugee: Naso’s name . . . Tristia 3.4¹⁸ (xi)

These lines are immediately followed by an extract from Voices of Gallipoli: ‘From first to last I lived with fear all the time, twenty-four hours a day, not just in spasms. Sometimes you couldn’t sleep for days, so you had plenty of time to think about what might happen’ (xi). The juxtaposition not only offers Ovid one of his most unexpected afterlives (confirming the endurance of this ‘sad refugee’ of his name), but also enables us as readers to gaze through our imaginations back from war-torn Gallipoli across two millennia to Ovid’s wretched and solitary figure, and thereby to glimpse at the ways in which an individual history can feed into the international forces of history where so many individual histories have been lost and drowned.¹⁹ This epigram is balanced by the volume’s closing

¹⁷ The Tristia are here looking back to the closing lines of the Metamorphoses where Ovid asserts with supreme confidence that his name will live for ever amidst the stars. ¹⁸ ‘nostra tuas vidi lacrimas super ora cadentes, / tempore quas uno fidaque verba bibi. / nunc quoque summotum studio defendis amicum, / et mala vix ulla parte levanda levas. / vive sine invidia, mollesque inglorius annos / exige, amicitias et tibi iunge pares, / Nasonisque tui, quod adhuc non exulat unum, / nomen ama: Scythius cetera Pontus habet’ (39–46). See Ovid (1994), 47–8: ‘I watched / the tears rain down your face, absorbed them along with / your protestations of loyalty. Even now / you still defend your banished friend with passion, lighten / my scarce-anywhere-to-be-lightened woes. / Live without rousing envy, enjoy years of undistinguished / ease and delight, seek equals for friends, love the one / part of your Ovid that’s not, as yet, in exile— / his name: all else the Black Sea’s shore now holds.’ ¹⁹ Balmer (2009a), xvii: ‘Most important of all, though, are the links forged between ancient and modern, past and present, the invisible lines that connect us to often surprising points in history, finding common ground in unexpected places, celebrating the common humanity that binds us, whether we live at the beginning of the first, the twentieth or the twenty-first century.’

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page, where Ovid’s focus on the survival of his name once again counterpoints the experiences of First World War soldiers: I may be exiled, sent far from home, where stars litter the dark horizon yet my name echoes like proclamation, my hardships sound through all domains. I will be read from sunrise to sunset; from dawn to dusk, from east to west. On land and sea, they will hear my words, my sorrow weightier than any sword . . . from Tristia 4.9 (49)²⁰

Ovid’s assertion of his immortality contrasts with the voice of the weary veteran, whose dreams carry the last vestiges of his memories (the lines from Voices of Gallipoli): ‘Occasionally I still dream about it. Yes, sometimes. But very seldom. Mostly it’s gone away now. Mostly, it’s gone.’²¹ But, of course, one of the effects of Balmer’s volume is that through their presence in her poetry these memories are kept alive for new generations of readers. One of the devices that Balmer employs in The Word for Sorrow is to create a binocular vision—we see Ovid in the same position as the First World War soldiers and vice versa. One effect of this is to enable the reader to empathize with Ovid’s bewilderment, panic, and depression through reading of it from the perspective of First World War accounts which are, to many, more graphic and immediate. In the poem entitled ‘Hell Hole’ Balmer subverts the readers’ expectations of an account of blood-chilling suffering, and instead depicts a scene so beautiful and so timeless that it could belong to Ovid’s world as well as our own: ²⁰ Balmer is reworking lines 17–24: ‘quod Scythicis habitem longe summotus in oris, / siccaque sint oculis proxima signa meis, / nostra per inmensas ibunt praeconia gentes, / quodque querar notum qua patet orbis erit. / ibit ad occasum quicquid dicemus ab ortu, / testis et Hesperiae vocis Eous erit. / trans ego tellurem, trans altas audiar undas, / et gemitus vox est magna futura mei.’ Ovid (1994), 79: ‘Although / I’m sequestered in this wasteland where the northern stars circle / high and dry above my gaze, nevertheless / my clarion message will go forth to countless peoples, / my complaint shall be known world-wide; whatever I say shall travel from sunrise to sunset, / the East shall witness the West’s words. Over continents I shall be heard, across deep waters; / my lamentation shall find a mighty voice.’ ²¹ The tired sadness of this voice chimes with that of Naso whom Balmer imagines looking back to his earlier life (‘Welcome Note’, 33): ‘I looked in the mirror and hardly knew myself: / an old man looking back, black hair bleached / to white [ . . . ] Tonight the stars were half-murmured words / sliding softly into sound after far too long.’

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‘A haze-raked morning, Gallipoli, early June / and today it’s hard to imagine—almost: / boats bob like mines on the stilled Aegean’ (25). It is only the vivid simile of the boats bobbing like mines that reminds us that this was a war zone. The collapse of the time difference separating us from Ovid’s world pervades the volume. The poem ‘By the Dardanelles’ offers two perspectives of the same place—the first is rooted in Ovid’s world and is called ‘Naso Jumps Ship’: ‘It’s but a short trip from here / to the mainland, that rock-hard peninsula, / past Dardanelles’ (10); the second, entitled ‘Samothrace’, asks us to look back to Ovid’s world from the perspective of the more recent past, and shows us a place where time zones have dissolved: ‘Here’s what Naso found: a world suspended, / hung in the balance: past, future, present’ (10). The way in which the poems shuttle back and forth between different millennia allows us not only to see how Ovidian exile sharpens the pathos of the plight endured by soldiers at Gallipoli, but also to reflect upon what the military imagery might show us about Ovid and his world. It is famously in Tristia IV, 10 that Ovid gives us his autobiography, which Balmer has translated and responded to in two poems entitled ‘Naso Sees Action’ and ‘Naso’s Back Story’. In ‘Naso Sees Action’ Balmer shows us an Ovid who is completely unsuited to military life— ‘In youth I shunned the rigours of military service / never took up arms unless in play or at the Circus. / In my old age now I must strap on sword and shield / as my trembling hands take cold comfort of steel’ (32). To think of Ovid as a soldier is to think of him as a lover, employing military strategies in order to win his beloved, according to his descriptions in the Amores and his instructions in the Ars Amatoria. In his exile he thinks that living among the people whom he deems to be savages is akin to living in a war zone, ‘where the clash of combat echoes’ (‘Naso’s Back Story’, 39), where all around him he beholds ‘my home, a new landscape of fear’ (‘Naso Sees Action’, 32). Through Balmer’s poetry Ovid’s landscape of exile becomes haunted by echoes from the future also, from the combat of the First World War. In ‘Among the Graces: Ampney Crucis’ she catapults us to the contemporary world, and shows us the activities of today’s farmers on Gallipoli Peninsula: Back at Suvla, known now as Kemikli Burnu— ‘the bone-strewn headland’—under haze of willow, black-veiled women are resting from the fields. Another plough stops, shudders up fresh yield;

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a shard of tibia that once knelt here in the grass, crushed primroses, diminished morning stars, Or finger bone that on sermoned Sunday mornings, traced, like sleepy new lover, this Latin lettering, detailing hour as well as day and date of death: decessit inter horas XII et primam nocturnas strange, unknown as yet, waiting to be learnt (35)

Balmer fleshes out the lost life from the bone, which points back to Latin as a new language that the young man is waiting to learn. It is an image that emphasizes his youthful hopefulness, as is the image of the flowers crushed like stars. The most striking image from this passage, however, is of the bones being turned over by the plough, as it is an image that leads directly back to the end of Book II of Virgil’s Georgics and the astonishment of Virgil’s farmers as they plough up bones and marvel at the power and size of the warriors of yesteryear. In a later poem, ‘Among the Graves: Green Hill, Gallipoli’, she once more draws on classical myth in order to blend images of fragile youth and brute force. She offers us a graphic image of the brutal loss of young lives as she depicts their gravestones—‘a stub of stones, milk-teeth, broken through / for the half-formed fighting men they sowed’ (21). The image reminds us of the heart-stopping youth and vulnerability of the soldiers sent off to die, while also reworking the myth of Cadmus in Metamorphoses III, who sows the dragon’s teeth from which a new race of mighty warriors sprung. As the poem continues, the pathos deepens: two-thousand five hundred and eighty-nine long-broken bodies that have never been found [ . . . ] I wish now I’d spoken out, roll-called the names, taken one small thing, at least, home to Gloucs: rosemary sprig to dry, daisy or phlox to press between calamitas. hurt and healed. consanatus. (21)

The impulse to commemorate the dead with flowers looks back to the ancient image, employed by both Virgil and Catullus,²² of the dying soldier resembling a flower torn from the earth, while the idea of pressing ²² See also ‘Malvern Road Station, Cheltenham’: ‘I’d hoped for a single snowdrop hunched by the tracks— /Catullus’ flower untouched, as yet, in the grass— / a star-chipped bloom to soothe the scar of waste’ (8). In the notes Balmer observes that this is ‘an image from Catullus 11, where the flower is left at a meadow’s edge to be “touched and then devoured / by the passing plough” ’ (51).

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it within the pages of the dictionary—between hurt and healed—reminds us of the Latin, the book out of which this entire project grew. The image also looks ahead to Balmer’s evocation of another serendipitous find, which forms the subject of the last poem entitled ‘Epilogue: The Observer Book of Wild Flowers’. Here too the flyleaf is inscribed by a signature, but the date is 1945, which, of course, marks the end of yet another war. The poem reflects upon the astonishing endurance of language, of flower names, to survive the series of atrocities, and offers a salve to the pity, the sorrow of her volume, by showing us ‘A light-dazed world for refugees, survivors. / A world for heartsease, naming flowers’ (48). While Ovid’s complaints about the harsh cold of the landscape have largely been discredited, they nevertheless establish kinship with the soldiers fighting in bleak conditions. In ‘Knocking at the Door’ Naso depicts his place of exile as mirroring the bleakness of his psychological condition: ‘A shrivelled, frost-scorched land [ . . . ] For days I’ve been knocking / at the door of my own tomb. / Death won’t hand back the key’ (19). The imagery is developed further in Geoffrey’s half of the poem: ‘Those of us who came back no longer walked / with the living. We had felt Hades’ breath, / our hair turned grey in that sharp blast of frost’ (19). Geoffrey’s sense that he and his fellow officers had been turned into the living dead extends Ovid’s presentation of himself as a ghost while also glancing at Eliot’s evocation of the dead mingling with the living, as they stream over London Bridge in The Waste Land, itself a poem that meditates upon the transformed meaning of classical literature within the contemporary world. The sense of hopelessness and futility crosses both time periods and nations. In ‘Seeking Quarter’ Naso complains about living among foreign, savage soldiers, beneath the same ‘ice-veined skies’(36), while Geoffrey remembers how the enemy revealed that they, too, were frozen in the same meaningless horror: On a frost-edged November night, crescent moon blown through the sky like bullet-hole, the Turks hurled a note into the trench: We can’t advance, you can’t advance. What can anyone achieve? Where to go? (36)

In ‘Naso’s Plight Hits Home’ Balmer draws on the topos of autumn leaves signifying death, a topos passed from the Iliad to the Aeneid, from the Commedia to Paradise Lost. Naso complains: ‘Think of the first frost in autumn / when winter’s chill begins to bleed / light from day, life from

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fallen leaves; [ . . . ] My fate takes shape like a half-blurred ghost’ (22). Once again Balmer collapses the geographical and temporal distances separating him from the First World War soldiers: ‘Seven hundred miles to the west / and two thousand years further on, they’d shoot off feet, fingers, thumbs’ (22). ‘The Fall’ evokes the winter of 1915, an especially bitter one in Gallipoli, when the harsh conditions paradoxically fostered closeness amongst the troops who ‘snowballed’ together to keep warm, while sharing tots of rum. Here too the line between living and dead is blurred: ‘We had gone through so much together / the living and the dead. We belonged / together’ (37). The extremity of their conditions made it impossible to believe that they could ever return home, return to normality: ‘The future didn’t exist any more, it was all / so far away. Now there was only the past . . . ’ (37). On this reading it is easy to believe that the soldiers might feel a greater affinity with the exiled Ovid than with their families waiting for them to come home. This blurring of past and present offers an unexpected afterlife to Ovid’s exile poetry, an afterlife he did not expect to see, despite his supreme confidence about the survival of the Metamorphoses. In a letter to Severus (Ex Ponto IV, 2) he complains that writing a poem that you may not read to anyone is the same thing as dancing in the dark.²³ Balmer uses the image as the title of her poem ‘Dancing in the Dark’²⁴, pointing out that in this way Ovid’s lines ‘ghost’ her original poems.²⁵ In this poem Balmer writes the task of the translator into Ovid’s predicament: For days now I’ve been stumbling after, chasing down words, just beyond reach, searching for agreement, unpicking order, trying not to tread on toes (or feet) to keep up, as ever, with his deft repartee.

(6)

²³ ‘Sive quod in tenebris numerosos ponere gestus, / quodque legas nulli scribere carmen, idem est’ (33–4). Ovid (1994), 176: ‘or that writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.’ ²⁴ Jane Alison also remembers this poem in her novel The Love Artist. See Alison (2001), 27: ‘But above all, Ovid. She saw him again, as she always envisioned him, with a wry face, clever long hands, what she half imagined as leathery wings. He flew in windows and dryly laughed, and fled again, mercurial. So brilliant, so urbane—but within his words was something achingly earnest, something that pierced Xenia’s heart: Oh god, don’t let my name, my work, sink into oblivious waters . . . Because why write poems if they’re not read? It’s like dancing in the dark.’ ²⁵ Balmer (2009a), xvi.

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The lines wittily evoke the hazardous enterprise of translation—how to respond to the poem creatively, while still respecting the original so that you don’t ‘tread on the toes’ of the author, or indeed of other translators. The small aside ‘(or feet)’ reminds us of the necessity of thinking about stanzas and rhythms when translating verse, but also picks up on Ovid’s many puns about feet in the Tristia, as he sadly imagined the feet of his poems arriving in the Rome from which he had been expelled.²⁶ Ovid’s weariness is translated into the blank sickness known to those who have spent too long staring at a book or computer screen vainly awaiting inspiration: ‘shame I can’t find it in this stiff dictionary. / Light shrinks. [ . . . ] last minute searches, last chance Googles’ (6). Once again, as for Darrieussecq and Tawada, the marvel of Ovid’s work surviving until the third millennium is exemplified by the apparent discord of using computers to reflect upon and disseminate his poetry, while Balmer’s anxious searches for exactly the right word mirror Ovid’s angst in exile that he may lose his ability to write poetry: A dismal spring, first of a new millennium and three weeks (so far) of relentless rain; lines are down, Perseus can’t save the day, no help now from latinvocabdotcom. [ . . . ] and there, as if still fresh, on the front page, dual initials, double-barrelled surname: G. A. Lyneham-Forsythe, 6th January 1900 scrawled in schoolboy boredom, thunder-stiff, blood-brown ink, faint as an old man’s vein. (4)

The freshness of the signature both looks ahead to the image of keeping pressed flowers in books and, movingly, evokes the youthfulness of the child scribbling his name. The ageing of the ink reminds us of the young men who never grew old, while also gesturing towards the sense of kinship we feel with those who previously owned our books, a point that is elaborated in ‘Up For Auction’: ‘beyond this dead man’s lexicon, dull ink, / we’d never have spoken the same language’ (42). The image of a contemporary woman poet and translator thwarted by a hailstorm

²⁶ Tristia I offers a typical example: ‘vade, liber, verbisque meis loca grata saluta: / contingam certe quo licet illa pede’ (15–16). Ovid (1994), 3: ‘Go, book, and bring to the places I loved my greeting — / let me reach them with what “feet” I may!’

