Stephanie McCarter on Why Ovid is Still Relevant Today

 

 

Why should we continue to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses two thousand years after it was written? For some, the Metamorphoses should be read because of its immeasurable influence on literature and art. What would Shakespeare be, for instance, without the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet? What would European art be without this epic? No other work of literature, apart from the Bible, has so inspired visual artists. Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been hugely instrumental in the formulation of various later canons within the Western tradition. Yet many have rightly questioned whether this canonical status should justify Ovid’s continued centrality, arguing that the canon itself is a tool of maintaining unjust hierarchies.

For others, the Metamorphoses has been primarily a source of poetic pleasure, perhaps even an escape into the world of myth. But for many, reading Ovid’s stories of abuse can be anything but a delightful escape, and the presence of rape in the epic has made its continuing centrality in high school and college classrooms controversial. It was the Metamorphoses that gave rise to recent debates about “trigger warnings,” which arose in the aftermath of a 2015 op-ed penned by undergraduates at Columbia University. These students objected to the fact that the epic was being taught without acknowledgment of or prior warnings about its sexually violent content, a pedagogical decision that did not take into account the reality that students themselves might have been victims of such violence. These students were widely denigrated as “snowflakes” who could not handle the more disturbing aspects of “great literature,” yet it was precisely the more disturbing aspects of these texts the students were asking those teaching them to acknowledge and interrogate.

Like so many works left to us from Greco-Roman antiquity, the Metamorphoses is the product of a patriarchal culture whose sexual politics and depictions of violent rape frustrate the oft-repeated claim that ancient works offer us ennobling virtues to revere. It is hard to keep classical literature on a pedestal while acknowledging its complicity in the hierarchical abuse that continues to permeate our world, and this discomfort has led some to either avoid speaking directly to its violence or to dismiss it with a wave of the hand or with an uncritical objection to judging the past by the standards of the present.

Yet if we do not rethink these texts through the lens of the present, they will cease to have relevance for the present. The inclusion of so many stories of rape in the epic suggests, in fact, that Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation, just as he shines a light on the negative repercussions of masculine heroics or divine power precisely in order to question, not celebrate, them. In an epic that takes forced transformation of the body as a central theme, sexual violence cannot be ignored. Rape, like metamorphosis, dehumanizes and objectifies. To ignore the theme of sexual violence, or to quickly explain it away, is in many ways to miss the point. It is also to miss the opportunity to trace the legacies of such abusive power in our own world so as to better understand and combat them. To read Ovid with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality—allows us to scrutinize our own thorny relationship with the past and with the ambivalent inheritance we have received from it. To wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination. It is easier to talk about love than rape or to focus on ennobling values rather than try to grasp our own human failings. Yet it is precisely this hard work that Ovid invites us to do.

Perhaps the best reason to read Ovid is simply that he gives us stories through which we can better explore ourselves and our world, and he illuminates questions about power, sexuality, gender, race, and art that humans have been debating for millennia. Ovid still matters because he speaks to the questions that still matter to us. The rapes Ovid recounts are traumatic acts of “force” (vis—a legal term for rape), often perpetrated by gods, that leave their victims permanently transformed. Repeatedly, rape is designated a “crime” (crimen), one that those in power can usually (but not always) simply get away with. When Jupiter rapes Callisto, for instance, he grips her in his embrace, revealing himself to her nec sine crimine, “not without crime.” Arachne, who weaves a tapestry depicting the gods’ abusive rapes, is said to depict caelestia crimina, “heavenly crimes.” What may seem an oxymoronic juxtaposition is par for the course in Ovid’s world—power, especially divine power, often goes hand-in-hand with abuse. 

Ovid’s rapes are met not with resignation or acceptance but with horror by the characters within the epic. Such violence silences victims and leaves them wounded and transformed, both literally and figuratively. Callisto, in the wake of her assault by Jupiter, is no longer the same, nor can she tell her fellow nymphs what happened:

"It’s hard not to reveal a crime with one’s

 expression! She can barely lift her eyes

 up from the ground. She does not stand beside

 the goddess, as before, or lead the troop.

 Instead, she’s silent, and her blush provides

 proof for her wounded chastity."

 

Callisto’s psychological wound becomes a physical one in Philomela, whose rapist Tereus cuts out her tongue when she threatens to disclose his crime. The silencing of Callisto and Philomela mirrors the silencing that many rape victims continue to experience. Learning to spot patterns of rape in Ovid can in fact help us see how these patterns repeat in our own world. Just last year, a group of students in India published an article that describes their experience of reading Ovid as empowering. “We have learned to critique rape narratives in literary texts,” they write, demonstrating how this in turn has helped them interrogate systems of sexual power within their own social context.

Despite the horror and trauma the characters themselves experience, it is not always entirely clear where the narrator’s own sympathies lie. At one moment, he treats victims’ trauma with immense sympathy, while at another he compels us to view the abused through a rapist’s violent gaze. Ovid builds such ambivalence into the epic as a whole. In the tale of Arachne and Minerva, for instance, he describes two textiles, one that celebrates power and one that defies it. Both reflect aspects of Ovid’s own text. Even the genre of the Metamorphoses is contradictory—though formally an epic, it displays numerous features of elegy, tragedy, and even philosophy while flaunting or parodying many epic conventions. It is this ambivalence that invites readers in, opening the text to a myriad of perspectives and readings.

Because Ovid constantly positions himself both inside and outside of established literary and social hierarchies, many contemporary thinkers, writers, and artists continue to find the Metamorphoses to be fruitful soil for exploring their own work and identities. Elizabeth Colomba adopts Ovid’s ancient subject matter to highlight the absence of Black women like herself from the European artistic canon, even as she claims a position for herself within it. Writers such as Rita Dove, Paisley Rekdal, and Nina MacLaughlin explore contemporary women’s struggles by rewriting and reimagining Ovidian myth, adopting Ovid’s own focus on psychological trauma and powerlessness. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown uses the Ovidian figure of Ganymede as a way of exploring enslavement and its legacy in the American South, stripping away the comforting narratives in which many take refuge. Such contemporary artists speak to Ovid’s continuing relevance for new generations, and they do so by homing in on the text’s most brutal stories.