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severe enough to cut off the world of the internet offers a striking parallel to Ovid’s pleas that his verses should be read leniently given the conditions under which they were produced. ‘Naso Sees the End of the Beginning’ reworks Tristia I, 11²⁷ and paints a vivid picture of the inclement weather: ice-hard December, frostbitten, shivering [ . . . ] they’re no longer written in shady gardens where my soft couch offered support, contemplation, but were drawn from the deep at ebb of dying year as salt-spray blotted page, dark cerulean blue. (11)

It is not just the bad weather that affects Ovid’s ability to write. He offers a vivid account of his journey to Tomis, a journey that led from normality directly into hell: me miserum, quanti montes volvuntur aquarum! iam iam tacturos sidera summa putes. quantae diducto subsidunt aequore valles! iam iam tacturas Tartara nigra putes. quocumque aspicio, nihil est, nisi pontus et aer, fluctibus hic tumidus, nubibus ille minax. (Tristia I, 2, 19–24) (Ah misery! What great mountains of heaving water— up, up, about (you’d think) to touch the summit stars: ah, what yawning liquid valleys— down, down, about (you’d think) to plumb the black abyss. Look where I may, there’s only sky and water, here swollen waves, there menacing clouds)²⁸

Balmer’s version, below, catches the swell of the waves that echoes the lurch of terror attendant upon an unwelcome journey into the unknown.²⁹ The repetition in ‘up, up’ and ‘down, down’ mirrors Ovid’s repetition of ‘iam iam’ in lines 20 and 22. Ovid’s ‘nisi pontus et aer’ is ²⁷ ‘aut haec me, gelido tremerem cum mense Decembri / scribentem [ . . . ] non haec in nostris, ut quondam, scripsimus hortis, / nec, consuete, meum, lectule, corpus habes. / iactor in indomito brumali luce profundo / ipsaque caeruleis charta feritur aquis’ (3–4; 37–40) (scribbling lines [ . . . ] while December froze the blood, [ . . . ] they were not written, as formerly, in my garden, / while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea, / in wintry light, rough-tossed by filthy weather, spindrift / spattering the paper as I write). Ovid (1994), 23–4. ²⁸ Ovid (1994), 7. ²⁹ This sickening lurch is also echoed in ‘The Horses’: ‘Seas reared, distant ranges, / fell as suddenly—heart-dark, breath still— / to pebbled, copse-fenced Cotswold pool’ (9).

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expanded into chiastic phrases—‘sky and sea, sea and sky’—that convey the terror of agoraphobia, the knowledge that however far you run, you will never be able to find your way back home. Balmer’s title for her version is ‘Naso All At Sea’, a phrase that is literally accurate, but that also conveys his mental anguish and confusion: We’re lifted up, up, to touch the stars, plunged down, down, into Hell’s black jaws, pitched into abyss as each swell sinks (spray stops my lips as I speak, write this). Look around: sky and sea, sea and sky, the one flecked white, other furrowed grey. (5)

Ovid’s poetic voice is quenched by the waves—‘dumque loquor, vultus obruit unda meos’ (34) (As I speak, a wave / drenches my face³⁰)—and this silencing deepens once he arrives at the site of exile. Ovid has stepped onto a dystopian wonderland, where elements are reversed, and where his depiction of stilled movement recalls the punishments meted out to so many in the Metamorphoses: inclusaeque gelu stabunt in marmore puppes, nec poterit rigidas findere remus aquas. vidimus in glacie pisces haerere ligatos, sed pars ex illis tum quoque viva fuit. poma negat regio, nec haberet Acontius, in quo scriberet hic dominae verba legenda suae. aspiceres nudos sine fronde, sine arbore, campos: heu loca felici non adeunda viro! ergo tam late pateat cum maximus orbis, haec est in poenam terra reperta meam. (Tristia III, 10, 47–50, 73–8) (hulls ringed with ice will stand fast as in marble, no oar will cleave those stiff waves. (I’ve seen fish frozen into the ice—yet notwithstanding some still survived, and thawed.) [ . . . ] no orchards, no fruit-trees, no apple on which Acontius could cut the message for his love to read: nothing to meet the eye here but bare plain, leafless, treeless— not the habitat any luckier man would choose— and this, with the whole wide world’s expanse to choose from, is the region selected for my punishment!³¹) ³⁰ Ovid (1994), 7.

³¹ Ovid (1994), 56–7.

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Balmer wittily entitles her version ‘Naso Sees Hell Freeze Over’, a title that is literal, and that also plays with the everyday phrase ‘hell would freeze over before . . . ’; in Ovid’s case, of course, the worst has already happened: Where once ships sailed, our journeys are made on foot; rock-hard waves resound to beat of shoe, horse-hoof [ . . . ] Dolphins are stopped mid-leap, ships’ prows frozen fast; fish are trapped, mid-glide, clinging beneath the glass. [ . . . ] No fruit, no leaves, no trees, no place for young men— And yet, in this wide world, here is my domain. (24)

‘This wide world’ looks back to the ‘sky and sea, sea and sky’ of the journey, but it also evokes Milton’s despair in ‘On His Blindness’, where he depicts the terror of grappling through a formless, unconstrained world in which he is afraid of never being able to write again: When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless . . .

Not only does the physical environment inhibit Ovid’s pen and power of expression, but he also wrestles with his status as an alien in this new land, and resents its influence on his writing: ‘crede mihi, timeo ne sint inmixta Latinis / inque meis scriptis Pontica verba legas. / qualemcumque igitur venia dignare libellum. / sortis et excusa condicione meae’ (Tristia III, 14, 49–52) (Believe me, I fear you may find my Latin / diluted with Black Sea usage, local terms / infecting my work. Make allowances for this book, then: / let my fate, and circumstances, stand as its excuse³²). In ‘Ovid Lost for Words’ Balmer’s version reads: ‘Believe me: my Latin now is Scythian-scarred: / don’t judge what my lines might weigh, just where they are’ (27). Yet, even as Ovid complains about the contamination of his Latin verse, and longs for the culture and sophistication of Rome, he retains enough insight to realize that in the eyes of the Getae it is he who is foreign and out of kilter. He evokes the humiliation of being unable to speak the language of the country he is in, and the attendant pantomime of gestures. In ‘Ovid the Barbarian’ Balmer blends verses from Tristia V, 7 ‘sive locum specto, locus est inamabilis, et quo / esse nihil toto tristius ³² Ovid (1994), 63.

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orbe potest’ (43–4) (Look at the landscape? It’s hideous—nothing more depressing / could exist in the whole wide world³³) and V, 10 ‘barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli, / et rident stolidi verba Latina Getae’ (37–8) (Here I’m the barbarian, understood by no one, / and these stupid peasants mock my Latin speech³⁴), to give: ‘I see a world without culture, savage, bleak, / a world weighed by sorrow. [ . . . ] / while I communicate by mime or gesture, / a thought occurs: who is the barbarian here?’ (41). The image of a world being weighted by sorrow looks to the title of the volume as a whole, and indeed to the title poem which is the last poem in the anthology, and the poem in which Balmer explores most fully her own identity as poet and translator. Her own journey from Britain to Tomis, from the present day to the early twentieth century to the turn of the first millennium, is also charted in this book. Titles such as ‘Dictionary Definitions’ (31) point to the importance of the task of the translator in reinvigorating classical texts, in situating them within radically new contexts, in making them accessible to new generations, who can no longer be expected to know classical Latin.³⁵ The act of translation is about opening oneself up to a new culture, to a new way of seeing, of allowing oneself to be vulnerable. But translation also offers a range of new voices, behind which the translator’s own story may be discerned. Given its focus on the meeting points between cultures, its possibilities for camouflage, and its long-standing status as an inferior form of creativity, translation is the quintessential activity for outsiders.³⁶ The figure of the translator is an apt companion both for the exiled artist and for the soldier navigating his way through dangerous, alien territory; the translator, indeed, is vital to the survival of their stories to the present day. In a poem entitled ‘Naso’s Last Word’ Balmer speaks of the ways in which the stories of both Naso and Geoffrey have come to us in the present day, thus ensuring, of course, that this is not Naso’s last word, that the words of Ovid continue to endure in new forms: ³³ Ovid (1994), 96. ³⁴ Ovid (1994), 100. ³⁵ ‘Most of all, I wanted my versions to be inclusive; to reflect classical scholarship on the poems and to allow those familiar with the original to find something fresh there, as well as to open them up for new, non-classicist audiences.’ Balmer (2013a), 148. ³⁶ Balmer’s reference to Raphael Lyne’s comments on the abiding relevance of the Tristia sheds light on this: ‘As Raphael Lyne has astutely observed of Tristia: “the appeal of the exile persona may be that it enables writers to express both the problems they have which parallel Ovid’s, and the sense of separation from their source.” ’ Balmer (2013a), 203. See also Chapter 3 on Yoko Tawada for extended treatment of this idea.

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Geoffrey came home, Naso did not; the player, the trickster, smiling behind the mask, teasing out the threads of sadness, refugee’s path, this twisting, transforming journey from life to art. (44)

In a poem suggestively entitled ‘Thread’ Balmer depicts the Sisyphean task of tracking down the different paths of her protagonists’ lives, evoking the frustration of the twenty-first-century writer and researcher who risks becoming lost in the labyrinthine bowels of the world wide web: I’m wondering now if he ever came home, even on the Net his trail has gone cold: Geoffrey’s disappeared without a trace. As for Naso, he’s too tricky, no bloody help— besides, I’m too distracted to translate. (28)

As she tracks down connections between places, between words, she follows threads that she describes as being ‘linked like dew-sagged spider webs’ (28), an image that plays on the image of the ‘Net’ or web, but that is also immediately suggestive of Arachne, and that points to the importance of creativity inherent in Balmer’s art. It is through the vital links, the flashes of connection that she establishes, that Balmer is able to revitalize the dust of these ancestors who have been awaiting this treatment, as is clear in the poem ‘Naso Writes his Own Epitaph’: ‘For if fire consumes, condemns flesh and bone to ash, / dust remembers. It hears our step, craves our touch . . . ’ (20). But these winding paths also offer Balmer the opportunity to inscribe her own experiences onto her adaptations of classical texts.³⁷ As she deepens her relationship with her protagonists, she recognizes that she is entering into a community in which the common binding element is loss. Naso and Geoffrey hover around her as she works: ‘I sensed two figures, unseen ghosts / at each shoulder’ (46).³⁸ The losses of home, of ³⁷ ‘through working on the tricky, shifting tone of Ovid’s exile poetry in my 2009 collection, The Word for Sorrow, I found new ways to approach the potentially hazardous task of revoicing first-person accounts of the bloody and traumatic Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. In addition, as I navigated the several, equally complex narrative voices in my own volume, I was able to articulate my own new role as a translatorprotagonist.’ Balmer (2013a), 233. ³⁸ ‘The Word for Sorrow’. The image is strikingly similar to Darrieussecq’s imagining of Ovid’s astonishment at seeing her hard at work on translating him on her computer. See Chapter 8.

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life, that are conveyed by the sites of exile and conflict need no further explanation. Paradoxically it is by responding to these centuries-old griefs that Balmer finds the creative space in which to visit her own grief, as the poem moves from Ovid’s Tomis to the rows of First World War graves to the single grave of a small girl, Balmer’s niece, whose illness and death inform the classical texts explored in Chasing Catullus: We none of us need a dictionary to define the word for sorrow: Tomis, Gallipoli, Salonica, name upon name etched on empty graves; date upon date end-stopped in one same year. Or a plaque in a country cemetery that can’t even reach double figures, Catullus’ flower passed by the furrow . . . (47)

These human griefs edge the task of responding to classical works away from ‘dictionary definitions’ to an exploration of the many different experiences and dimensions of loss. It is the need to repair the losses by voicing them that forms the creative impulse: We are all translating the same story search same words in same thesaurus. What drives us on, keeps us to our path, in every version is not gain but loss. (47)

The losses that haunt The Word for Sorrow obviously include loss of country, loss of life, loss of loved ones. But its specific, personal losses flower into wider collective losses and threats. As Balmer pieced together the fragments of her writing process she realized that ‘As both Ovid and Geoffrey fade from view, The Word for Sorrow concludes with a long, personal little poem of a nature that, perhaps, I might never before have expected to write, exploring my relationship with the poem’s protagonists and subject-matter, as well as my own sense of separation as a classical scholar and translator.’³⁹ Bridging the gap between contemporary experience and the classical past is an enterprise that Balmer has negotiated for her readers as well as on her own behalf. In part this is achieved through allusions to writers such as Eliot and Milton who have become fundamental to our cultural currency. ³⁹ Balmer (2013a), 226–7.

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But it is precisely this separation from the roots of our cultural past that has prompted so many contemporary writers to revisit the classical world in their poetry.⁴⁰ In 2013 Averill Curdy published her first volume of poetry, Song and Error,⁴¹ in which she maps contemporary America onto the songs and legacy of Ovidian exile. The very title is a translation of Ovid’s famous ‘carmen et error’ (Tristia II, 1, 207)—the poetry and the mistake that he said were the reasons for him being sent into exile. Journeying is a central theme of the volume, as titles such as ‘Sparrow Trapped in the Airport’, ‘Commute’, and ‘See They Return and Bring Us with Them’ demonstrate. Ovid lies at the heart of the volume—the poems ‘Ovid in America’ and ‘Song and Error’ reflect upon the ways in which his works were imported into American culture and his enduring presence within American culture. But Curdy’s journeys are not solely cultural; her poems are peopled by refugees, stowaways, empire-builders. Moreover the journeys are also undertaken by words—Curdy’s language is studded with archaic forms, and by poisonous chemicals borne on the wind, and liable to induce teratogenesis. The volume opens with the poem ‘Sparrow Trapped in the Airport’, thus situating us from the start within the hub of modern wandering, or ‘error’. Curdy selects a highly Latinate word in her depiction of the sparrow, which is ‘never / The pelagic messenger bearing orchards / In its beak’ (3). The effect of this word, derived from ‘pelagus’ (the sea), is to alert the reader to the fact that throughout the volume they will be moving between the ancient and the contemporary worlds. But Curdy’s bird is not so much a bearer of portents as ‘a stowaway whose carriage / Recalls how lightly we once traveled’ (3). These closing lines glance at the wanton and rampant consumption of the Western world, but also remind us of today’s stowaways, fragile and vulnerable immigrants who are desperate to be able to share in the wealth and who travel lightly and perilously in order to do so. This Latinate language is also found in ‘See They Return and Bring Us With Them’, where the observation ‘it festinates, / Hastening slowly’ (35) leads directly back to the Latin ⁴⁰ ‘Classical translation itself was becoming a greater part of the contemporary poetic landscape with versions of classical poetry appearing in new collections by Michael Longley (1991, 1995) and Seamus Heaney (1996), as well as by Anne Carson (2000).’ Balmer (2013a), 173. ⁴¹ Curdy (2013). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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adage ‘festina lente’ (hurry slowly). The title of the poem, a quotation from ‘Little Gidding’ of Eliot’s Four Quartets, indicates that Curdy, like Balmer, is inserting her work into a long tradition of literature that has negotiated its position with regard to the classical world.⁴² In the poem ‘Visiting the Largest Live Rattlesnake Exhibit in North America’ Curdy situates her work within the context of imperial ambition together with its attendant dangers and griefs. She wittily employs the Latin word ‘dolor’ to mean grief, but also to evoke in the readers’ minds the dollars that will not be forthcoming, since the land refuses to submit to the settlers’ vision of farming and bounty: Another day, another dolor. For 100 miles In any direction this homemade splendor, Built with the old West’s ruinous hope Something might be wrung from land That promises so much, yet yields so little (8)

In the context of a book that is explicitly built upon Ovid’s Tristia it is reasonable to remember here Ovid’s own disappointment at the hostile, unwelcoming nature of the landscape that surrounded him. His is not the only ghost to haunt this poem. Curdy depicts today’s visitors to the snake exhibits melding with the ghosts of their ancestors who gazed in astonishment at exhibits brought back from the New World, and further develops this communion between living and dead in the closing lines of the poem which quote George Sandys’s 1632 translation of Ovid (explored in detail in her ‘Ovid in America’) and in which she depicts us cowering before this monstrous marvel from an earthly paradise, a reminder that danger lurks even in the worlds that we conquer and create as Edens: ‘Relieved to laugh at the rattler’s habitat / In mountains, woods, and desserts, inheritors / Of this anxious paradise, votively we cluster / In the dark’ (9). The poem ‘Northwest Passage’ also examines the connections between cultures, and the issues of dominance and imperialism.⁴³ The promise

⁴² It is notable that Curdy makes repeated use of the term ‘elegy’. For instance in ‘The Preservation of Meat—Thomas Jefferson, September 1782’ she speaks of ‘An elegy of tender violations’ (33). ⁴³ A later poem, ‘Dark Room’, is set in the camera obscura in Clifton Observatory, Bristol, a city which made its fortune in large part from the tobacco industry and the slave trade.