Such adaptation of the Metamorphoses shows no signs of abating. Other recent literary retellings of Ovidian myth include Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Mark Prins’ The Latinist, and Charlotte Higgins’ Greek Myths. In film, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers a queer retelling of the Orpheus myth, while stage productions include established favorites like Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses and more recent offerings like the one-person play A Poem and a Mistake by Cheri Magid and Sarah Baskin. It feels like Ovid is everywhere. And as he is transformed for new times and places, his text resonates with new meanings that bring the present into conversation with the past.

The Metamorphoses holds up a kaleidoscopic lens to the modern world, one that helps us reflect upon our own (in)humanity, our vulnerability, and our capacity for change. Ovid poignantly explores the innate fragility of the human body, how subject it is to forces beyond our control, and he recognizes how traumatic such lack of agency can be. Humans in Ovid’s world are something of a contradiction, sculpted with divine intelligence imbued into mortal clay. Ours is an endless struggle to surpass our bodies’ limitations, and, like Icarus or Phaethon, we risk constant failure and death. Human grief, especially that of women, is a recurrent Ovidian theme. Grief transforms us, as it does Clymene or Niobe or Hecuba. There is indeed no greater emblem of human powerlessness than the grieving parent, and Ovid’s accounts of such grief resonate across time. It is hard, for instance, not to read Phillis Wheatley’s translation of Ovid’s Niobe episode as a poignant reframing of her own family’s experience of such powerlessness when she was kidnapped and enslaved as a child.

Ovid illuminates the human obsession with power and how it can transform both its wielder and its victim. The desire for power can turn even the most sympathetic figures into monsters. One of Ovid’s most perennially popular characters is the grieving father Daedalus, who loses his son Icarus as they fly across the sea. But few people remember Ovid’s other story about Daedalus, how he murders his own nephew by throwing him from a high place, the Acropolis—the motive: he was jealous of the boy’s artistic prowess and did not want to be outdone. Nobody is immune from power’s lure. One of the most dangerous things we can do, then as now, is inadvertently catch the notice of those in power. Before Jupiter rapes Callisto, he first sees her. Before Juno, in turn, transforms her, she first directs her gaze her way. On the other hand, the gaze that is not backed up by power can enervate and transform its wielder, like Clytie gazing upon the sun. Ovid’s stories help us explore the tangled power dynamics of the gaze in our own culture as well.

Ovid treats the connections between desire, gender, and the body in surprisingly relevant ways, showing that what we think of as modern concepts such as gender fluidity or asexuality are hardly new concepts at all. Time and again we meet characters who defy heteronormative expectations of gender and sexuality. Daphne, like many other nymphs in the epic, has no interest in marriage or sex, preferring to stay perpetually a virgin and to devote herself to the asexual goddess Diana. A transgender character such as Caeneus is at home in his new male form immediately, while transformed characters such as Io and Callisto experience the painful dysmorphia that can ensue when living in an exterior form that is misaligned with one’s interior being.

When I turn to Ovid, I do so to find hope or perspective in moments of crisis and despair.  Ovid continually reminds his readers that, no matter how voiceless they feel, humans will always strive toward expression and agency. Tereus can render Philomela voiceless, but he does not silence her. Apollo may torture the satyr Marsyas for his artistic defiance, but he cannot stop the nymphs and woodland gods from weeping for him. Power can only extend so far. As Ovid tells us in the epic’s closing lines, not even Jupiter himself could destroy Ovid’s poetic achievement. Vivam, “I will live,” is the last, defiant word of this epic song.

The last few years have brought intense, swift change to the world, ushering in a time of disease and fire and flood and war. Ovid never lets us forget that such chaos can be unleashed into our world at any moment, with staggering human costs. In his epic, floods wipe out entire populations, fires incinerate mountains, and plague taints the very air people breathe. Crisis is unavoidable, but the world is equally resilient, and change inevitable. What resonates with me the most when I read the Metamorphoses is this promise of endless metamorphosis. I do not yet know what the future holds, but I do know, if I am to believe Ovid, that it will leave the world transformed.

 

Excerpted and adapted from the introduction of Ovid‘s Metamorphoses by Stephanie McCarter, published by Penguin Classics, 2022

Does Ovid Still Matter Today? By Stephanie McCarter. Electric Literature, November 8, 2022.

“In all creation there is nothing constant,” says Pythagoras in the final book of the Metamorphoses. All things are subject to the power of change: bodies, landscapes, cities, nations—even the cosmos. Ovid announces his epic’s main theme as metamorphosis in its first two lines: “My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed / into new bodies.” We might instead expect “bodies transformed into new shapes” since generally it is the body that is reshaped. This is how several translators render this line: “bodies changed to other forms” (A. D. Melville) and “stories of bodies changed / into new forms” (Stanley Lombardo).

But by undermining our expectations, Ovid places special emphasis on the body and invites us to consider carefully the relationship between the body, its shape, and the identity it contains. For Ovid, what constitutes a body can be variously defined, and one kind of body can be reshaped into another. Yet there is almost always something left of the original form. This can be something superficial, such as Daphne’s beauty that gleams within the laurel tree she becomes.

More often than not, however, something sentient remains: Callisto and Actaeon, for instance, are fully conscious inside their animal forms, their essential identity unchanged. Grief, love, and loss can echo through the ages, crystallized by metamorphosis into creatures and objects still known to us today. Metamorphosis, though synonymous with change and flux, is likewise the process through which the familiar world is established.

The Metamorphoses begins at the very beginning of this world, before grief or love or loss—or even time. The first word after the proem is simply “before,” a word that at once unleashes time into the cosmos. Time becomes the irresistible force propelling the narrative forward, bringing constant change in its wake. Time might be read as teleological; that is, moving toward some overarching cosmic goal within an increasingly stable universe.