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and hope contained in the vision of the ‘New World’ shelter the dark stories of routing and oppression: ‘light flush alleys and rooftops, / Just touching my neighbors’ gardens, / Until they seethed like the green smoke / Of a new world’ (53). As the poem continues Curdy reminds us of the harsh cost exacted by these expeditions, looking back to the title of the whole volume, as she does so: ‘Finding by brute necessity and skill / Some route between suffering and song’ (54). Through this evocation of ‘Song and Error’ Curdy glances once more at Ovid’s suffering brought about by his exile. The volume is explicitly linked to Ovid’s exile poetry through its title, but Curdy also introduces allusions to the Metamorphoses. As she describes the strip-club The Fair Incognito she evokes the fate of Actaeon. Once again the archaic verb ‘raven’ emphasizes the dislocation of living in both the contemporary world and the ancient world at the same time: ‘The hunter’s hounds / will raven him who tries to see more than he is / given, here, to see’ (71). This thin line between animal and human is emphasized when Curdy shows that the ‘birds’ in the strip-club are akin to real birds, describing ‘Carolina paroquets, / vivid and garrulous as girls’ (73). Curdy is also sensitive to the long history of links between Ovid and visual culture, and in its vivid, lingering description of flesh being peeled from bone, the poem ‘Anatomical Angel’⁴⁴ recalls Ovid’s quietly cruel description of the flaying of Marsyas: ‘Unfastened avidly from each ivory button / Of her spine, the voluntary muscles open / Virtuosities of red: cinnabar’ (31). Perhaps the most sinister metamorphoses are the ones that Curdy depicts in ‘Song and Error’. The opening line situates the poem firmly in the late twentieth century, and the first metamorphosis is that of money into death-dealing armaments which bear names that appear to be more redolent of the world of Action Man than anything else: It was 1986, when currencies to be changed Into multiple-launch-surface, antitank missiles [ . . . ] when it also rained Radionuclides, strontium, cesium, and iodine, Over river and clay, and over the poet’s Black Sea Exile, before the prevailing winds blew them all Across Europe from Chernobyl. (29)

⁴⁴ The poem is about Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoly’s L’ange anatomique.

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The site of Ovid’s exile is not only geographically close to Gallipoli but also to the site of a more recent disaster, the nuclear power spillage in Chernobyl. Curdy lists the poisons that have seeped into ‘river and clay’. The fact that we are now aware of children being born with terrible deformities and defects in the wake of the disaster lends to the passage the suggestion of human beings emerging from clay, which is how Ovid depicts the start of creation in the first book of the Metamorphoses. Curdy quotes the relevant passage in Sandys’s translation: ‘Like Ovid’s seething, knotted seed of frog-slime, / Which not seldome attracted by the sun falls / In little frogs with the rain’ (29). And by the fearful power of the winds these poisons with the alluringly beautiful names have been blown throughout Europe, bearing within them the threat of metamorphosis through mutation.⁴⁵ By quoting Sandys Curdy is connecting this poem to the one which directly precedes it, in which she reflects upon Ovid’s importation to America through the work of Sandys. Curdy’s ‘Ovid in America’ is prefaced with a short biographical note: ‘George Sandys (1578–1644), translator of Ovid’s Metamorphosis English’d, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, and resident treasurer of the Virginia Company for its settlement at Jamestown (1621–1624).’ The terms used as synonyms for translations are all heavily loaded. The Ovid travelling to America is one who has been inscribed into English culture, who has become part of English mythology, while also playing a vital role in the ways in which that mythology has been constructed. The inclusion of his post in America alerts us to the role that Sandys played not just as translator of Ovid, but also of colonizer of foreign lands. The poem is divided into three sections entitled ‘A Long Voyage’, ‘Winter, 1621’, and ‘Spring, 1622’. These titles align Sandys’s experiences to the experiences documented by Ovid in the Tristia. Within a few lines of the poem’s opening Sandys is borrowing Ovid’s imagery in Tristia I, 1, where Ovid sends his book back to Rome as representative of its author: ‘This page is small yet stout enough / To bear me whole upon it to you / All the way in London’ (13). His writing metamorphoses into the boat that will preserve his name, even if he himself were to perish on this long journey: ‘My letter is another ark to preserve me: George’ (13). Sandys shares Ovid’s agoraphobia expressed in the Tristia by ‘quocumque aspicio, nihil est, nisi

⁴⁵ Jo Shapcott employs comparable imagery in Of Mutability. See Chapter 7.

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pontus et aer, / fluctibus hic tumidus, nubibus ille minax’ (I, 2, 23–4) (Look where I may, there’s only sky and water, here swollen waves, there menacing clouds⁴⁶). Such a threatening and blank landscape disorients Sandys to such an extent that he loses his sense of time, as well as of place: ‘Seeing nothing, nothing to be seen, you feel / Unhoused, evicted from time’ (14). The dissolution of temporal barriers is particularly apt in a poem that is thinking about the way in which Ovidian poetry has travelled from the ancient world to seventeenth-century England, from seventeenth-century England to seventeenth-century America and from there to contemporary America. Such dislocation, under the aegis of ‘error and sign’ (14), eventually seems to be Sandys’s natural habitat: ‘I began to brood long on landlessness, / Coming to believe it my sovereign, my home’ (16). As Sandys travels, untethered from temporal and geographical moorings, figures from the Metamorphoses haunt his imagination, especially as he contemplates with horror the idea of death, of surviving only through poetry: ‘Like Daphne his voice is forfeit for the song, / But we do not grieve for Daphne’ (15). The observation highlights the way in which the suffering depicted within the Metamorphoses is transmuted into artistic pleasure for the reader, who is more likely to dwell upon Ovid’s exquisite artistry rather than Daphne’s raw, blind terror. His depictions in ‘A Long Voyage’ of enduring extreme climatic conditions recall the complaints of the Tristia: ‘Listening / To collisions of wave and star outside his tower, / Rock-rapt, icebound’ (15). Once he has arrived in America he metamorphoses into a seventeenth-century Ovid, waiting anxiously for letters from London which fail to arrive. As he sits in the evening brooding over the changes wrought by cultures when one is colonized by another, when ‘clay and leaf and sand’ can be transformed ‘to the king’s profit as iron, silk and glass’, he enters into Ovid’s world, not just as an avid reader, but as one who inhabits and believes in the world that Ovid constructed: From my hand at night (my light Some oil in a dish or a rush taper smoking, Not so different from Ovid’s) flower His fantastic shapes, shadows Of an old empire’s former splendor Now perjured by Virginia’s clay and leaf and sand ⁴⁶ Ovid (1994), 7.

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Turned to the king’s profit as iron, silk and glass. Belief is possible at night, solitary, firelit. Then, I can believe in Ovid’s centaurs, [...] I can believe in your letters, Thomas, which never come.

(20)

Curdy’s fascination for the way in which Ovid is metamorphosed, translated, and transmitted parallels her interest in the way in which his translator also metamorphoses, both into Ovid’s mythological characters, such as Daphne, and indeed into a seventeenth-century version of Ovid himself. Furthermore she reminds us of how all of us are unceasingly vulnerable to the metamorphoses of the body, when she shows Sandys’s envisaging his return to London: When I imagine myself returned to the smells And noise of London, from my stiff knee Sands grinding as I walk, no marvels Except those which the mirror surprises in all of us, The swan-white wing at my temple. (22)

The image of the ‘swan-white wing’ of hair both highlights the inevitable ageing of the body, while also pointing to the ease with which human beings slip into the guises of Ovidian mythology. Sandys appears at one and the same time as a seventeenth-century statesman and man of letters, and as a man-bird, a swan, thus evoking the myth of Leda. The parallels between Ovid’s creations and seventeenth-century humans acquire a chilling edge in the third and last section of the poem, ‘Spring 1622’. For the natives of the colonized land spring did not represent a rebirth, but instead a brutal slaughter. The section opens with the bleak, bald statement: ‘300 were murdered’ (23). Those who survived were too traumatized to attempt to voice what had happened, to scar their language by uttering what had happened: ‘like Io, / We would flee the noise of our new voices’ (23).⁴⁷ When Curdy’s Sandys asks: ‘Who am I so far from home?’ (25), he is not simply echoing Ovid’s heartache, or expressing his own homesickness, he also appears to be aghast at what

⁴⁷ Once Io has been transformed into a cow, she cannot bear to speak and hear the animal tones of her new voice. Metamorphoses I, 637–8 : ‘conatoque queri mugitus edidit ore / pertimuitque sonos propriaque exterrita voce est’ (When she tried to complain, a lowing sound issued from her lips, and she was afraid, terrified by her own voice).

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he has become, at what atrocities he has witnessed. He, too, must pay a price for his own ‘song and error’. Curdy demonstrates Sandys’s ability for private cruelty in his experiments on frogs—he kills them, but he also torments them to test their reactions. As he does so he turns Ovid back into a book, subverting the opening lines of Tristia I where Ovid longs to become the book that will have a passage back to Rome. Here he is simply the book that will serve as a prop in Sandy’s experiment: ‘If I put Ovid between it and the window / And tickle its hinderparts with acid, it leaps / Toward the light’ (24–5). Through the frogs Sandys also contemplates the final extinction of the world, as well as his own death: ‘Time will not end by water or fire, / But by a congregation of frogs who yelp like hounds / and ride each other in shallow plashes’ (24). Curdy here looks back to the frog imagery in ‘Song and Error’ discussed above, which she links to the destruction of the natural world unleashed by the accident at Chernobyl, and further back still to Ovid’s representation of frogs in the Metamorphoses. The poet who once sang of how the earth came into being is invoked both by Balmer and by Curdy to shape representations of tragedies that threatened the continuation of life as it had been. Like Balmer, Curdy invokes the songs of exile not just to deepen individual and personal loss and melancholy, but also to reflect on atrocities, both historical and contemporary, that threaten the world. Through their poems Ovid speaks of colonial atrocities, becomes part of the collective sorrow of the First World War, laments the horror of Chernobyl, and expresses the terrified insecurity that is a legacy of the 9/11 attacks. Where once Ovid sang his songs of exile to articulate an individual plight, a private grief, through the poetry of Balmer and Curdy he voices the exile and loss experienced by the displaced of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries also. And as he does so, he ensures that his song continues to travel from the ends of the earth.

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10 Michèle Roberts and Clare Pollard When Philip Terry, at the turn of the millennium, invited selected authors to answer Ovid back, by contributing to his Ovid Metamorphosed, only one author out of nineteen chose to respond to the Heroides, his collection of letters from mythical women to the men who had abandoned them. This is especially striking since twelve of the nineteen contributors were women¹ and, as Terry points out in his Introduction, ‘the Heroides (Heroines), is itself a proto-feminist work, anticipating in its strategies much recent feminist fiction, from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to Michèle Roberts’s Impossible Saints.’² These poems, in which Ovid unfolds his understanding of female psychology as the protagonists voice their experiences of abandonment, absence, and grief,³ might be expected to offer a rich seam of inspiration to women writers. Ovid himself is offering a lesson in answering back, as his protagonists—Penelope, Ariadne, Medea—voice the ways in which females experience the quests and wars that are the subject of male-dominated epics. But, of course, the author bestowing his voice upon these women is male, which may account for the apparent reluctance on the part of women to follow his lead. In her

¹ The preponderance of women writers in this volume may also be seen as an early indication of contemporary women writers having a distinctive contribution to make to Ovid’s reception. ² Terry (2000), 13. ³ Hardie (2002a), 106, depicts the driving dynamic of the Heroides: ‘Ovid finds a form ideally suited to the basic premiss [sic] of love elegy, that the lover desires but cannot securely enjoy the presence of the beloved. The epistle presupposes the spatial separation of the writer from her or his object of desire; the written text of the amatory epistle is both a means intended to procure the presence of the beloved and a substitute for the immediate communication that would be possible in that presence.’

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review of Clare Pollard’s translation Ovid’s Heroines (2013) Josephine Balmer articulates the problem: Since Dryden, translators have long struggled with Ovid’s tricky mix of humour and pathos, which might have tickled Roman audiences but can fall flat on modern ears. There is also the complex issue of authorial voice, the mirrors within mirrors of the male poet voicing female protagonists, who themselves exist only in the literary imaginations of other men; how far do the women speak as themselves or for their revisionist male recreator?⁴

It is no surprise to see that it was Michèle Roberts who responded to the particular challenges of reworking the Heroides. Her novel The Book of Mrs Noah (1987) retells canonical stories from the Bible and from the Western classical tradition as Mrs Noah gathers together a company of women, the Sibyls, and sails off with them in the Ark.⁵ They discover a male in their midst, the Gaffer, who eventually turns out to be God the Father, looking in dismay at the mistakes, the gaffes, he has committed in his understanding of creation. At one point the Sibyls urge Mrs Noah to take her turn at prophecy and understanding, and as she takes her place at the tripod she meditates upon the distortions wrought by male minds upon the myth of Daphne and Apollo, the most famous version of which is in Metamorphoses I:⁶ —Hear me. This is the story of the burning laurel leaves. This is the story you may have read in the library, in the books written by men. The god Apollo, who was poet and musician, loved the beautiful nymph Daphne. She did not return his ardour. Fleeing from his embraces, she prayed for help to Mother Earth, who transformed her into a laurel tree. Disconsolate, Apollo made himself wreaths from its branches, and so the laurel became the emblem of poetry. Hear me. This story has an earlier version. Rewritten, it has been almost erased. Its forgotten words, trampled in the dust of the male scholars’ sentences, yelp in their elegant pauses, poke through the gaps between their graceful lines.⁷

⁴ Balmer (2013c). ⁵ For a fuller discussion of the reworking of the classical tradition within this book see Cox (2011), 97–115. ⁶ Roberts also responds to this myth in her poetry. See Roberts (1986), ‘Daphne to Apollo’, 36–7. This anthology also contains the Demeter and Persephone sequence (90–7), as well as the poem ‘Penelope awaits the return of Ulysses’ (116–17). ⁷ Roberts (1987), 52.

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In this version it is not simply the case that male writers have written over the words of the female protagonist, it is that by smoothing over her lament and attempting to silence her they have turned her voice into an incoherent, unintelligible yelp; the effect of this perpetuates the brutality of the initial attempted rape. Unable to take Daphne, Apollo ensures that he nevertheless owns her by entrapping her within his version of the story. The myth can be mapped onto the fear of rape victims to take their attackers to court, lest their stories are disbelieved and silenced, lest it is their attacker’s account that is endorsed as the true version of what really happened.⁸ In Roberts’s version the outrage is that Apollo perpetuates the myth that women are unable to match men as writers: ‘Apollo has stolen Daphne’s laurel branch to make his own crown, has locked up her version of the story inside his, has pretended that she is captive and silent inside the tree, has claimed that women do not make poets and storytellers, that poets and storytellers make women.’⁹ As Roberts overwrites the male authorial voice of the Heroides in Terry’s Ovid Metamorphosed,¹⁰ her Hypsipyle, writing to Jason, appears to be speaking from the ‘pur morceau d’angoisse’ (pure piece of anguish), so vividly evoked by Barthes.¹¹ In the Metamorphoses she leads the women of Lemnos, who murdered all their men in order to find freedom for themselves. As such her story echoes the plight of Dido, who was also unusual as a female leader, and who was also undone by her passion for a man. Jason leaves Hypsipyle on his quest for the Golden Fleece in which he is, of course, accompanied by Medea. Roberts opens her version of Hypsipyle’s response with the bleakly lapidary: ‘You’ve gone’ (53). The baldness of the statement appears to usher us into the blank, empty world of a woman who has been abandoned. In Roberts’s account, which

⁸ In her short story ‘The Agony of Intimacy’ Jeanette Winterson probes comparable issues. In her version it is Zeus who is Daphne’s aggressor. The fusing of Daphne’s legs ensures that if Zeus can’t have her, nobody else will, and as she turns from young girl into myth, her voice is silenced: ‘She called for help from the goddess Gaia and her white legs fused so tight no one would ever part them. Her speed slowed. Her arms stretched, her head turned in one shift of yearning. Her smooth skin, wet with sweat, was glossy with plant oil. She tried to speak but spat out a leaf. The lovely rustle of her as she moved in the breeze. Her green eyes were shiny as bay leaves. They were bay leaves. Laurus Nobilis. She had become a different kind of Daphne.’ Winterson (2010), 280. ⁹ Roberts (1987), 53. ¹⁰ Roberts (2000), 53–6. Page numbers to this edition will appear within the text. ¹¹ Barthes (1977), 22.