In the epic’s first transformation, chaos becomes ordered as the cosmic realms of heaven, air, earth, and sea are established. This also enacts a hierarchy, with heaven ascending over all other realms, just as the gods rule over humans, animals, and objects. In this view, the Rome of Ovid’s own day is the ultimate goal of time’s movement, with Augustus at its helm, destined himself to ascend to heaven. But in this epic, more than one reading is always possible, and disorder is always working to rear its head.

In Book 1, for instance, no sooner is the universe structured than the flood is unleashed to throw it into disarray. Time can therefore also be read as a force for chaos, as Pythagoras’ speech in Book 15 suggests: far from being permanent, Roman power, like that of Sparta or Athens or Mycenae before it, will necessarily be temporary and subject to transformation.

Humanity itself nicely encapsulates the ambivalence that sits at the heart of this epic. When humans are created at 1.76–90, Ovid gives two possibilities. They are, in one view, the final artistic achievement of the Demiurge, neatly positioned in the cosmic hierarchy between gods and animals, subject to the former but ruling over the latter. Or, in the alternative version, we are the most pervasive threat to this hierarchy, prone by our very nature to defiance. Here it is instead Prometheus who creates humankind by blending together the various elements, thus recombining what the Demiurge has just separated.

 

Unlike other animals, we look defiantly at the heavens. Time and again, the gods punish such defiance by demoting us farther down the hierarchy, from human to animal, or from human to object. Human defiance is similarly double-edged. It might be regarded as impiety and thus deserving of punishment. Or, we might read human defiance as righteous indignation against gods concerned not with order and justice but cruelly protective of their own often abusive power.

Indeed, if there is a sustained thread, apart from transformation, it is power. Ovid is keenly interested in the way power transforms us, both those of us who have it and those of us who do not. Again and again it is raw power that motivates both gods and mortals: Venus wants to expand her empire into the Underworld, which leads to the rape of Proserpina; Minerva sets out to punish Arachne as a message to anyone who would defy her power; Minos is motivated by imperial ambitions.

Ovid is interested not only in the workings of power, but also—and perhaps especially—in the psychology of being disempowered. The epic gives us tale after tale of people brutalized and traumatized, and transformation is often the outward manifestation of their inner emotions. There is perhaps no more salient a figure of disempowerment than the grieving parent, and bereft mothers in particular show up repeatedly: Clymene, Niobe, Hecuba, and more. It is not only parents who grieve but also lovers, friends, and siblings.

Sometimes grief leads characters to continue the cycle of violence that victimized them, as in the tales of Procne or Hecuba. Powerless to undo trauma, these characters metamorphose first into a potent brew of wrath, grief, and vengeance before losing their humanity, and form, altogether. Ovid is also keenly aware of the gendered dynamics of power—being a woman in this cosmos often means existing on the brink of disempowerment.

Ovid in fact continually explores women’s points of view and lets them be moral agents every bit as complex as epic’s traditional men. Heroes such as Perseus and Achilles, in contrast, become rather onesided representatives of a macho masculinity reduced to its most basic drive, that of penetration, whether in fighting or in sex. It is instead the women who pulse with emotional depth as Ovid considers how virtues usually gendered masculine are transformed when they are applied to women.

Rather than tell us at length about Hercules’ famous labors, for instance, Ovid lets his mother, Hecuba, tell us about her own famous labor, that of giving birth to the hero. Whereas Vergil had crafted his Aeneas as a man of pietas, Ovid asks instead what such “duty” or “loyalty” means for women, torn as they often are between natal and marriage families that might have opposing interests. For women, loyalty to one’s beloved might necessitate murderous disloyalty to one’s father or state, as in the tale of Scylla, daughter of Nisus; or one’s marital and filial loyalty might incestuously converge on the same person, such as in the tale of Myrrha.

The psychology of women in love is especially intriguing to Ovid, who, like many Greco-Roman writers before him, presents women’s libidos as destructive. Medea, for instance, describes erotic love as a vis, a “violent force” that she cannot resist. Women such as Byblis and Myrrha lose their humanity as love makes them powerless to resist incestuous desire. Again, two readings are possible: Ovid’s interest in women might be sympathetic, or it might confirm long-standing misogynistic attitudes about women’s lack of control.

 

Women much more often, however, suffer violent force at the hands of men in love, specifically the force of rape. Around fifty of the epic’s tales involve rape or attempted rape. As Sharon James has recently written, “If it is not a truth universally acknowledged that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is much occupied with rape, it should be.” Yet it has only been in the last few decades that scholars have started really to reckon with the sexual politics of the text.

In a landmark 1978 article, Leo Curran could still say that “rape is the dirty little secret of Ovidian scholarship.” Curran blamed a contemporary culture of reticence around rape, which he argued had led to the use of euphemism by scholars to describe the epic’s sexual dynamics. The tide has now largely turned, and recent scholarly work on gender and sexual violence in Ovid has improved our understanding of the poem enormously.

Rape fits well into Ovid’s overall focus on power, victimization, and trauma. The specific language that Ovid employs to designate rape is consistent with Roman legal terms denoting forced sexual penetration. The key word is again vis, “violent force,” which is perhaps the closest Latin can come to a one-word correspondence to the English “rape,” though the meanings do not overlap entirely—vis could cover various acts of public and private violence, such as armed assault or rebellion.

Sexual vis was most definitely a crime, and the rapes the epic presents would certainly not have been considered normal or acceptable acts—they would have been as horrific to the Roman mind as they are to ours, especially since they are regularly perpetrated against young virgins who would otherwise have been able to marry and bear legitimate children. Ovid’s language of “force” nicely illustrates how rape is fundamentally an abuse of power, a connection he is at pains to make clear.

The Thracian king Tereus’ rape and mutilation of his own sister-in-law, Philomela, for instance, goes hand in hand with his abusive tyrannical sway. Rape is by no means a theme incidental to Ovid’s larger epic project. Rather, it sits right at the heart of what it means to lose one’s bodily autonomy to forces beyond one’s control. It is itself a kind of metamorphosis perpetrated by those in power that forever changes its victims.

Bound to the power dynamics of sexual violence are those of the gaze, itself a tool of masculine violence. Rape is one link in a chain of events that the epic repeats in numerous variations: A beautiful virgin (usually a girl but sometimes a boy) is caught in the gaze of someone more powerful, who rapes or tries to rape them, and they ultimately are turned into a tree or a lake or a stone or a bird, and so on. The victim’s objectification is clear: They are first a visual object, then a sexual object, and finally simply an object.

The initial gaze anticipates the sexual violence to come, as when Tereus at 6.504–505 “looks at [Philomela] and through his gaze / rehearses his assault.” Both the gaze and the subsequent transformation frequently break the body down into an assemblage of dehumanized parts. In the Apollo and Daphne episode, for instance, Ovid mentions Daphne’s body parts more than twenty times, first as Apollo’s eyes linger over her, and then as she becomes a laurel tree. Women too can wield a dangerous, objectifying, masculine gaze in this epic as they encounter beautiful (and often feminized) male bodies. The gaze of Salmacis or Medea, for instance, foreshadows their looming violence, though other women, such as Echo, lack the physical strength to overpower the beautiful young men they see and desire.

Gender is one of the many human characteristics subject to constant vacillation in the epic, and Ovid is interested in exploring the relationship between gender and the body as well as that between gender and the mind. Does, for instance, the gender of Tiresias or Caenis/Caeneus change when their body does, or does gender instead reside in nonphysical mental and emotional realms?

Gender is often tethered to other social constructions, such as sexuality, power, and beauty. Visual beauty is indeed a constant source of danger for those who possess it, whether male or female, and often prefigures transformation. The word Ovid most consistently uses to designate “beauty” is forma, the same word he uses in the epic’s opening lines to state his theme: “shapes (formae) transformed / into new bodies.” What makes a man lovely in the epic is precisely what makes a woman so: softness, smoothness, youth, a pale but also rosy complexion—and virginity. Indeed, the victims of rape are often androgynous or gender fluid and eschew “normative” sexuality.

They frequently have no desire to court the eyes of others and are instead figures of defiance who spend their time hunting in pastoral landscapes that quickly take on dangerous and sinister associations. And like other figures of defiance, they pay through the loss of their bodily autonomy. The new bodies that the beautiful acquire are no longer subject to violent sexual penetration, yet they often retain their original beauty, now totally subject to another’s visual control.

Yet not all of the epic’s tales of erotic desire or gender nonconformity are tales of rape. The story of Iphis and Ianthe is perhaps Ovid’s most triumphant love story, and in it Ovid shows enormous sympathy for Iphis, born a female but raised as a boy. The love between Iphis and Ianthe has one of the few happy endings in the epic. Ovid, in fact, includes several stories that feature mutual love, such as those of Cephalus and Procris, Baucis and Philemon, and Pyramus and Thisbe, reminding us that love itself has two sides.

The most moving gaze of the epic is probably that of Alcyone, who watches her husband, Ceÿx, watch her as he sails away to his doom, then gazes at him again as his corpse washes ashore. One story that is simultaneously a tale of mutual desire and rape is that of Pomona and Vertumnus. This tale largely conforms to the established pattern of sexual violence, and Vertumnus is even preparing to use vis against Pomona, until she gazes at his beauty and feels mutual passion. This is the epic’s final erotic tale, and it can be read simultaneously as a rejection of rape and as a demonstration of its lingering threat.

One frequent consequence of rape, disempowerment, and/or transformation is the loss of the voice—and the agency that the voice grants us. Io, for instance, is as distraught by the loss of her voice as she is the loss of her body when she is changed into a cow. No doubt the most disturbing instance of voicelessness in the wake of violence is Philomela. After Tereus rapes her, she threatens to make his crime known to anyone or anything that will listen. Fired with fear and anger, Tereus puts her tongue in pincers and cuts it out.

Yet both Io and Philomela craft ways to reclaim their voices. Io uses her hoof to draw her name in the sand, so that her father will know what has become of her, while Philomela weaves a tapestry that reveals her rape, then instructs a slave woman to take it to her sister. In both instances, it is creative expression, either through writing or through weaving, that allows these victims to recover their lost voice in defiance of those who have harmed them.

Art indeed becomes the most significant means whereby individuals can assert agency. Perhaps the most transcendent artist in the epic is Daedalus, whose art seems capable of defying the natural limitations imposed on humanity as he takes to the air like a bird. But the loss of his son Icarus shows how each attempt to transcend nature or defy power through art brings danger.

This is the lesson learned by the many disempowered artists in the epic, most of whom suffer enormously as their art ultimately fails to bring them triumph: the Pierides, Arachne, Marsyas, Orpheus, Byblis. And for almost every artist who defies power, there is another in power who uses art to shore up the established hierarchy—for each Arachne, there is a Minerva. Already in the epic’s opening cosmogony, as we have seen, there are two competing artists at work: Prometheus, who defiantly “sculpts” his human from clay, and the Demiurge, whose process of separation and ordering is also a type of sculpture.

Whether we see Ovid’s own poem as art that challenges power or reasserts it depends, in many ways, on how we ourselves feel about power and art and how we choose to read his tales. It is not always clear whose side Ovid himself is on—that of the abusers or that of the abused. At times, he seems sympathetic to those who are transformed; at times, he seems positively gleeful to describe their victimization in excruciating detail.

At one moment, he seems deferential to power; at another, deeply irreverent. The textiles of Minerva and Arachne illustrate well the two-sided slipperiness of Ovid’s own text. Minerva’s tapestry gives us a narrative about those in power rightly punishing the impious, while Arachne’s offers us a defiant catalogue of divine abuse in what Jia Tolentino has called an example of #MeToo journalism. Both tapestries nicely reflect Ovid’s prismatic narrative, depending on how we ourselves hold it to the light.