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has transposed the story to the contemporary world, Jason has sped off in his MG, leaving her in a house which feels empty and big, and a bed which is now too wide (53). Where once she was self-sufficient and used to her own company, now she is acutely aware of the gaps left by his absence, remembering the comfortable ease of knowing that someone else is in the house: ‘I’m no longer used to living on my own. All day long we work in our separate studios, not seeing anyone, not talking, as though we’re on two different islands, and then at night we throw rope bridges across; we’re together’ (53). Yet where Ovid’s Hypsipyle laments and rails, Roberts’s Hypsipyle explores the silence, sensitizing her ear to the varied melodies of birdsong,¹² and recognizes that exploration of this silence represents her own adventure: ‘The silence is made up of all these sounds, and it’s also a geography which opens up around me and under my feet. A new country which now I must explore’ (54). She fills the silence with the quiet, deep pleasure of listening to her solitude, not only in terms of the sounds that are muted by ordinary life, but also in terms of remembering her life shared with Jason. And it is in his life with her that he experienced the quest for a different golden fleece. In Roberts’s version this quest represents an exquisite moment of shared intimacy: ‘Over supper, by candlelight, you tell me your secrets. In the bath, reclining opposite me, you lift your foot and stroke the curly blonde hair on my cunt with your toes. The golden fleece’ (55). Terry observes of this moment that ‘by making the sought-for Golden Fleece Hypsipyle’s sex, she cleverly folds the masculine epic back on itself, feminising it by bringing the female body into the heart of the narrative’.¹³ The heroic, male adventure embarked upon by Jason and his Argonauts is transformed into a woman’s recollection of a joyful erotic experience. Not only is Roberts subverting the epic genre by recasting it as part of a woman’s memories, but she is also offering a corrective to the presentation of women’s experiences in the Heroides. By the end of the story it becomes clear that the ‘You’ve gone’ of the opening sentence need not be read as a lament, but rather as a sigh of relief and anticipation. In Jason’s absence Hypsipyle uses the space to

¹² As we have seen, the richness of birdsong is also used as an emblem of joy at the end of Wittig’s Virgile, Non. ¹³ Terry (2000), 13.

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probe her feelings for him, thereby deepening her love for him.¹⁴ Utterly confident of his return, she pleads with him to delay: ‘So don’t come back just yet. Stay away just a little while longer. [ . . . ] Give me the time to miss you more, to relish that, to feel even more lonely’ (55). The letter of lament becomes a letter that will never be sent, a letter written purely on Hypsipyle’s behalf. It becomes part of the spell by which she conjures up Jason’s return, in a gesture that edges her towards the attributes of her rival, Medea. Paradoxically the success of her magic will entail the destruction of the letter, which will become redundant in the face of the lovemaking that will celebrate Jason’s return: to compose this letter, this ship that sails to you, my freight, my spell magically conjuring your presence on paper, imagining what we will do and say on your return, words I shall not need to write down and send to you because you will have come back, you will be here with me and I’ll never despatch this letter but tear it up into bits and scatter it, white fragments falling silently like our clothes on the floor. (56)

Clare Pollard also transposes the context of the Heroides to the present day in her translation-cum-adaptation entitled Ovid’s Heroines. Pollard, who was still at school when she wrote The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), her first published volume of poetry, is a poet, editor, teacher, and broadcaster. Unlike Roberts who learned Latin at school, Pollard has had no formal training in the Classics, and came across Ovid through Ted Hughes’s version of the Metamorphoses. However, it was James Michie’s translation of the Ars Amatoria which alerted her to how ‘dry and modern’ (10)¹⁵ Ovid’s voice was. Pollard had selected Michie’s translation, along with the Loeb edition of the Heroides (translated by George Showerman), as appropriate reading material for her trip to Rome to attend a wedding. As she read the Heroides for the first time she had a ‘feverish, vertigo-feeling. [ . . . ] This is life, I thought to myself, prosecco in hand, as candles wobbled in the sea breeze and the newlyweds gazed at each other. It’s about love. And this, it seems to me, is

¹⁴ In Roberts’s poem ‘Penelope awaits the return of Ulysses’ Penelope also recognizes the possibility for creativity in the absence of her beloved, although her experience is charged with a sadder longing: ‘Your absence undoes me. / I want to make and make. These days, I want to remain unfinished. / I need you to hear me out. To unravel me.’ ¹⁵ Pollard (2013). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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why the Heroides is a great book. It takes huge narratives of nationhood, war, death, myth and religion, but it puts love at the centre’ (10). Her observations echo Roberts’s strategy of transforming the masculine epic story of Jason into a private memory of female erotic pleasure. And while the subject matter of the Heroides may not furnish the most auspicious reading-matter for a wedding, the fact that its lines were threading their way through Pollard’s mind as she attended the ceremony is an indication of its abiding contemporary qualities. For Pollard Ovid’s creative genius lies, in part, in his ability not only to speak for both men and women, but to speak as both man and woman. In her view, the fact that the male Ovid is able to speak in the tones of a contemporary woman lies in the fact that ‘For Ovid, as for Virginia Woolf, a portrait of the creative mind is one of the “androgynous mind” ’ (11),¹⁶ and she calls the Heroides ‘a daring act of literary transvestism’ (11).¹⁷ And, of course, through her act of translation, Pollard extends the fluidity of these shifts in gender. She is a woman translating a man adopting the mindset of a woman. In an observation that is directly inverse to Darrieussecq’s image of Ovid stupefied by seeing his works translated by a woman, Pollard expresses astonishment that these outpourings of loss and rage ‘were written by a man over 2000 years ago’ (12). Yet she also warns against perceiving Ovid as a ‘proto-feminist’ (12), observing that the women that emerge from the poems are, at times, petulant or childish or, quite simply, evil. Cumulatively, however, Ovid offers a chilling insight into the gender roles that entrap his female protagonists, so that as his translator Pollard is filled with ‘rage and heartbreak’ (12). That she embarks upon her translation from this position of enraged empathy is testimony not only to her creativity and perception, but also to her confidence as a female translator. Where she might have been cast as the deferential Echo, anxiously repeating the words of others, the role she plays is that of Smith’s Echo, delighting in answering back, and modifying the forms in which she retorts. ¹⁶ For an analysis of the Ovidian presence in Woolf ’s most overtly androgynous creation, Orlando, see Brown (1999), 201–15. ¹⁷ See Balmer (2013a): ‘In an essay on the cross-gendered poem—that is, a poem written in a gender voice other than that of its poet-author—Alan Michael Parker and Mark Willhardt declared that, like transvestitism, such poems present a “third term” which can undermine assumptions about male/female gender binary’ (141). Balmer is referring to A. M. Parker and Mark Willhardt (1996) The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse.

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The most obvious strategy that Pollard adopts in order to make the Ovidian verse accessible to the modern reader is to emulate Ted Hughes’s decision to render his poetry in free verse. The very first lines of the first poem, the letter from Penelope to Ulysses, strike a contemporary note in Pollard’s version: Dear Ulysses you’re late.

(16)

The space between the two lines is pregnant with exasperation. Our first image of Penelope is of a wife who is annoyed at her partner’s inability to arrive home on time in the evening. It is only as the poem progresses that the tone shifts and we realize that Penelope is chafing with anxiety as she thinks of her husband absent on active duty. Pollard’s Penelope uses contemporary locutions, such as ‘but, honestly, Troy isn’t worth it’ (16) (vix Priamus tanti totaque Troia fuit [Heroides I, 4])¹⁸ and ‘I mean, I know love makes me anxious / [ . . . ] I was a nervous mess’ (res est solliciti plena timoris amor [ . . . ] frigidius glacie pectus amantis erat [Heroides I, 12 and 22).¹⁹ These modern turns of phrase not only create a Penelope who is immediately recognizable to us, but enable her to speak alongside today’s army wives, still waiting at home and fearful of what the ring at the doorbell might herald. Even as Pollard creates a contemporary vision, the images she employs are shaped by the topoi of ancient epic. She speaks of being ‘flooded with fear’ (16) when hearing of Greek spears being warmed with blood. The line both evokes panic coursing through her veins, and looks back to the commonplace of water imagery to depict the fluctuating battle lines. Pollard also employs both elision and expansion in order to create a vivid image of Penelope. She avoids foreign terminology that is liable to be meaningless to modern ears and simply suppresses the phrase ‘Sigeia tellus’ (33) (Sigeian land), and renders ‘Simois’ as ‘The river’ (16). On the other hand she inserts the depiction of Ulysses and his men as they ‘slur victory songs’ (16); the reader immediately envisages the male world of drunken camaraderie and singing. This world of masculine solidarity, more recognizable to us from football matches and coach trips, is

¹⁸ ‘but scarcely were Priam and all Troy worth the price to me’. Ovid (1986), 10. ¹⁹ ‘Love is a thing ever filled with anxious fear. [ . . . ] colder than ice grew the heart of her who loves you.’ Ovid (1986), 11, 12.

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transposed to the world of the far-distant battlefield. The shift in emotional tone that this addition offers reinforces the image of a Penelope who is torturing herself with imagining what Ulysses is getting up to away from home and under the influence of his drunken friends. Away from his wife’s tender but vigilant eye, Ulysses might just be tempted to stray, a weakness that both the ancient and the modern Penelope attribute to his gender, translating ‘haec ego dum stulte metuo, quae vestra libido est / esse peregrino captus amore potes’ (75–6)²⁰ as ‘for all my silly fears / you might just be snared by some exotic tart— / you’re male, after all’ (17). Where Ovid’s Penelope laments ‘o nimium nimiumque oblite tuorum!’ (41),²¹ Pollard’s Penelope is far more terse: ‘not caring about us’ (17), and she adopts a sardonically modern tone in the observation ‘Sounds typically cautious and thoughtful’ (17), which is Pollard’s translation of the line ‘at bene cautus eras et memor ante mei!’ (44).²² Through her adoption of free verse Pollard is able to invest the terseness of her Penelope with powerful emotional resonance. When she translates ‘si maneo, qualis Troia durante manebam, / virque mihi dempto fine carendus abest’ (49–50)²³ as ‘I remain as I was while it remained— / alone’ (17), the line composed of the single word ‘alone’ vividly reflects her abandoned state. A similar effect is achieved through the translation of ‘quas habitas terras, aut ubi lentus abes?’ (66) as the single line ‘Where are you?’ (17). And the longer Ulysses stays away, the more insecure Penelope grows about remaining attractive to him. In Pollard’s version this insecurity acquires a contemporary British edge. Where Ovid writes ‘forsitan et narres, quam sit tibi rustica coniunx / quae tantum lanas non sinat esse rudes’ (77–8),²⁴ Pollard’s Penelope expresses the fear of being perceived as ‘provincial’ rather than ‘rustica’, and sneers at the image she fears Ulysses holds of her as a ‘domestic goddess’ (a term introduced by the publication of Nigella Lawson’s ironically named cookbook How To Be a Domestic Goddess (2001)): ²⁰ ‘While I live on in foolish fear of things like these, you may be captive to a stranger love—such are the hearts of you men.’ Ovid (1986), 17. ²¹ ‘O too, too forgetful of your own!’ Ovid (1986), 13. ²² ‘Ah yes, you were cautious, indeed, and ever gave me first thought!’ Ovid (1986), 13–15. ²³ ‘if I am still to remain such as I was while Troy endured, and must live to all time bereft of my lord?’ Ovid (1986), 15. ²⁴ ‘It may be you even tell how rustic a wife you have—one fit only to dress fine the wool.’ Ovid (1986), 17.

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‘You might be saying how provincial I am: / Domestic goddess; good with wool . . . ’ (18). Pollard reinforces these contemporary terms by translating ‘di, precor, hoc iubeant, ut euntibus ordine fatis / ille meos oculos conprimat, ille tuos’ (101–2)²⁵ as ‘God, I pray our family dies in the right order’ (18) and by allowing her Penelope to call the tiresome, pawing suitors ‘bastards’, as the modern version of ‘inimicos’ (Heroides I, 109).²⁶ Furthermore, in the final lines of this first letter her translation reveals changing attitudes to the attributes sought in male behaviour. Pollard’s addition of ‘You have—let’s pray you keep—a son / who’s vulnerable’ (18) reflects a world that has witnessed the phenomenon of the ‘new man’, a man who is all the more attractive for being emotionally literate and unafraid to admit to feelings of weakness or insecurity. A similar shift in cultural attitudes is revealed by Penelope describing herself not as an ‘old woman’,²⁷ which is how we might expect ‘anus’ to be translated, but as ‘a fully grown woman’ (18). Not only does the term ‘fully-grown woman’ possess an allure that is utterly absent from ‘old woman’, but it also points to changes in what each generation thinks of as ‘old’. One of the effects of Pollard’s decision to use a modern vernacular in her translation is that the women of the letters become more distinct, one from another, than they are when they all speak in the same tones through a more mannered, old-fashioned translation. In contrast to Penelope, Pollard’s Phyllis of the second letter comes across as young and guileless, and perhaps not very bright. Her naivety is indicated when she cries ‘oh / you bad, bad man’ (20) as a translation of ‘scelerate’ (Heroides II, 17), which Showerman offers as ‘ah base, base, man’ (21). Her lament begins: ‘You know the mountain we visited? / I’m stood there, crying. / The promised day has passed and you’re not here’ (20).²⁸ Pollard, who outlines the geographical setting of this letter in her introduction

²⁵ ‘The gods grant, I pray, that our fated ends may come in due succession—that he be the one to close my eyes, the one to close yours.’ Ovid (1986), 19. ²⁶ Both of these terms resurface in Ovid’s Heroines. In Letter IV Phaedra exclaims ‘God’ instead of ‘heu’ (36), while in Letter XII Medea turns on Jason with the words ‘Go, bastard’ rather than ‘improbe’ (84). ²⁷ In Showerman’s version she’s ‘an aged dame’. Ovid (1986), 19. ²⁸ ‘hospita, Demophoon, tua te Rhodopeia Phyllis / ultra promissum tempus abesse queror’ (Heroides II, 1–2) (I, your Phyllis, who welcomed you to Rhodope, Demophoon, complain that the promised day is past, and you not here). Ovid (1986), 19–21.

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to it, replaces the proper name of Rhodope simply with ‘mountain’ in order to clarify the picture for the reader. Geography is of little consequence in this poem; what matters is the characterization of the querulous, self-pitying Phyllis, who abandons any pretence to dignity with her insistence that Demophoon should know that he has made her cry. Her statement ‘I’m stood there, crying’ grates both on account of its grammatical lapse, common in modern vernacular, and because of the naked emotional blackmail. Later in the poem, where Phyllis complains that she herself gave Demophoon what he needed to get away, thereby engineering her own downfall, she again seizes the opportunity to flaunt her suffering: Ah, laceras etiam puppes furiosa refeci— ut, qua desererer, firma carina foret!— remigiumque dedi, quod me fugiturus haberes. heu! patior telis vulnera facta meis! (Heroides II, 45–8)²⁹

In Pollard’s version these lines read as follows: Yes and, like a fool, I repaired your ship’s keel by which you left me! I gave you oars by which you fled. I self-harm. (21)

The phrase ‘like a fool’ is far more direct to modern ears than ‘in my madness’, just as at line 85 ‘exitus acta probat’ is far more effectively rendered by the trite and easy observation ‘it’s for the best’ (22) than Showerman’s ‘The event proves well the wisdom of her course’.³⁰ Moreover, by blurring Phyllis’s meaning—that she is the author of Demophoon’s escape—Pollard allows the line ‘I self-harm’ (21) to characterize Phyllis even more fully as a young girl, eager to display her self-inflicted wounds.³¹ Images of modern forms of self-harm now overlay this passage, ²⁹ ‘Ah, in my madness I even refitted your shattered ships—in order that the keel might be firm by which I was left behind!—and gave you the oars by which you were to fly from me. Ah me, my pangs are from wounds wrought by weapons of my own!’ Ovid (1986), 23. ³⁰ Ovid (1986), 27. ³¹ In Letter XI (91–2) from Canace to Macareus Ovid depicts traditional gestures of grief in the lines ‘exierat thalamo; tunc demum pectora plangi / contigit inque meas unguibus ire genas’ (My father had gone out of my chamber; then at length could I beat my breasts and furrow my cheeks with the nail’). Ovid (1986), 139. Pollard smooths these lines in such a way as to allow the modern reader to imagine more modern forms of self-harm: ‘Only when our father left my bedroom / did I try to hurt myself.’