Excerpted from Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Stephanie McCarter and published by Penguin Classics.

Reading the Power Dynamics of Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Stephanie McCarter on Finding New Meaning in a Classic. By Stephanie McCarter. LitHub, November 8, 2022

Stories of rape are uncomfortably prominent in the literary canon, and no canonical work includes more such tales than Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Apollo, pierced by Cupid’s arrow, pursues the nymph Daphne, who becomes a tree to escape him. Jupiter, king of the gods, violently assaults Io, whom he then turns into a cow. The nymph Callisto endures sexual violence at the hands of Jupiter, then physical violence at the hands of Juno, his queen, who turns her into a bear. Nearly 50 acts of rape or attempted rape appear in the epic, and many of these in turn have inspired significant works of art and literature, such as Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne,” Titian’s “The Rape of Europa” and Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”

 Familiar as they often are, these stories present a challenge to translators: How should one render in English acts that are often grotesquely violent in Ovid’s original Latin? For decades, many have simply sidestepped the issue, obscuring violations with romantic euphemisms or even suggesting, through subtle turns of phrase, that the women in Ovid’s tales consented to assault. As a classicist, one of my principal goals as I set out to prepare my own new translation of Ovid’s epic poem was the clear and accurate rendering of these scenes of rape. It was, I thought, critical to treat sexual violence in the “Metamorphoses” as frankly as Ovid himself does.

These issues were central for me in part because I regularly teach the “Metamorphoses,” and the presence of sexual violence in it has made its place in classrooms fraught. In 2015, an op-ed penned by undergraduates at Columbia University went viral for its criticism of a professor who focused on “the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery” in the epic without adequately addressing the presence of rape. The piece launched a sprawling debate about “trigger warnings” that led to a string of think-pieces, some of which were sympathetic to the students’ concerns and some of which denigrated the undergrads as “snowflakes” who could not handle the difficult aspects of great literature.

It seemed to me that there was a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of this debate. The Columbia students were not trying to censor material involving rape — they were simply asking that such violence be framed and scrutinized as violence. It was the unconsidered aestheticization that troubled them — the implicit premise that this was an unimpeachable work of beauty that could only elevate without ever doing harm. And this is true beyond Columbia. The idea that overly sensitive students are seeking en masse to censor such material runs counter to my two decades teaching in college classrooms. I have never had a student object to the frank discussion of rape in the text. If anything, contemporary students are much more prepared to discuss this difficult aspect of literature than many from my own generation. What they are not prepared to do is accept it uncritically.

Readers need editions of the epic that will facilitate such analysis. Notably, the translator’s role in communicating rape went unexamined in the larger trigger-warning debate that followed the Columbia op-ed, despite the fact that most of those who read Ovid’s text do so in translation. It was David Raeburn’s early-21st-century English, not Ovid’s Latin, that the Columbia students were reading. Translations that euphemize rape risk giving readers the impression that Ovid was unambiguously flippant about sexual violence when in fact he underscores the psychological and physical trauma it produces.

In the case of Apollo and Daphne, one of the tales cited by the Columbia students, Raeburn adds details that are simply not present in Ovid’s Latin and that amplify the power of the male gaze. When Apollo runs his eyes over Daphne’s body, for instance, Ovid tells us simply that he looks at her “lips” and “fingers” and “arms,” yet Raeburn goes further. In his rendering, Daphne’s lips are “teasingly tempting,” her fingers “delicate” and her arms “shapely.” When the hard bark runs up Daphne’s soft torso, “mollia praecordia,” Raeburn has it surround her “soft white bosom.” The accumulation of these alterations distorts Ovid’s presentation of Daphne’s body, drawing readers into the role of voyeur and making it seem like the narrator revels in her objectification in ways the Latin does not justify. In Raeburn, it is as if her body simply invites Apollo’s assault.

 In translating Ovid’s scenes of rape, I took care to use English words that reflect his own language of violence, which ties rape to the epic’s larger theme of abusive power. The most common Latin word Ovid uses for rape is “vis,” or “force.” This was indeed a legal term for rape in Rome, although it was also applied to other violent acts, such as armed insurrection or wielding weapons within the city’s bounds — acts that undermined the Roman citizen’s expectation of safety and bodily autonomy. The punishments for rape by “vis” ranged from personal retaliation to loss of citizenship and even death. If we judge the epic’s rapes by the standards of the Romans, they are appalling crimes.

When “vis” appears in the epic, whether in the context of rape or not, I consistently use the word “force” to enable readers to connect various types of violence. Ovid frequently pairs the word “vis” with the word “pati,” “to suffer,” which can denote being the penetrated partner in a sexual act. The phrase “vim pati” (“to suffer force”) becomes in Ovid an almost technical term for rape, as in Apollo’s rape of Dryope, which I translate, with Ovid’s own directness, as she “had suffered / a forceful rape.” In Ovid, a perpetrator may also “exert force” against another, as when he uses the phrase “vim tulit” to describe the river god Cephisus’s rape of Liriope or when Leucothoe accuses the sun god of raping her. Although translators do occasionally use the word “rape,” they are highly inconsistent, more often watering down Ovid’s language of force, with “vis” becoming “ardent wooing” or “advances” or simply disappearing altogether. In Stanley Lombardo (2010), for instance, Dryope “lost her virginity” to Apollo. In Allen Mandelbaum (1993), Cephisus “had his way” with Liriope. And in Horace Gregory (1958), Leucothoe says the sun god “dazzled” her.

Sometimes it’s necessary to deviate slightly from strict fidelity to Ovid’s exact verbiage to capture what the poet’s words would have meant to his original audience. Ovid’s other main Latin term for denoting sexual violence is “rapio,” from which the English “rape” is derived. Although the primary meaning of “rapio” is “snatch” or “steal,” Ovid uses it repeatedly in tales of sexual assault. The girl Mestra, for instance, identifies the god Neptune as her rapist by saying that he possesses the “raptae praemia virginitatis” — “the prize of her stolen virginity.” In such passages, I simply use the word “rape.” In my translation, Mestra says, “You who raped me — stole my prized virginity.” The most accurate translation is not always the most literal.

Jupiter’s rape of Io similarly calls for accuracy over literalness. Ovid here uses just two words to narrate the rape: “rapuit pudorem,” literally “he stole her chastity,” which I translate as he “raped her, chaste no more.” Translating this phrase too literally into English blunts its violence, making it sound old-fashioned or euphemistic when Ovid’s language is neither. Procne later uses a similar phrase when she threatens to castrate Tereus, her sister’s rapist, by slicing off the organ that “stole” her sister’s “chastity.” The violence of such theft is matched by the violence of her threat.

Translators have, of course, found ways to obscure and dilute such language. In Charles Martin’s 2004 translation, for instance, Jupiter simply “dishonored” Io, an act that leaves the specific crime unclear. Going beyond euphemism, Gregory rewrites the scene as consensual in his translation. Rather than “steal Io’s chastity,” his Jupiter “overcame her scruples,” a phrase suggesting seduction rather than rape. In his 1986 version, A.D. Melville uses the euphemizing “ravish,” a word that translators repeatedly employ in Ovid’s rape scenes. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, this is now an archaic term for rape that more commonly implies “ecstatic delight” or “sensuous pleasure.” It appears frequently in the titles of romance novels.

Even the most horrific stories of “vis” have been euphemized in translation. In one especially brutal episode, both Apollo and Mercury rape a 14-year-old girl named Chione. Mercury makes her fall asleep with his wand, then rapes her. In my translation: “Unconscious from its mighty touch, she suffers / the god’s forced rape.” Other translators obscure the rape or give Chione agency she lacks. In Mandelbaum’s version, she “submits / in deep sleep, to his godly violence.” It is unclear how Chione can “submit” to violence in her sleep. Rolfe Humphries’s 1955 translation reframes Mercury’s “vis” as “power”: “Under his touch she lay, and felt his power.” The girl here seems awed into submission rather than bent to Mercury’s will by force.

If we want readers to consider the brutality present in great literature, we must give them the tools to do so. And with a writer like Ovid, a well-translated text is the first of those tools. Ovid is arguably the canonical poet of sexual violence, and as such he offers a rich space for considering how we think, speak and write about such trauma. We need to use and normalize the words “rape” and “force.” When translators refuse to back down from such language, they can treat sexual violence as violence, allowing readers to speak its name, scrutinize it, ponder how it works and recognize how it continues to transform too many of us.

Stephanie McCarter is a classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. Her new translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is now available.

 

Classical poetry is full of sexual violence. We shouldn’t hide that. By Stephanie McCarter. The Washington Post, November 8 , 2022

One day in the thirteenth century, James I of Aragon, not only a great conqueror but a king famous for his powers of memory, made a revealing slip. Having convened an assembly of lords and clerics, he tried to think of an appropriately authoritative quote with which to begin his address. What happened next is recorded in his “Book of Deeds,” the autobiographical chronicle that he later dictated to his scribes:

“And we ordered the bishops and the nobles to our Court and we had them assembled in the church of the Preachers. . . . We got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam quaerere parta tueri.”

“It takes no less talent to keep what you’ve got than to acquire it”: for a crusading medieval monarch, what more convenient justification for territorial consolidation could there be than “Sacred Scripture”?

The problem is that that line of Latin doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. It comes, rather, from a notoriously risqué book of poems, published during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, whose narrator doles out advice on how to seduce women—preferably married ones. (The first part is about where to find them; the second, about how to get them into bed; the third—the part that James quoted—about how to hold on to them.) The Spanish king was hardly alone in conflating this poet with a Higher Authority. The eleventh-century theologian and philosopher Abelard once cautioned against excessive harshness in monastic rule by observing that “we always chafe at restrictions and want what is forbidden”—sensible enough advice, except that the sentence in question was actually meant as a warning to married men that keeping too close an eye on their wives would only make them more eager to stray.

That these lines of Roman erotic verse had become indistinguishable from Scripture by the Middle Ages isn’t really all that surprising. More than those of any other poet of ancient Rome, the works of Publius Ovidius Naso—we know him as Ovid—have insinuated themselves into the mind of Europe, influencing its literature, art, and music. Already during his lifetime, dance versions of his work were being staged, and the adaptations and borrowings have continued to the present day. Julie Taymor’s notorious Broadway flop, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” was an awkward riff on Ovid’s tale of Arachne, the artistically talented young woman who foolishly challenged the goddess Minerva to a weaving contest and, as punishment, was turned into a spider. The poet Jericho Brown opens his 2019 collection, “The Tradition,” with a poem called “Ganymede,” in which Jove’s abduction of the beautiful Trojan prince becomes a metaphor for the agonized dynamics of American slavery.

 If the stories of Arachne and Ganymede are familiar to the casual reader, it’s because of Ovid’s greatest work, the Metamorphoses, an epic poem of fifteen books. These contain nearly two hundred and fifty mythic tales of corporeal transformation, many of which have become the canonical versions of those stories. The nymph Daphne, desperately fleeing the god Apollo, calls on her river-god father for help and is turned into a laurel tree; the lovelorn artist Pygmalion’s ivory statue becomes a flesh-and-blood woman, Galatea; the nymph Echo, pining for the self-absorbed Narcissus, fades away until all that remains of her is her voice. The poet’s acute insights into human psychology have given these tales a parable-like power—narcissism, anyone?—while the tortured physicality at the heart of his narratives has made them irresistible to artists across the centuries. “Leda and the Swan” alone has tempted everyone from Leonardo to Cézanne to Cy Twombly.