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and this declaration is entirely consistent with Phyllis’s declared intention to commit suicide at the end of the letter. Where the Latin reads: Inscribere meo causa invidiosa sepulcro. aut hoc aut simili carmine notus eris: PHYLLIDA DEMOPHOON LETO DEDIT HOSPES AMANTEM; ILLE NECIS CAUSAM PRAEBUIT, IPSA MANUM. (145–8)³²

Pollard’s version achieves its dramatic effect through the brevity of its threat: ‘On my tomb they’ll inscribe my story. / By this suicide note you’ll be known’ (24). The world of today’s adolescents also finds its way into Pollard’s translation of the ninth epistle, Deianira’s letter to Hercules. Deianira has heard rumours that Hercules is staying with the queen Omphale, who has persuaded him to lay down his weapons, take up a spindle, and dress as a woman. Deianira, who was already frustrated at his repeated absences, is aghast at news of his new cross-dressing tendencies. Pollard’s translation of her complaint, ‘but you’re always gone—more guest than husband— / chasing some myth or monster’ (63),³³ is already guiding us towards looking back to her story from the future, where Deianira herself will be part of this mythical world. As her anger escalates at the contemplation of what he has become, Deianira’s language strikes a contemporary note in the selection of her shrill and bitchy sneer. ‘nec te Maeonia lascivae more puellae / incingi zona dedecuisse putas?’ (65–6)³⁴ becomes ‘And modelling the Lydian belt, / like Miss Playful. You’re sick—sick’ (63). Taunting him by comparing him to ‘Miss Playful’ is also a way of dealing a sideways jibe at Omphale, the woman whose games have reduced him to this pitiful and embarrassing state. Pollard’s Deianira presents Omphale as something of a vamp. She resents the fact that Omphale will not suffer from ‘bad hair’ (65) (‘incultis capillis’, 125), and having persuaded Hercules to ³² ‘On my tomb shall you be inscribed the hateful cause of my death. By this, or some similar verse, shall you be known: DEMOPHOON ‘TWAS SENT PHYLLIS TO HER DOOM; / HER GUEST WAS HE, SHE LOVED HIM WELL. / HE WAS THE CAUSE THAT BROUGHT HER DEATH TO PASS; / HER OWN THE HAND BY WHICH SHE FELL.’ Ovid (1986), 31. ³³ The Latin reads: ‘vir mihi semper abest, et coniuge notior hospes,/ monstraque terribiles persequiturque feras’ (Heroides IX, 33–4) (My lord is ever absent from me—he is better known to me as guest than husband—ever pursuing monsters and dreadful beasts). Ovid (1986), 111. ³⁴ ‘And do you not think that you brought disgrace upon yourself by wearing the Maeonian girdle like a wanton girl?’ Ovid (1986), 113.

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dress up in her clothes, she dons his. ‘Shame, that your shaggy lion-skin / showed off a woman’s cleavage!’ complains Deianira (64). The Latin reads: ‘o pudor! hirsuti costis exuta leonis / aspera texerunt vellera molle latus!’ (111–12);³⁵ Pollard’s decision to translate ‘molle latus’ as ‘a woman’s cleavage’ adds an extra dimension of sexuality to the scene. When Omphale then poses with Hercules’ weapons, ‘instruxitque manum clava domitrice ferarum’ (117) (‘taken in her hand the club that overcame wild beasts’³⁶), Pollard makes both of them seem ridiculous by calling his weapon ‘your monster-mashing club’ (65), evoking for her modern readers the comic pop song ‘Monster Mash’, replete with its ghouls and zombies engaging in their graveyard smash. As the letter continues Deianira hears further rumours, that Hercules is close to death having donned the poisoned shirt of Nessus that she sent. She imagines the bitchy sneering reaching new heights of hysteria, except that this time it is directed against her. Where Ovid’s Deianira laments ‘ei mihi! quid feci? quo me feror egit amantem? / inpia quid dubitas Deianira mori?’ (145–6),³⁷ Pollard’s Deianira conjures up in her imagination the public who hate her and who will urge her to die: ‘No. No— / what have I done in my madness? / They’ll cry: ‘Bitch! Why not kill yourself ’ (66). The language is painfully reminiscent of the newspaper accounts of teenage suicides, goaded to kill themselves by trolls on social networking sites. It is far easier for the Deianira of today to imagine that she is hated by thousands of people. Her fevered imagination conjures up the tabloid headlines that will feed the fury of those baying for her to spill her own blood, as Pollard adds a line of her own invention: ‘Hercules Horror. Wicked Wife Still Lives’ (66). The twentyfirst-century Deianira envisages these tabloid hacks, turning over every scrap of her family history, so that the phrase ‘Heu devota domus’ (153) (Alas, for my devoted house!’³⁸) becomes ‘They’ll dig into my family’s tragic story’ (66). It is not long before she is urged to commit suicide again. Once more, whereas in the original it was Deianira talking to herself ‘inpia quid dubitas Deianira mori?’ (158) (O wicked Deianira, why ³⁵ ‘O shame, that the rough skin stripped from the flanks of the shaggy lion has covered a woman’s delicate side.’ Ovid (1986), 117. ³⁶ Ovid (1986), 117. ³⁷ ‘Alas me! what have I done? Whither has madness driven me in my love? O wicked Deianira, why hesitate to die?’ Ovid (1986), 119. ³⁸ Ovid (1986), 119.

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hesitate to die?³⁹), in Pollard’s version it is the trolls and hacks wanting to know why she hasn’t done it yet: ‘Deianira you bitch—why not kill yourself ’ (66). This is confirmed by another tabloid headline of Pollard’s invention: ‘Poison Shirt Shock: Demands for Deianira’s Death’ (66). As Deianira succumbs to the pressure and bids farewell to the world, Pollard wittily transforms the light of day into ‘the bright lights’ (66), which to our ears are suggestive of a modern, cosmopolitan city. The original Latin: Iamque vale, seniorque pater germanaque Gorge, et patria et patriae frater adempte tuae, et tu lux oculis hodierna novissima nostris, virque—sed o possis!—et puer Hylle, vale! (165–8)⁴⁰

becomes: All right then goodbye father, sister, brother, nation, the bright lights, husband (could you but live) and, finally, my son: goodbye. (66)

The vicious savaging of women in today’s public domain can be seen elsewhere in Pollard’s translations. In her version of Letter V, in which Oenone, the daughter of the river god, addresses her erstwhile lover Paris, Paris’ new love, Helen, is condemned as ‘just / a slag with a thing for strangers’ (41).⁴¹ Towards the end of the letter Oenone makes the unpleasant suggestion that a woman who is raped as often as Helen has been is a willing participant: ‘vim licet appelles et culpam nomine veles; / quae totiens rapta est, praebuit ipsa rapi’ (131–2).⁴² Pollard’s use of the modern term ‘asking for it’ is a further sobering reminder of why so many of today’s rape victims are reluctant to press charges, as they fear being stigmatized for the crime perpetrated upon them: ‘Veil her

³⁹ Ovid (1986), 119. ⁴⁰ ‘And now fare ye well, O aged father, and O my sister gorge, and O my native soil, and brother taken from thy native soil, and thou, O light that shinest today, the last to strike upon mine eyes; and thou my lord, O fare thou well—would that thou couldst!—and Hyllus, thou my son, farewell to thee.’ Ovid (1986), 121. ⁴¹ ‘sit facie quamvis insignis, adultera certe est; / deseruit socios hospite capta deos’ (125–6) (Let her seem how fair soever of face, none the less she surely is a jade; smitten with a stranger, she left behind her marriage-gods). Ovid (1986), 67. ⁴² ‘You may call it violence, and veil the fault in the world; yet she who has been so often stolen has surely lent herself to theft.’ Ovid (1986), 67.

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fault and call it rape, / but someone “stolen” so often’s asking for it’ (42). Pollard’s Oenone also damns Helen by her use of the capitalized ‘Other’ to refer to her. Since this device is used so often in contemporary discourse to analyse deep-rooted attitudes prejudices towards foreigners, its presence here establishes Helen as a dangerous, shadowy character, of whom we should automatically be suspicious. ‘dum moror, in summa fulsit mihi purpura prora / pertimui; cultus non erat ille tuus’ (65–6).⁴³ Pollard’s version reads: ‘But then, on the prow, I was a flash / of frock—it was some Other / The fresh breeze carried your craft closer; / shivering, I caught a woman’s face’ (40). Oenone is not alone in wanting to cast her rival in the role of unwanted foreigner with loose morals. Pollard’s Hypsipyle (Heroides VI) is light years away from Roberts’s self-contained, confident woman. In Pollard’s version Hypsipyle is also terse as she opens the letter, but her language is clipped and cold. The Latin reads ‘gratulor incolumi, quantum sinis; hoc tamen ipsum / debueram scripto certior esse tuo’ (3–4),⁴⁴ which becomes ‘Please accept my congratulations—though you might have said yourself ’ (44). As Hypsipyle evokes her abandonment by Jason the tone modulates into lyrical melancholy, aided by Pollard’s poetic touches, such as her lovely balancing phrases ‘Two summers fled, two winters thawed’ (45) for ‘hic tibi bisque aestas bisque cucurrit hiemps [sic]’ (56),⁴⁵ so that the shift back into modern vernacular is all the more stark. As Hypsipyle puzzles over how Medea has managed to ensnare Jason, Pollard employs a very modern and well-worn phrase as her translation of ‘nec facie meritisque placet’ (83)⁴⁶—‘It cannot be her looks or personality’, she declares. A few lines later she becomes even more strident than the Ovidian Hypsipyle. Where the Latin reads ‘hanc potes amplecti’ (95).⁴⁷ Pollard’s heroine seethes: ‘Can you hold such a hag?’ (46). And through her translation of the final lines of the poem, Pollard’s Hypsipyle wishes upon her rival a particularly contemporary form of exclusion and frightened hopelessness: ⁴³ ‘While I delayed, on the highest of the prow I saw the gleam of purple—fear seized upon me; that was not the manner of your garb.’ Ovid (1986), 63. ⁴⁴ ‘I speak you well for your safety—so far as you give me chance; yet of this very thing I should have been informed by message of your own.’ Ovid (1986), 69. ⁴⁵ ‘Here twice the summer fled for you, here twice the winter.’ Ovid (1986), 73. ⁴⁶ ‘Her charm for you is neither in her beauty nor her merit.’ Ovid (1986), 75. ⁴⁷ ‘A woman like this can you embrace?’ Ovid (1986), 77.

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exulet et toto quaerat in orbe fugam! quam fratri germana fuit miseroque parenti. filia, tam natis, tam sit acerba viro! cum mare, cum terras consumpserit, aera temptet ; erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua! (158–62)⁴⁸ May she [ . . . ] be exiled; a refugee. A bitter sister and daughter— she’ll be a sour wife and mother. And when all borders are closed, let her live on air— wander, a bag-lady, bereft, blood-stained. (48)

The conjuring up of Medea as ‘bag-lady’ marks one of the very few moments in Pollard’s book to which Natalie Haynes takes exception, observing that ‘If she occasionally veers too far towards bathos, that’s preferable to pomposity: at one point, Hypsipyle describes herself to Jason as inops (without resource, or piteous) which I think I still prefer to Pollard’s undeniably succinct “bag lady”.’⁴⁹ To my mind, however, much of the power of Pollard’s versions are precisely that they accommodate so cogently the conditions of our modern world. By referring to the borders being closed, by hoping that Medea will find herself a refugee, Pollard is using terms that are freighted for us with images of terrible pasts and suffering. She not only gives a vivid image of Hypsipyle’s spiteful rage, but reminds us that the condition of refugee, of unwanted immigrant, is still one greatly to be feared in the modern world. Jason has brought upon himself the misfortune of receiving two of the letters in the Heroides. A letter from Medea (12) follows hot on the heels of the letter from Hypsipyle. Once more Pollard’s translation achieves the blending of highly poetic images with a very contemporary turn of phrase. Her phrase ‘blaze-breathed’ (80) for ‘quorum terribilis spiritus ignis erat’ (42)⁵⁰ vividly evokes the bulls with which Jason was forced to

⁴⁸ ‘let her be an exile, and seek a refuge through the entire world! A bitter sister to her brother, a bitter daughter to her wretched sire, may she be as bitter to her children, and as bitter to her husband! When she shall have no hope more of refuge by the sea or by the land, let her make trial of the air; let her wander, destitute, bereft of hope, stained red with the blood of her murders!’ Ovid (1986), 81–3. ⁴⁹ Haynes mistakenly reads this as a description of Hypsipyle rather than of Medea. Haynes (2013). ⁵⁰ ‘for their breathing was of terrible fire.’ Ovid (1986), 145.

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plough. And instead of the pedestrian ‘I betrayed my sire’⁵¹ for ‘proditus est genitor’ (109), Pollard offers us ‘I fleeced my father’ (81), a witty touch to a story involving Jason. But the simplicity of Pollard’s translation of ‘optima cum cara matre relicta soror’ (112)⁵² as ‘I miss my mother and my sisters’ (82) is particularly touching from the mouth of one of the most reviled and feared females of the ancient world. This vulnerability is transferred to her children who, in Pollard’s translation of ‘pater . . . Iason’ (151), speak of ‘Daddy’ (83).⁵³ Medea identifies the moment when everything changed, when she was transformed into a vengeful monster, as being a moment full of fear: ‘pertimui’ (141). Instead of a literal translation (‘I was filled with fear’⁵⁴), Pollard offers us ‘Things tilted’ (82), a chilling evocation of a moment of recognition that the world has slipped from its axis and that nothing will ever be the same again. And where Ovid’s Medea vengefully predicts that ‘flebit et ardores vincet adusta meos!’ (180),⁵⁵ Pollard offers us a more graphic image of a deranged woman enjoying the prospect of another’s pain: ‘Soon she’ll scream and blister far worse than me’ (84). In her translation of Medea’s letter Pollard once again inserts the image of a particularly modern phenomenon, as she speaks of love, translating ‘et qui me sequitur semper, amore tui (136)⁵⁶ as ‘that stalker, love’ (82). The image of love as something that hunts her down in order to destroy her is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s characterization of the passion that she knew would one day annihilate her also,⁵⁷ and of course Plath, whose last poem ‘Edge’ betrays her contemplation of killing her children, has often been presented as a modern Medea.⁵⁸ On this reading

⁵¹ Ovid (1986), 151. ⁵² ‘beloved mother and best of sisters I have left behind.’ Ovid (1986), 151. ⁵³ A comparable emotional charge is achieved in Pollard’s translation of Letter VIII from Hermione to Orestes, where ‘sine me, me sine, mater, abis?’ (80) (Mother, will you go away, and will you leave me behind? [Ovid (1986), 105]), becomes the scream of a frightened child: ‘Mummy, don’t leave me behind!’ (59). ⁵⁴ Ovid (1986), 153. ⁵⁵ ‘she shall weep, and the flames that consume her will surpass my own!’ Ovid (1986), 155. ⁵⁶ ‘and what follows me evermore, my love for you.’ Ovid (1986), 153. ⁵⁷ Plath (1992), ‘Pursuit’, 22. ⁵⁸ See for example Roche (1979), 85: ‘When she died, I shuddered to imagine what curses she had hurled at Ted, and what maelstroms of sorcery she had conjured up on those winter nights alone by the moors, and, worse still, I had a horrifying vision of the first scenes having been played by this New England Medea’.

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Pollard’s modernizing touches of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Go, bastard’, already discussed, may also remind the reader of ‘Daddy’, Plath’s poem of despair at her abandonment by both father and husband, in the last line of which she calls her ‘Daddy’ a bastard.⁵⁹ Pollard also roots her translation firmly into a British poetic lineage through the short prefaces she gives to each poem. In her comments about her translation of Letter XIII, which is Laodamia to Protesilaus, she invites us to explore one of the possible ends to Laodamia’s story further, by reading Wordsworth’s poem on the subject (85). Similarly, she makes it clear that her response to Dido’s plight has been filtered through Marlowe and T. S. Eliot by reminding readers of Marlowe’s resonant line ‘yes, yes, it pleases me to go into the dark’ (49) and by pointing out that Eliot thought that Dido’s rejection of Aeneas in the Underworld was ‘the most telling snub in western literature’ (49). Through thinking back through this predominantly male response to Ovid, Pollard ensures that she enters the dominant poetic dialogue that is the reception of Ovid. Although there is no evidence of her espousing Ovid in order to promote any kind of feminist cause, it is surely significant that the only sustained treatment in modern times of the Heroides has been penned by a woman. It is also a sign of the increasing democratization of Ovid that this response should come from someone who has received no formal training in the Classics. Pollard’s translation offers us an Ovid who displays his earlier receptions and thus is recognizable to us, yet who also astonishes us anew by his ability to comment on contemporary society through his appearances in the most contemporary of guises—the refugee bag lady, the self-harming teenage girl, the woman driven to suicide by the sordid viciousness of tabloid headlines. And the variety of these guises reminds us of the power of Ovid’s understanding of the complex psychology of his heroines, and his empathy towards those who are so deeply damaged, not only through being abandoned, but also by being forced to witness how their anguish generates their metamorphosis into vengeful and dangerous monsters.

⁵⁹ Plath (1992), 224.

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11 Jane Alison In the course of this book we have seen writers responding to Ovid through a variety of genres, but the rise in the number of women translating Ovid has been especially striking, especially at a time when classical education can no longer be assumed to form part of the school curriculum, and especially when several of the translators—such as Darrieussecq and Pollard—have no background of advanced education in classical studies. The translations we have studied have located Ovid within a very specific time by allowing his translated voice to speak to contemporary concerns, such as Pollard’s decision to shade her translation of Ovid with the echoes of tabloid trolling and aggression. In such a context it is worth remembering once more Darrieussecq’s belief that Ovid’s exile poetry articulates a peculiarly modern crisis, the terror of losing everything from one day to the next. Another distinctive feature of the translations has been their ability to accommodate a highly personal voice, an element that shines out especially from Balmer’s translations/transgressions. These particular aspects of recent translations of Ovid by women point to a new phase of reception, not only of the classical world, but also of the use made of translation. In her seminal book Gender and Translation Sherry Simon reminds us of the long centuries of oblivion in which women turned to translation in the hope of gaining access to the world of letters by borrowing the words of other authors who had achieved acceptance, and who were usually male. She also highlights the strong connections between the history of women translators with a wider feminist struggle, observing that ‘The line of transmission linking Mary Wollstonecraft to Bertha Pappenheim reframes and reactualizes the struggle for women’s rights.’¹ Within this volume we have seen that,

¹ Simon (1996), 61.

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as translation meets the democratizing values of the third wave, it is no longer being employed as a means towards literary acceptance, but instead is becoming a vehicle by which women writers are interrogating not only literary history, but also cultural values, contemporary politics, and personal stories. Jane Alison is not only a translator, who read Classics at Princeton, but she has also written novels and an autobiography. Her decision to translate Ovid came as no surprise to those in the world of classics who were familiar with her first book, a novel entitled The Love Artist (2001), which tells the tale of Ovid’s exile in Tomis, as seen through the eyes of one of the women, Xenia, whom he meets there, and who fascinates and bewitches him. Like Darrieussecq, Alison believes that our Zeitgeist is especially conducive to receptions of Ovid, especially in light of his exile and its attendant losses, as she explains in an interview: Perhaps in this globalized era we’re more likely, through work or family or marriage, to find ourselves living in places that aren’t home and where our language is foreign. It could also be a generalized sense of alienation or personal dislocation brought on by countless aspects of our over-technological world—a nostalgia for a place-time that’s lost.²

Alison’s response to Ovid is prompted, above all, however, by a profound recognition, a sense that his myths were depicting predicaments with which she felt familiar. She opens her Introduction to her translation by recalling the jolt she had felt as a teenager upon realizing that Ovid was recounting her story, in his version of the myth of Echo and Narcissus: When I first read Ovid, I was nineteen and amazed that this Roman man, two thousand years earlier, could portray so precisely the dynamics of my own obsession with a beautiful but ice-cold boy [ . . . ] Echo follows him and misunderstands his words, believing that he wants her as much as she does him, but he wants no one and rejects her coldly. She withers away in mortification until nothing is left but petrified bones and a floating voice. Narcissus, meanwhile, falls into a fascination with his own detached image, his reflection, and slowly wastes away as well. Like Echo, I followed the boy I knew helplessly, so unnerved in his presence I could barely speak. [ . . . ] The pain I felt that year was excruciating, yet Ovid’s story seems a gemlike portrait of my situation, giving it form, beauty, and perspective.³ ² Alison (2013). ³ Alison (2014), ix. All references will be to this edition, with page references given within the text.

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This first moment of identification with a character from Ovid ignited a lifelong fascination with his poetry. Through her translations of Ovid, selected from both the Amores and the Metamorphoses, Alison explores both Ovid’s dissection of the emotional landscape of erotic and amorous encounters and his meticulous charting of the transformations that shape and reshape the human body, and that are frequently prompted by relationships with others. Her claim that ‘I evolved a personal, almost sexually charged experiment with the voice’⁴ not only highlights the depth of her identification with his work and characters, but also explains the rationale behind her selection of the passages she wanted to translate. Her translation is a work where danger lurks at every turn, where the pain of unrequited love, or of being the wrong person in the wrong body, is achingly present. Alison’s initiation into this Ovidian world of myth was as a result of recognizing Narcissus from the boy she loved, and the eternal cry of the heartsick teenager, echoed so often by the women writers analysed in this book, is taken from Ovid’s verse and gives Alison’s volume its title: Change Me. The plea of the title is followed by the clarification: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. The questions that Ovid poses and that dictated the choice of passages for translation highlight the vulnerability and frailty that is attendant upon so many of the sexual encounters that he depicts: ‘What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts?’⁵ These passages are arranged in five different sections whose titles emphasize the dangers that Ovid’s world holds, particularly for females: ‘Looking’, ‘Taking’, ‘Ruining’, ‘Wanting Someone too Close’, and ‘Switching’. These active participles recall Marina Warner’s essay on Ovid’s reception, organized into chapters entitled ‘Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, Doubling’, while also pointing to the fact that Ovid’s stories continue to enjoy an ongoing, active presence. Furthermore, Alison’s choice of participles acts as a reminder that these dangers often emerge from an inability to control our own yearnings, especially if we are ‘wanting someone too close’. Alison captures the abiding sense of threat that permeates Ovid’s world with its tales within tales within tales of rape

⁴ Alison (2013).

⁵ Alison (2013).

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and abduction, and the cry of ‘Change Me’ can be heard over and over again. In the ‘Switching’ section Caenis pleads ‘da, femina ne sim’ (Metamorphoses XII, 202), which Alison renders as ‘Change me from a girl’.⁶ Myrrha, who falls in love with her father, articulates her longing to establish a new kind of relationship with him by wishing ‘mutataeque mihi’ (Metamorphoses X, 487), a lament which is once again translated by Alison as ‘change me’. And both Caenis and Myrrha are echoing the cry of Daphne, running through the narrative and the Looking section, calling ‘ “Fer, pater,” inquit “opem! si flumina numen habetis, / qua nimium placui, mutando perde figuram” ’ (Metamorphoses I, 545–7), which Alison translates as ‘Help me, Father, if there’s mystic strength in your stream / destroy this form that’s too pleasing: change me!’ (38). Alison’s response to such moments of terror or of self-hatred in Ovid stems from a sense that Ovid is able to probe and elucidate her own identity, so that her relationship with and reading of Ovid is a theme of her memoir The Sisters Antipodes, as we shall see. In an interview she defines the way in which Ovid’s myths become enmeshed with a sense of self that they both modify and are modified by: ‘I think that Ovid’s stories become most new when they’ve sunk deeply into a reader and later arise again unconsciously to provide meaning—or a portrait—of an experience; but by now they’ve been modified with details of one’s own life.’⁷ Alison’s deep engagement with Ovid is evidenced not only by the ways in which she responds to his themes, but also in the vividness and playfulness of her wordplay. Her delight in unfolding the resonances of Ovid’s Latin, while ensuring that it has a modern flavour for the contemporary reader, is clear from the very beginning of the volume, where she has placed her selections from the Amores. In her Preface Alison points out that there is a natural link connecting the Amores to the Metamorphoses: while in the Metamorphoses women tend to be the objects ensnared by love, in the Amores Ovid recounts predominantly his own experiences of being in thrall to romantic passion. In the first poem she selects, Amores I, 3, Ovid complains that his love is unrequited, and promises to make his beloved as famous as Io and Europa, if she will only love him. He’s praying only for what is just, he declares—‘iusta precor’ (1) in the Latin. Alison establishes a contemporary tone to her ⁶ The translations from Ovid in this chapter are those of Jane Alison. ⁷ Alison (2013).

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translation from the start, by rendering this as ‘It’s only fair’, a strategy that she follows up a few lines later when Ovid points out (10) that his parents are ‘parcus’ (careful with money) and she calls them ‘tight’ (22). Moreover, even where Ovid does not employ devices such as alliteration in the original, such stylistic features are so much a part of his voice that it is entirely in keeping with his approach that Alison should insert such flourishes of her own at various moments. Where Ovid evokes Io’s terror at discovering that she has become a cow, claiming that she is ‘exterrita cornibus’ (21), Alison depicts her as an aside in parentheses as ‘(horrified heifer-girl)’. And when Ovid invokes Europa who sailed away on a bull’s back, he refers to her ‘cornua vara’ (24), which Alison catches rather beautifully as ‘lilting horn’ (22). The phrase mirrors the rock of the movement as the bull ploughs through the waves, but is also seductive and so serves as a warning of the ways in which poetry can lure people into danger with its beauties. She further emphasizes such dangers when she translates the phrase ‘neque posset ab arte capi’ (Amores II, 12, 4) as ‘in case she be charmed away’ (25), since the ‘charmed’ looks back to the Latin ‘carmen’, a word which means both ‘song’ and ‘spell’, thus reminding us that much of Ovid’s power lies in his ability to weave spells through poetry. Alison’s translation of Amores I, 4, in which Ovid offers instruction to his lover about how to send him covert messages of love at a dinner party in front of the lover she’s betraying, has a modern and rather threatening tone. This is achieved in part through print—Alison has italicized the injunctions in lines 36 and 38—‘don’t lean your head on his bony chest’ and ‘Absolutely do not kiss him’ (23). The alliterative translation of ‘tange pedem!’ (16) as ‘flick my foot’ (23) contributes to the brittleness of the tone. ‘Mea lux’ of line 25 becomes ‘Sunshine’ (23), a very clever updating of the endearment, since it acquires a contemporary edge that blends, in the English, with a rather patronizing and condescending flavour. Alison employs such barbed playfulness later on in the translation, in her version of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, when faced with the challenge of translating the names of the Greek nymphs. She explains her thinking behind her choice of names in her notes: ‘The six nymphs’ names are Greek, and they are lovely Greek names, so most translators leave them that way. But soon to come in the story is a long list of the names of dogs (the ‘Catalogue of Dogs’), which are also Greek, yet usually translated into English, because the meanings are telling and funny. I have likewise

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translated the Greek names in this mini-catalogue of nymphs, which gives the scene a Disney-like effect that seems to suit Ovid’s playful and ever-shifting register of tones in a story that will end up horrific’ (125): Pebble from Thebes is more skillful than they and loops hair loose at Diana’s neck in a knot, though her own hair tumbles undone. Then Purity, Glass, Raindrop, Sparkle, and Dish scoop up water in deep urns and drink it.⁸

At times Alison catches Ovid’s tone and outdoes Ovid himself. An example of this occurs in her translation of Amores I, 5, the poem where Ovid famously depicts a long, languid afternoon in bed with his girlfriend. Alison opens her translation by rendering ‘exegerat’ (1) with the much softer ‘had drifted’ (24), a phrase which carries the feel of lazy summer heat with it. As afternoon gives way to evening Ovid evokes the dimmer light in the bedroom: ‘qualia sublucent fugiente crepuscula Phoebo’ (5). Alison preserves the ‘s’ alliteration, and merges the senses of ‘sublucent fugiente’ to offer the beautifully evocative ‘cool glow’, in a line that vividly conveys the relief of the dropping temperature after a blisteringly hot Roman afternoon: ‘or like the sinking sun’s cool glow at dusk’ (24). When Ovid declares ‘ecce’ (9), while admiring Corinna’s beauties, Alison suggests the catch in his breath as he looks upon her loveliness by offering us: ‘And oh’ (24). Alison does not rely simply on contemporary turns of phrase to ensure that Ovid speaks in modern tones to her readers, although there are many instances of these, where Latin exclamations such as ‘me miserum’ (Amores III, 11) is turned to ‘oh god’ (28), or where Diana’s ‘cultum’ which Jove adopts as a disguise (Metamorphoses II, 425) in order to trick Callisto is referred to as ‘her gear’ (61).⁹ By colouring her translation ⁸ Alison (2014), 40. The original Latin reads: ‘nam doctior illis / Ismenis Crocale sparsos per colla capillos / colligit in nodum, quamvis erat ipsa solutis. / excipiunt laticem Nepheleque Hyaleque Rhanisque / et Psecas et Phiale funduntque capacibus urnis.’ Metamorphoses III, 168–72. Janet Lembke uses a similar strategy in her translation of Virgil’s Georgics where she names the Greek nymphs, for example, ‘Woods Girl’, ‘Golden’, ‘Clear Voice’, ‘Fancy Leaf ’. For a discussion of this see Cox (2011), 236. ⁹ Other examples include the opening of Amores III, 4, where Alison writes: ‘O you tough man’ (1) or Metamorphoses V (584), where the phrase ‘corporis erubui crimenque placare putavi’ becomes ‘my lushness made me blush’, emphasizing the ‘lush’ that is so much a part of teenage vernacular these days, and enabling Alison to include the internal rhyming of ‘lush’ and ‘blush’. Alison is fond of such internal rhymes; a further example is

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with literary allusions that she can expect to be instantly familiar to her readers, Alison emphasizes the fact that Ovid and his works are intimately bound up with our literary traditions. At the beginning of Amores III, 12, where Ovid ruefully contemplates the reasons for his failed love life and reflects upon inauspicious omens, rather than having the blackbirds cawing ‘sad omens’ to him, Alison turns this to ‘bleak / Nevermore’ (28), a twist that invokes Poe’s raven for us, which to our age provides a more immediate and tangible chill. The enjambment between ‘bleak’ and ‘Nevermore’ ensures that ‘Nevermore’ sounds its toll at the beginning of the line, echoing Poe’s strategy of emphasizing ‘Nevermore’ in ‘The Raven’. A similar approach is employed in the translation of the Iphis episode from the Metamorphoses (IX, 761), where the phrase ‘mediis sitiemus in undis’ becoming ‘So much water and no drop to drink’ (115) looks back to Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and the well-worn line: ‘Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.’ As Alison moves to the translations of selections of the Metamorphoses, the emphasis shifts from Ovid’s romantic travails to a much darker world, that reminds us again and again of the dangers that stalk us, particularly females. The vulnerability of young girls is foregrounded throughout in Alison’s translation. At times this is achieved through emphasizing the scantiness of their clothing; Scylla appears wearing a blue cloak ‘caerulaque induitur velamina’ (Metamorphoses XIV, 45), which Alison intensifies so that she ‘draped herself in airy blue’ (98), a version which heightens the diaphanous, fragile appearance of the young girl. Similarly where Ovid depicts Salmacis as ‘nunc perlucenti circumdata corpus amictu’ (Metamorphoses IV, 313), Alison gives us ‘a see-through dress like light on her skin’ (66), which both picks up on the ‘lucens’ contained in ‘perlucenti’ and highlights Salmacis’ fragile and ethereal beauty. In both instances Alison stresses via her translations the delicacy of the girls, while also suggesting a rather provocative appearance. As well as emphasizing the ethereal quality of such female appearances, Alison also foregrounds the brutality and force of their predominantly male attackers. When Apollo mockingly asks Cupid: ‘ “quid” que “tibi, lascive Metamorphoses I, 689 where ‘Arcadiae gelidis sub montibus’ becomes ‘in chilly, hilly Arcadia’. Alison observes in the notes to the Myrrha section that she has followed Stanley Lombardo in translating ‘filia’ and ‘pater’ as ‘Baby’ and ‘Daddy’ here. Alison (2014), 133.