The art, like the poem itself, is not without controversy. Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne,” a technically superb rendering of an ugly act, has raised troubling questions about the aestheticization of violence which increasingly haunt the reception of Ovid’s epic. In 2015, a group of Columbia University students demanded that trigger warnings be attached to passages from the Metamorphoses—long a required text—that depict rape. In so doing, they themselves triggered a national debate about “snowflake” students and the place of “great books” in the curriculum.

But, then, Ovid was controversial from the start. Immensely successful during his lifetime, he nonetheless drew jabs from contemporary literati who found his verbal polish and glittering wit a cover for a lack of substance—a criticism that persisted well into the twentieth century. Ironically, the most famous controversy about the poet is historical rather than literary: at the height of his fame and prestige, he was suddenly exiled by Augustus to a backwater where he spent the rest of his life. The precise nature of his offense is still the subject of debate.

These controversies are now squarely addressed in a brisk new translation of the Metamorphoses from Penguin Classics, by Stephanie McCarter, a scholar of classical languages at the University of the South. McCarter confronts the tricky issues associated with both the poet and his epic not only in her forthright introduction but in the translation itself, where, like an art restorer removing decades of browned varnish from an Old Master, she strips away a number of inaccuracies and embellishments that have accreted in translations over the decades and centuries, obscuring the sense of certain passages, particularly those portraying women and sexual violence. The addition of McCarter’s revisionist translation to an already crowded field—half a dozen into English alone since the nineteen-eighties—reminds us that Ovid and the issues that preoccupied him have never been far from the center of our culture.

The youngest, by nearly a generation, of the three greatest poets of Rome’s “golden” literary age, Ovid was the only one who grew up under the Empire. Both Virgil and Horace were already adults by the time the Roman Republic finally disintegrated, in the forties B.C.E., during a bloody civil war; Ovid, the second son of a wealthy landowner in Sulmo, about a hundred miles east of Rome, was born in March, 43 B.C.E., almost exactly a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar set in motion the war’s final chapters. The collapse of the old order paved the way for the ascendancy of Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son, Octavian, who in 27 B.C.E., having defeated Antony and Cleopatra, his last remaining rivals for power, assumed the name Augustus and established the Empire.

 

Like many intelligent Romans exhausted by years of civil war, Virgil and Horace could be grateful for the political and economic stability brought about by Augustus’ iron grip on the state, while discreetly looking away when it came to his sometimes draconian tactics for reinforcing solid old Roman virtues. (He passed laws encouraging fertility and imposing heavy financial penalties on adulterers.) But to the next generation, especially well-off youngsters like Ovid who, in an earlier era, might have happily pursued meaningful careers in politics, the autocrat’s attempts to legislate private morality no doubt seemed as risible as George H. W. Bush’s “family values” campaign did to urbane twentysomethings in the nineties.

This background is crucial to understanding Ovid’s literary manner and the great successes—and, perhaps, the ultimate disaster—it brought him. Though educated with an eye to a career in the law, the young Ovid faced his father’s disapproval (“Even Homer died penniless!” Ovid, Sr., protested) to pursue what he felt was his natural inclination to poetry: whenever he tried to write prose, he later recalled, it came out as verse. In the mid-twenties B.C.E., while still in his late teens—“my beard had only been trimmed once or twice”—he burst onto the literary scene with a daring collection of erotically themed poems called the Amores. The work, whose title can mean anything from “love affairs” to “girlfriend” to “sex play,” recounts the ups and downs of the narrator’s affair with a woman he calls Corinna. Typically, Roman poems of this sort took the form of anguished erotic autobiography—frustrated suitors brooding over their emotional upheavals at the hands of cruel or indifferent mistresses. In the Amores, Ovid comes close to parodying that earnest genre, toying with its conventions and expanding its boundaries to cover a range of outré subjects—two of the poems are about abortion, one about impotence—in an arch style that would have raised eyebrows coming from a mature poet, let alone a teen-ager.

Roman society was titillated, and wanted more. After the Amores came the Heroides (“Mythic Heroines”), a series of verse letters by famous women of myth to the lovers who had abandoned them (Dido to Aeneas, Medea to Jason). These revealed a deep sympathy for women’s suffering and a keen interest in female perspectives unusual for the time, qualities that were doubtless on display in his tragedy “Medea,” now lost, which the historian Tacitus described as one of the two most popular Roman dramas ever produced.

When Ovid was in his early forties and the toast of Rome, he published his most audacious poems to date—a collection that the Encyclopædia Britannica once called “perhaps the most immoral work ever written by a man of genius.” In the Ars Amatoria, or “The Art of Love”—the book that would later make such an impression on James I of Aragon—the poet repurposed the dignified old genre of didactic poetry in a scandalous way. Earlier poems of this type offered instruction in matters both philosophical (Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things”) and practical (Virgil’s Georgics gives advice about farming and beekeeping). Ovid, assuming a brittle, Noël Coward-ish pose of erotic sophistication, used the form to gleefully dispense his wisdom on seduction, complete with hints about where men could hunt for women (porticoes, theatres, the tail end of parades). Two volumes of this were soon followed by a third, in which he gives women advice on how to seduce men. Then he published “Remedies for Love,” in which he does an about-face and offers tips on how to fall out of love. The ability to work all sides of an argument reminds you that he’d been trained as a lawyer.

 

The timing of these books’ publication was problematic, to say the least. At around the same time, Augustus’ only child, Julia, was caught up in a sex scandal involving a number of high-ranking citizens. The “family values” emperor couldn’t very well be seen as a hypocrite: one of Julia’s lovers was forced to commit suicide and the others were exiled, as was Julia. Ovid himself believed that “The Art of Love” was what got him into trouble with Augustus: he later wrote that he had been exiled because of a “poem and a mistake”—the poem being “The Art of Love.” And yet that book was published a full ten years before the day in 8 C.E. on which the poet, now in his early fifties, was summoned to the palace, castigated by Augustus, and given twenty-four hours to leave Rome. He left behind his third wife, who seems to have worked tirelessly for his recall. (After two brief marriages, one of which produced a daughter, the erotic cynic seems finally to have found true love with a worthy partner.) Also left behind was the manuscript of the Metamorphoses, still awaiting its finishing touches, which the distraught poet apparently attempted to burn. Luckily, copies were already circulating.