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puer, cum fortibus armis” ’ (Metamorphoses I, 456), Alison carries the question into the twenty-first century as she asks: ‘What’s a playboy like you got to do with big weapons?’ (36). For a contemporary reader the term ‘playboy’ carries connotations of a slick, cruel man.¹⁰ Modern allocutions can also be heard when ‘illa aversata petentes’ (I, 478) is strengthened from Daphne refusing all suitors to the more direct ‘she says no’ (36), a phrase heard in law court after law court from those presenting the cause of victims, who make it clear that their answer was no. Such arresting simplicity also shadows Io’s plight when, having been metamorphosed into a cow, she observes bleakly: ‘I will suffer on and on’ (58), a balder and more chilling statement than the original ‘aeternum nostros luctus extendit in aevum’ (I, 663). Meanwhile the grief of Io’s father is conveyed by the term ‘miserrimus’ (I, 584), which Alison renders poignantly as ‘Broken, he grieves his girl’ (56). Alison’s Ovidian world is characterized by its darkness—it is a world that is shadowed by danger, threat, and ruin. In the story of Perseus what seems like a neutral word—‘memorabile’ (Metamorphoses IV, 615)— becomes ‘haunting’ (47), a term which is pregnant with a sense of doom. As she embarks upon the story of Myrrha, she makes Ovid announce ‘I’ll sing a dark story’ (104) for ‘dira canam’ (Metamorphoses X, 300), while even an ebullient myth, such as the story of Iphis and Ianthe, is edged with darkness as she translates ‘monstri’ (Metamorphoses IX, 667) as ‘dark marvel’ (113).¹¹ Furthermore this dark world is electrified by flashes, it glitters with threat, seduces with its shining beauties. Alison emphasizes the heat and light of erotic desire. Her fondness for alliteration catches the surge of Pygmalion’s lust, as he gazes upon his creation. The Latin ‘pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes’ (Metamorphoses X, 253) becomes ‘flames of lust for the feigned body flick at his heart’ (54). As Adonis looks longingly at a running maiden, Alison renders the Latin ‘passu volat alite virgo’ (X, 587) as ‘the girl streaks by’ (91), a phrase suggestive of nakedness and transgression. At Metamorphoses X, 590 the phrase ‘et cursus facit ipse decorem’ flowers into ‘running blooms

¹⁰ See also ‘crudelis’ in the Proserpina episode (Metamorphoses V, 541) which Alison translates as ‘The nasty boy’. ¹¹ The emphasis laid by Alison on the marvellous in her translation of ‘monstrum’ chimes with Sarton’s description of ‘writing women’ as ‘strange monsters’, an idea from which this book takes its title.

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her beauty’ (91), a phrase which, in its loveliness, is ripe with youth and freshness. The male characters in Ovid are also capable of inflaming such longing. Byblis’ brother, on discovering her love for him via a message delivered by a servant, turns his wrath on the servant and cries ‘o vetitae scelerate libidinis auctor’ (Metamorphosis IX, 577), a phrase that acquires a modern feel when Alison translates it as: ‘you disgusting pimp / of perversion!’ (102). When Salmacis falls in love, Alison intensifies the sense of burning present in the verb ‘exarsit’ by using the word ‘lit’: ‘nudaeque cupidine formae / Salmacis exarsit’ (Metamorphoses IV, 346–7) becomes ‘the boy’s naked body lit / Salmacis with lust’ (66), and when we are told that Hermaphroditus ‘translucet’ (IV, 354) Alison offers us ‘he gleams in that translucent pool’ (67), emphasizing its luminous qualities by including an adjective to reinforce the imagery of the verb. In Ovid these gleaming pools herald danger, as is made clear within the story of Actaeon, where Alison catches the fresh sound of outdoor water when she renders Ovid’s ‘fons sonat [ . . . ] perlucidus’ (Metamorphoses III, 161) as ‘Bright lines of water plash’ (40). The pool will shortly be stained by blood, as Actaeon is turned into a stag and torn to shreds by his own hounds. Alison is well aware of the horrors and dangers that lurk in the loveliest of Ovidian scenes, and she is sensitive to how fragile Ovidian beauty is. Indeed the very myth that served as an epiphany to her when she was nineteen, and hopelessly in love herself, centres around just such a still and lucent pond. When Ovid depicts the pool in his version of Echo and Narcissus he observes that ‘fons erat inlimis, nitidis argenteus undis’ (III, 407), which Alison translates as ‘There was a clear pool with a glittering shine’ (44); with the use of the brittle, hard word ‘glittering’ she intensifies the cruelty inherent in the myth. As we have seen, it was through the myth of Echo and Narcissus that Alison discovered Ovid, and found in his stories an acute understanding of the psychology that had governed her teenage behaviour and that stemmed from the unusual childhood that she depicts in The Sisters Antipodes.¹² Ovid spoke to a teenage self that recognized that the drive in so many of his characters was intimately connected to a longing for ¹² Alison (2009). All references will be to this edition, with page numbers given within the text.

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home, so it is unsurprising that her first book should have been a novel about his exile. In contrast, The Sisters Antipodes is a memoir that allows Alison to invoke classical myth as she explores her own personal past and underworld, and in so doing contributes to the trend of turning to classical literature in order to explore the ‘personal voice’.¹³ As Alison meditates upon the teasing elusiveness of an identity that resists being grounded by patterns of words, she appears instinctively to turn to classical literature for insight: There’s so often a hole at the heart of first-person narratives: a black hole like the windy center of consciousness, or like Odysseus calling himself No One in the Cyclops cave. The self seems so nebulous: What’s it made of ? [ . . . ] why does it seem so vaporous, no more certain than weather? (197)

This fragile self, this sense of emptiness at the heart of one’s being, sheds light upon Alison’s identification with Echo when she found Ovid’s depiction of the young girl, whose ghostly utterances faded more and more palely until there was nothing left, and indeed Alison turns to Ovid as she probes the edges of this dark emptiness at the centre of one’s being and so at the centre of first-person narratives: ‘Ovid gave these ideas such beautiful flesh: Bodies change and are permeable; the self is unfixed. All breath and words, it slips through our openings; it enters, exits, can be lost’ (197). This terror of being lost must have been exacerbated by the unusual configurations of Alison’s family, when she was a child. Her parents divorced and remarried, each partnering the respective spouses of another married couple who also had daughters of the same age as Alison and her elder sister. Alison draws upon the imagery of metamorphosis in her depiction of the reshaped families: ‘Helen and my father remarried, as did my mother and Paul, as if the split had blasted apart stones and fused the pieces, making metamorphic families’ (33). The new family arrangements meant that Alison had to leave her homeland of Australia and move to the USA, as well as coping with the fact that her father had suddenly become a father to two other daughters, whose father was now acting as a father to her. As well as this she had acquired a double, a twin whom she was usurping, even as she herself was being

¹³ See Hallett and Van Nortwick (1996) for multiple expositions of the power of the personal voice in classical scholarship.

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usurped. This dislocation, both from the original family unit and from her native country, enabled her to feel a natural affinity with Ovid and his experience of exile. Within her own family story her sense of dislocation is attendant upon acute sensitivity to the highly unusual situation that was shaping her life: The girls also called our father Daddy, while their own father they called Father. We called their father Paul. The girls were called the girls, or Paul’s girls, his real girls. The parallels between the two families were so neat we seemed designed as nature, twinned markings on the wings of a moth. (34–5)¹⁴

The fact that Alison does not see herself as one of Paul’s ‘real’ girls establishes in childhood a pattern in which she probes the boundaries of real and imagined worlds, as she attempts to establish a sense of self. She describes a period of her childhood as a time when: ‘I was never awake but suspended, dreaming, in ice or glass. A sense of being off-kilter. Home, the real center, was far away, and the feel of hovering at an edge was sickening’ (32). In these new families, with the wrong fathers, both Alison and her counterpart, Jenny, living in her father’s house, learned to compete in order to outdo each other, in order to win male attention. It was here that Alison first experienced the emotions that she would later recognize within Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that would inform her readings of them. Significantly as she and Jenny gazed at each other in the room they shared during the brief periods when they were in the same house, Alison points out that she is carrying around her Latin with her: ‘In her room, she sat on the bed, I sat on a chair, and we looked at each other, her with a bag full of poems and garbage and me with a bag full of Latin and math’(190). As she basked in her stepfather’s approval of and admiration for her academic prowess, Alison felt as if she were dissolving into the figure of the golden girl, and evokes the experience in language that recalls the world of Ovidian myth, where females such as the Danae are forced to endure the metamorphosis into a shower of gold, for example, as the reward or punishment for their outstanding qualities: I [ . . . ] felt his rare gold sift upon me, felt it melting on my skin until it became my skin, burnishing, stunning. And the faint, fine sense of being favored was an ¹⁴ Alison returns again and again in her memoir to this idea of Paul’s daughters being his real girls, as for example on p. 41 where she speaks of ‘his girls, the real girls’.

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element of the high air in that house, nine thousand feet up in the Andes, air that was too thin, made you giddy. (69)

The altitude in which she experienced this vertiginous transformation is suggestive of Mount Olympus, and the episode is steeped in danger: the risk of becoming a shower of gold, of shining too brightly, too briefly, is that one is liable to lose any sense of a grounded self. By transforming herself into the ‘golden girl’, who might supplant Paul’s daughter, Jenny, the ‘real girl’, Alison feared even more acutely the chasm at the centre of the family, of her world, into which she could slip and be lost. She observed that ‘Desire and desirability were a mingled current—the way when you looked at the sky, it was the current of looking that meant everything. Close your eyes, and girl or sky disappeared’ (67). In this strange, hybrid family the two girls battled against each other for survival. Eventually Jenny, who had embarked upon increasingly selfdestructive behaviour culminating in drug abuse, achieved the ultimate apotheosis by dying, and thereby becoming the star that her grieving mother was able to buy for her: ‘Jenny [ . . . ] transformed to light and shadow. Like one of Ovid’s girls who’d been raped and humiliated and turned into a bear, but then, as a grace, altered once more, now to a constellation. Helen has done something you can do these days: designated a star to be Jenny’s’ (275). Like a terrible, classical curse, however, the ‘metamorphic’ family pushed Alison, also, into dangerous patterns of behaviour that anaesthetized, for a while, her fear of slipping away from a stable identity, and her fear of making herself vulnerable by repeating the choices made by her parents. As her memoir moves through the adolescent years towards young adulthood, the references to classical myth crowd in more and more. The more she longs for a stable identity, the more she responded to the emotions and reactions depicted within classical myth—‘memory, pain and love’—that appeared to offer her a template of her own psychological state. ‘I suppose it’s the same, this yearning for love and home, for a place where we dwell at the center. Sometimes I think that memory, pain and love all arose from the same quiet pool in the body: longing’ (277). The image of the quiet pool recalls Narcissus’ lengthy gaze into the still waters that entranced him with his reflection and reminds us that it was the myth of Narcissus and Echo that was the place where Alison’s journey with Ovid began. She encountered Ovid

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just at the point where she was losing her heart to an emotionally abusive and distant young man, who was eating away at her thoughts and at her sense of self. ‘I made myth and literature serve,’ observes Alison. ‘Narcissus, frozen in his self. Echo, eaten up by need for a man who would give her nothing until she became a cave. The logic of classical myth and tragedy seemed algebraic: The marble boy who refuses to love will be shattered by ruinous love’ (203). Ovid’s myths of metamorphosis seemed not only to offer insight into her emotional turmoil, but also to reflect the bodily changes that affect adolescents and over which they have so little control. Alison vividly depicts the strangeness of puberty, and the ways in which corporeal metamorphoses exert an inexorable control over the impulse to perpetuate family histories. For her, Ovid’s Metamorphoses weave themselves around the confused emotions of adolescent girls, whose bodies are thickening and ripening, even as their mercurial desires are spinning out of control: At fourteen, fifteen, everything felt liminal: half girl and half woman, beginning to push out the windows and doors of the house. [ . . . ] The chest, once a boy’s smooth skin stretched over ribs, with two pale disks both sensitive and numb, now swells into a pair of warm, heavy live things filling your hands. Hair sprouts between your legs, a bottom pushes at your jeans, blood’s a surprise on the toilet paper; no wonder it’s mostly girls in Ovid who are transfigured, becoming laurel trees, drops of myrrh, bears. This must be when the shift begins, when yearning for those pantheonic fathers who had dwelled in the ribs turns instead to the men on the street, and when you might or might not become your mother. (151–2)

The passage begins with a glance at Alice in Wonderland, growing at such an alarming rate that she threatens the very structure of the house. It represents the moment of change, of transformation from sweet little girl into an adolescent, whose moods and self-destructive urges bode ill for the harmony of family life.¹⁵ Ovidian myth shimmers through the adolescent girl’s urge to find security and love in the men whom she dates. The adolescent girl, whose body turns from boyish slenderness to womanly curves, enacts the myth

¹⁵ Lavinia Greenlaw explores a comparable sense that childhood and adolescence had been Ovidian experiences for her, prompted in part by a recognition of her mortality, a sense of being on the wrong side of time. She also argues that the condition of being a child lends itself to being caught in a process of endless metamorphoses, through role playing which defies temporal constraints. See Greenlaw (2008), 20–1.

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of Tiresias,¹⁶ while Callisto, transformed into a bear, hovers around the evocation of sprouting hairs. Such physical changes, however, could only account for part of Alison’s turbulence as a teenager. Above all else her behaviour was governed by a longing to find a home, to find a stable self and a place where that identity would be accepted. She likens the futility of this quest to a Homeric nostos: ‘Making men your home. Such a faulty quest, a hopeless roundabout route. Like Odysseus and all his women in their seaside lairs, ten years wandering towards home’ (211). She describes walking the city streets and looking in at the lit windows of the houses and, in her imagination, stepping back in time to become a little girl who lived in that house.¹⁷ As she looked back to her past self, having received her training as a professional classicist, Alison was able to perceive the ways in which she herself had unwittingly played out the parts of certain of Ovid’s female victims in her quest for a grounded, secure identity: ‘When I was nineteen, twenty, I seemed to have an alternate self that lived away from my consciousness, wanting and doing things I couldn’t believe I’d do and refused to remember. Like an Ovidian figure of Hunger or Greed, climbing out night after night and leaving me wrecked’ (198). The subtext aching behind the lines of so much of the memoir is the ‘Change me’ that became the title of Alison’s anthology of Ovidian translations. Her memoir burns with the remembered urge simultaneously to be someone else, to be nobody at all, or, more searingly, to find a home in which she might simply be allowed to be. One of the metamorphoses of Ovid that we are witnessing is the way in which his words and his images are being re-voiced and adapted so that they are woven into this female-penned memoir of loss and fractured families. Alison, who has described herself as Echo to evoke the gaping chasm at the heart ¹⁶ Alison’s sensitivity to the myth of Tiresias prompted her to highlight the female perspective within it, by marking the change of gender within the narrative voice of the poem, a switch which very few other translators have made, as she points out. Such an observation points to quite how masked the female perspective has been to date in translations of Ovid. See Alison (2014), 134: ‘Ovid can avoid the problem in Latin: harder for us in English. Most translators retain the masculine pronoun even when Tiresias is a woman. I’ve chosen instead to refer to Tiresias during those seven years as a “she”, because germane to the story is Tiresias’ experience of a woman’s sensations recollected and expressed in words.’ ¹⁷ Alison (2009), 141.

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of her sense of herself, in fact plays the part of a much stronger Echo, an Echo who repeats Ovid’s words in order to probe the insights that they can shed upon the behaviour and experiences bequeathed to a small girl in the twentieth century by the loss of her father, house, and homeland. Ovid’s journey into this memoir has enabled him once more to cross genres—from the male authority, albeit parodied, of the epic Metamorphoses to the confessional autobiography of a female classicist and novelist of the twenty-first century. The preconditions for Alison’s intense identification with Ovid were established early on. She evokes the epiphany of realizing how dysfunctional her family arrangements were from the shocked reaction of a friend: I told Peggy the story in a closet, the story of my doubled family, which I’d never told before. It had never seemed anything to tell, just the air around me. There was silence. She looked at me in the dimness with eyes I’ve seen since, the troubled, defensive eyes of someone who does not recognize your language or species. I looked back at her in that closet, and suddenly felt I was looking out through the eyes of a hybrid, a griffin. (68)

The moment of metamorphosis occurred the minute Alison told her story, for it was in that moment that she experienced herself as a different being, as a kind of animal. And it is precisely this moment that confirms Alison as one of the ‘writing women and strange monsters’ who have reshaped Ovid in their articulation of the heartbreaks, politics, and perils of the contemporary world. Ovid offered her a map by which to navigate the mercurial emotions and corporeal changes of adolescence. Through an array of arresting, beautiful, and chilling images, to which she responds with such sensitivity in her translations, he taught her that desire can be accompanied by emotional and physical violence, that loveliness is dangerous, that feeling too much or choosing not to feel can engender terrible self-harm. He offered her a vade mecum to the human heart to carry with her on her quest to forge a self that could find a home.

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Conclusion We began this book by examining the phenomenon of equating ‘writing women’ with ‘strange monsters’. The writers in this volume are caught between the pull of longing for stability, acceptance, and a home¹ (which is why so many have responded with such urgency to the pain of exile expressed within the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto), and exhilaration at the possibilities of transformation and reinvention. We looked at Cixous’s appropriation of an Ovidian myth—the story of Medusa—and saw Medusa’s metamorphosis from hideous monster to a wonderfully creative, beautiful, laughing woman. This is what happens, Cixous’s message is, when women break from the carapaces forged for them by men’s words and speak for themselves. The writers in this volume have, however, gone further than this and have spoken on behalf of others also. The changes in which they are interested are not just modifications to the classical myths so that they reflect women’s lived experience, but are also the retelling of myths in order to comment upon and activate social and political change. Ovid’s journey in the hands of these writers has taken him from the streets of Hamburg to the shores of the Black Sea, from Australia to the banks of a river in Devon, from the United States to France. Perhaps more important than his geographical travelling is the range of subjects that he has been invoked to address: the threat of climate change and its attendant mutations (Shapcott); the experience of physical changes and mutations (Alison, Byatt, and Shapcott); ecological fragility (Oswald); the refugee crises of the contemporary world (Tawada, Stanescu, and Warner); the limitations of opportunity for the working classes (Darrieussecq and Smith); the inequities engendered by capitalism and morally bankrupt governments (Smith, Zimmerman, ¹ For a comparable phenomenon in the reception of Virgil by contemporary women writers, see Cox (2011).

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Stanescu, Shapcott); the legacy of the 2008 financial crash (Curdy, Shapcott, Smith); the viciousness of tabloid journalism (Pollard and Tawada); the marvels and dangers of the internet (Stanescu, Darrieussecq, Balmer, and Tawada); the horror of war and terrorism (Warner, Shapcott, Balmer, Curdy, Stanescu, and Zimmerman); and Ovid’s abiding ability to shape the ways in which women speak of desertion (Roberts, Pollard, Stanescu, and Alison). Women writers are able to both change the narratives bequeathed to them by this monument of the classical tradition and, at the same time, try to effect change within the world through their own Ovidian narratives. Only set Medusa free, and there is no limit to what can be achieved, as Rimell noted: Medusa makes the wildest illusions real, rock solid—she and her victims are no mere echoes or reflections. And if you don’t believe in her, look out: when you realize your mistake, she will have already captured a permanent snapshot of your awe. As aggressive as it is seductive, this monumental poetry never stops moving, reminding readers that the boundaries of creativity, as of empire, are all in the mind.²

The boundaries of Ovidian reception have been expanded by the women writers studied in this volume. So much is evident not just from the range of topics that Ovid addresses, but also from the frequency with which generic forms are extended and adapted so that they can accommodate new ideas and forms of expression. And of course, in the twenty-first century, Ovid’s reception is extended and enriched still further through his life online, which has been an abiding source of fascination for the writers studied. Stanescu’s poem is presented as a website; Tawada recontextualizes a Japanese pillow book within contemporary Germany; Balmer uses ‘transgressions’—both translation and original work—to express personal feelings within millennia-old poetry; Pollard inserts tabloid-style headlines into her translations of the Heroides. In the hands of Jane Alison Ovid is inextricably and intimately woven within her conflicting emotions wrought by her dysfunctional family background and so becomes part of her autobiography. Moreover, in all of the works that we have discussed, the writers delight in challenging temporal boundaries, by eliding or highlighting or expanding what Winterson calls the ‘gaps of time’. Warner’s assertion that Ovid

² Rimell (2006), 209.

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flourishes on boundaries, or within what she calls ‘cross-cultural zones’, has been confirmed again and again, but we can see that Ovid has flourished also at generic turning points, and has acquired new resonances within different forms of presentation, such as the computer screen. The works that we have examined have been produced predominantly at the turning point of the millennium and have been shaped by successive waves of feminism also, which has itself become informed by different values and a powerfully renewed sense of social responsibility. And yet there is never a sense of these writers responding to Ovid in a formulaic manner, or simply in order to peddle a new-fangled theory. These are writers whose beings have been shaped by books—small wonder, therefore, that so many of them look back to The Tempest, not just as Shakespeare’s most Ovidian play and an important vehicle for the transmission of Ovid, but also because it is a play that meditates upon the transformative power of books and the powerlessness of a self that has become separated from reading and writing. It is notable that it is the same part of The Tempest that has resurfaced again and again—the song ‘Full Fathom Five’ which promises, precisely, ‘Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.’ These reading women, these writing women, have responded to one of the founding fathers of the Western canon and have refashioned and transmuted his words into their meditations upon their own unease at feeling themselves to be monstrous, upon social inequity, upon the barbarism of war, upon illness, upon the fragile ecology of the earth. The figure of Echo has also played a dominant role in the works of these writers, but she is no longer a woman who can offer only the pale repetitions of words already written. Echo has, as Ali Smith asserts, learned to answer back, to re-contextualize a narrative and to fight on behalf of others. Paradoxically, by refusing to accept Ovid’s version as the final word, they have succoured his ghost so that he can continue to walk among us, as described by Virginia Woolf (whose works are also recurring intertexts): ‘For great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.’³ Such a phenomenon offers its own answer to the final word of the Metamorphoses—‘vivam’ (I shall live)—and soothes the rawness of

³ Woolf (1992), 148.

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Ovid’s fear of oblivion. In the Preface to Change Me Alison points out that the ‘carmen perpetuum’ that Ovid boasts of at the start of the Metamorphoses can be understood not just as ‘unending song’ but as ‘unending enchantment’. It is enchantment that has lit the imagination of these women writers, from the darkness of Narcissus gazing at pornography on a computer screen, to Byatt’s stone woman dancing liberated and free. It is enchantment that redeems these women writers from the monstrosity of the freakish, unloveable outsider to the wonder of the writer in thrall to creative possibility, and that reminds us that the Latin term ‘monstrum’ means not only ‘monster’, but also ‘a wondrous phenomenon’. Ovid walks among us, thanks in part to their work, and continues to reveal his timeless marvels, in dialogue with writings of the women he has helped to shape—the ‘strange monsters’ of the twentyfirst century.

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Bibliography Alfonso, Rita and Triglio, Jo (1997) ‘Surfing the Third Wave: A Dialogue between Two Feminists’, Hypatia 12/3, 7–16. Alison, Jane (2003 [2001]) The Love Artist. London: Allison and Busby. Alison, Jane (2009) The Sisters Antipodes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Alison, Jane (2013) Interview with Fiona Cox. Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception, http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/pvcrs/sites/www.open.ac.uk. arts.research.pvcrs/files/files/ecms/web-content/20133JaneAlison.pdf, accessed 5 Feb 2018. Alison, Jane (2014) Change Me. Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Axelrad, Catherine (2000) ‘Report on the Eradication and Resurgence of Metamorphic Illness in the West, 1880–1998’, in Philip Terry (ed.) Ovid Metamorphosed, 237–43. London: Chatto and Windus. Balmer, Josephine (2004) Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. Balmer, Josephine (2009a) The Word for Sorrow. Cambridge: Salt Publishers. Balmer, Josephine (2009b) ‘Jumping their Bones: Translating, Transgressing, and Creating’, in S. J. Harrison (ed.) Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English, 43–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Balmer, Josephine (2012) ‘Handbags and Gladrags: A Woman in Transgression, Reflecting’, in Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos (eds.) Contemporary Women Authors and Classical Reception [special issue], Classical Receptions Journal 4/2, 261–71. Balmer, Josephine (2013a) Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Balmer, Josephine (2013b) Interview with Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos. Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception, http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/ research/pvcrs/2013/balmer, accessed 9 Feb 2018. Balmer, Josephine (2013c) ‘Ovid’s Heroines by Clare Pollard’ [review]. The Times, 22 June, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ovids-heroines-by-clarepollard-s0nqskmrwcw, accessed 9 Feb 2018. Barthes, Roland (1977) Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil. Bate, Jonathan (1993) Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baudelaire, Charles (1972 [1861]) Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Gallimard. Boland, Eavan (2014) A Woman without a Country. Manchester: Carcanet.

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Zimmerman, Mary (2002) Metamorphoses: A Play. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ziogas, Ioannis (2011) ‘The Myth is Out There: Reality and Fiction at Tomis’, in Jennifer Ingleheart (ed.) Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid, 289–306. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ziolkowski, Theodore (2005) Ovid and the Moderns. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Ziolkowski, Theodore (2009) ‘Ovid in the Twentieth Century’, in Peter E. Knox (ed.) A Companion to Ovid, 455–68. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Index Alison, Jane 4, 13, 99, 160, 185, 219–33, 235, 236, 238 Alfonso, Rita 4 Apollinaire, Guillaume 166 Atwood, Margaret 25 Axelrad, Catherine 20 Balmer, Josephine 3, 4, 5, 14, 160, 175–93, 199, 202, 206, 236 Barthes, Roland 203 Bate, Jonathan 88, 91 Baudelaire, Charles 93, 165 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 146 Boland, Eavan 4, 11–14 Braidotti, Rosi 13, 14, 15, 73 Brantley, Ben 114 Brexit 2, 37, 38, 40 Brown, Sarah Annes 20, 91, 133, 206 Bryce, Lesley 30 Byatt, A.S. 16–24, 25, 29, 34, 35, 46, 235, 238 Campbell, Joseph 97 Camus, Albert 43 Carson, Anne 121, 193 Carter, Angela 117, 121 Catullus 176, 183 Celan, Paul 169 Chirico, Miriam 97, 103, 112, 113, 114 Cixous, Hélène 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 149, 177, 235 Clark, Alex 56, 61 Cochrane, Kira 144, 147 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 225 Cosnay, Marie 156 Cox, Fiona 3, 5, 12, 16, 66, 74, 82, 142, 153, 202, 224 Cruise, Tom 159 cummings, e.e. 117, 124 Curdy, Averill 4, 12, 14, 76, 193, 236 Dante 169 Darrieussecq, Marie 3, 4, 14, 68, 103–4, 105, 118, 122, 132, 144, 155–73, 206, 219, 220, 235

Davies, Caroline 16 Dellner, Jennifer J 12 Descartes, René 120 Dickinson, Emily 47 Drake, Jennifer 15 Duffy, Carol Ann 4, 26, 103, 125, 126, 141 Duffy, Jean 49 Dylan, Bob 1 Eliot, T.S. 5, 92, 96, 151, 184, 194, 217 Eluard, Paul 167 Fowler, Rowena 12, 146 Fränkel, Hermann 70 Freud, Sigmund 97, 98 Galchen, Rivka 64 Garwood, Deborah 97, 99, 110 Geoffrey of Monmouth 94 Greenlaw, Lavinia 231 Greer, Germaine 30 Hall, Edith 145, 155, 178 Hallett, Judith P. 228 Hamel, Kathleen 155, 170 Hamilton, Edith 100 Hardie, Philip 57, 70, 74, 85, 118, 119, 175, 201 Harding, Sandra 63 Harris, Alexandra 35 Harrison, Stephen 1 Haynes, Natalie 215 Heaney, Seamus 193 Heraclitus 28 Herrick, Robert 32, 33, 34 Heywood, Leslie 15 Higgins, Charlotte 1, 16 Hillman, James 97 Hofmann, Michael 1 Horace 33 Horia, Vintila 160 Hughes, Ted 1, 12, 87, 90, 134, 135, 136, 141, 205 Hugo, Victor 168 Hunter, Pat 33

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INDEX

Hurst, Isobel 12 Huxley, Aldous 40 Ingleheart, Jennifer 123 Innes, Mary 25, 41 Irigaray, Luce 177 James, Anna 30 Joyce, James 132 Julian of Norwich 61 Jung, Carl 87, 97 Kay, Jackie 30 Keats, John 54 Kennedy, Duncan 1, 175 Kipling, Rudyard 58 Kis, Danilo 169 Kline, A. S. 123 Kott, Jan 1 Kristeva, Julia 175 Lasdun, James 1 Lawson, Nigella 208 Lembke, Janet 224 Leonard, Miriam 5 Lévi–Strauss, Claude 160 Levine, Susanna Jill 177 Liveley, Genevieve 11, 100 Longley, Michael 193 Lovatt, Helen 175 Mahon, Derek 1 Malouf, David 160, 175 Mandelstam, Osip 169 Martindale, Charles 18, 30, 152 Martindale, Joanna 33 Matzner, Sebastian 175 Medcalf, Stephen 151 Meyers, William 113 Michalopoulos, Andreas 175 Michie, James 205 Milton, John 34, 85, 189 Nouryeh, Andrea 100, 101, 110 O’Gorman, Ellen 109 Oswald, Alice 4, 5, 14, 20, 83, 85–96, 138, 178, 235 Ovid passim Owen, Wilfred 178 Penny, Nicholas 142 Philippot, François 156

Plath, Sylvia 134, 135, 136, 138, 216, 217 Pollard, Clare 4, 202, 205–17, 236 Potter, Dennis 152 Proust, Marcel 80 Pushkin, Alexander 150 Racine, Jean 136 Ranger, Holly 117, 122, 123, 126, 133, 134, 160 Ransmayr, Christoph 160, 175 Rees–Jones, Deryn 90, 96 Richlin, Amy 63, 64 Rilke, Rainer Maria 97, 110 Rimell, Victoria 7, 70, 88, 131 Roberts, Michèle 4, 82, 201–5, 236 Rosetti, Christina 17 Roubaud, Jacques 167 Ruden, Sarah 113, 178 Rushdie, Salman 1, 175 Sandys, George 194, 196–9 Sappho 4, 176 Sarton, May 4, 5, 226 Schiach, Morag 11 Shakespeare 39, 58, 76, 85, 91, 127, 141, 237 The Tempest 20, 39, 40, 91, 127, 138, 237 King Lear 58 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 76 The Winter’s Tale 59 Macbeth 127 Shapcott, Jo 4, 14, 15, 18, 46, 55, 76, 141–53, 235, 236 Showerman, Grant 205 Simon, Sherry 219 Slavitt, David 97, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109 Smith, Ali 4, 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25–46, 69, 75, 77, 79, 92, 96, 138, 144, 235, 236, 237 Sontag, Susan 150 Stael, Mme de 4 Stanescu, Saviana 4, 5, 14, 20, 35, 69, 117–39, 235, 236 Swift, Katherine 87, 88 Tawada, Yoko 4, 5, 10, 18, 62, 63–83, 118, 120, 190, 235, 236 Taylor, Catherine 25 Terry, Philip 16, 50, 201, 204 Theodorakopoulos, Elena 3, 15, 153 Thomas, Dylan 96

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INDEX

Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 47 Titian 141 Tomlinson, Charles 87 Triglio, Jo 9 Valéry, Paul 165 van Nortwick, Thomas 228 Vaughan–Williams, Ralph 92 Veronese, Paolo 47 Virgil 12, 34, 55, 89, 113, 134, 178, 183, 184, 224 Warner, Marina 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 14, 46, 47–62, 64, 70, 79, 138, 144, 155, 159, 221, 235, 236

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Winterson, Jeanette 25, 59 Wittig, Monique 49, 50, 66, 204 Wood, Sarah 30 Woolf, Virginia 12, 14, 30, 96, 117, 121, 147, 206, 237 Wordsworth, Dorothy 4 Wyke, Maria 123 Zajko, Vanda 5, 109 Zimmerman, Mary 4, 6, 96, 97–115, 235, 236 Ziogas, Ioannis 175 Ziolkowski, Theodore 16, 71, 108, 114, 133, 151, 155, 175