It remains a mystery why, if Augustus was so offended by “The Art of Love,” he waited a decade to act. Some scholars believe that the “mistake” Ovid referred to later was not literary but political: he may have got too close to a conspiratorial faction at court that opposed Tiberius, Augustus’ chosen heir, and official outrage over the poem was merely a smoke screen to prevent news of the conspiracy from leaking out. Whatever the case may be, within months Ovid was in the tiny frontier settlement of Tomis, on the northwest coast of the Black Sea, where few people spoke Latin: a particularly cruel punishment for a poet. He died about ten years later, aged sixty, his endless pleas for a recall ignored by Tiberius, as they had been by Augustus. The exact date and circumstances of his death remain unknown.

What is not controversial about Ovid is that the poem he was laboring over before his fall from grace was a masterpiece: his only epic and a work unique in the literature of Rome, if not of the world.

Like some of the anomalous beings it takes such delight in describing, the Metamorphoses is a hybrid. Ovid and his contemporaries were deeply influenced by the aesthetic theories of the Greek writer Callimachus, who, rejecting the sprawling narrative arcs of epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, is said to have declared that “a big book is a big evil.” Callimachean aesthetics endorsed, by contrast, exquisiteness, brevity, and allusiveness. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid attempted something that no one had ever tried before: to compose a work whose reach recalled Homer and Virgil but that was simultaneously a Callimachean collection of artfully fashioned episodes.

Ovid announces the nature of his epic in its opening lines, where he asks the gods to “delicately spin out” a song so vast as to be “unceasing,” starting with the beginning of the world and ending in the poet’s own time. He opens with an evocation of the primal chaos from which all creation arose, shifting, as the poem progresses, to the establishment of Jove’s rule in heaven and the creation of the human race (which, as in the Bible, has to repopulate itself after a devastating flood). There follows a panoply of myths about the interactions of gods and humans, including the many instances of divine violence against mortals which lead to all those baroque mutations.

Amid this busy sequence, the poem’s chronology moves from the mythic age to human history, and the scene of its action gradually moves from Greece and the East to Italy and Rome. We get capsule retellings of the Trojan War and its aftermath—material from the Iliad and the Odyssey, of course, but also from the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic about the founding of Rome, which by Ovid’s time was already a classic. Finally, the mythic history segues into current events. Toward the end of the final book, the murdered Julius Caesar is transformed into a twinkling star that looks down on the even greater achievements of his adopted son—Augustus.

The Aeneid, too, found space to celebrate Augustus and his family. But in the Metamorphoses what looks like an optimistic trajectory from chaos to empire is constantly undercut by tartly revisionist treatments of epic tropes. When Ovid rehashes Homer and Virgil, there’s something of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” about his approach—he finds odd, sometimes even comic angles from which to view the famous heroics of the past. In the Metamorphoses, much of the Trojan War is reduced to a long and frankly rather boring debate between two warriors over who will get the dead Achilles’ armor. Other great myths and their heroes—Perseus, Theseus, Jason, even Hercules—come in for similarly irreverent treatment.

Above all, Ovid’s presentation of Jove—the king of the gods and the obvious counterpart of Augustus himself—is almost uniformly disparaging in its contempt for the god’s use of his power. The Metamorphoses often reads like a catalogue of Jove’s violent offenses: Jove transforming himself into a bull in order to abduct Europa, Jove becoming a swan to get at Leda, Jove taking the form of an eagle in order to snatch up Ganymede. Homer’s Zeus, fallible though he sometimes is, is always august, awesome; not so Ovid’s Jove. You’re more than a little uneasy when, in the poem’s final vignette, Augustus is explicitly compared to that most powerful of gods: “Jove rules the heavens / and the tripartite world. Augustus holds / the earth. Each is a ruler and a father.” By the time he wrote these lines, of course, Ovid knew exactly what the Emperor had done to his daughter.

If there are any heroes in this violent and kaleidoscopic work, they are artists. The Metamorphoses returns again and again to the ingenuity of artists and musicians and poets, from sculptors like Pygmalion to the musician Marsyas, from inventors like Daedalus, who both creates and then must escape from the Labyrinth, to the semi-divine poet Orpheus, the preëminent representative in the Western tradition of poetic genius in both its positive and negative aspects. (He can charm trees and rocks, but famously fails to bring his wife, Eurydice, back from the dead.) The long Orpheus sequence in Book 10—a mini-epic all its own—is characterized by a dizzying, almost Calvinoesque series of nested narratives. At one point, you realize you’re reading Ovid telling a story about Orpheus telling a story about Venus telling her lover Adonis a story about another pair of lovers.

As if eerily anticipating his own fate, the poet lingers on the tales of artists—and critics!—who suffer dreadful punishments for speaking uncomfortable truths to power. Marsyas is flayed alive for challenging Apollo to a musical contest; when the mortal Midas questions a decision in another contest, Apollo gives him an ass’s ears. Art and literature, Ovid seems to say, are powerful if dangerous means of confronting arbitrary authority. In the Arachne episode, Minerva weaves a tapestry that celebrates her victory over Neptune, her uncle, in a long-ago contest for possession of Athens—an egotistical bit of divine P.R. Arachne’s weaving, by contrast, depicts nine rapes committed by Jove, six by Neptune, a few by Apollo and Bacchus, and one by Saturn, Jove’s father. The writer Jia Tolentino has described Arachne’s work as #MeToo journalism.

And so it’s only fitting that the apotheosis the epic actually ends with is not that of Caesar but that of Ovid himself. The final ten lines of the twelve thousand that make up the poem constitute a ringing affirmation of the power of artists to survive anything that “Jove” can do to them, culminating in the epic’s final word, vivam, “I shall live”:

’I’ve made a masterpiece Jove’s wrath cannot

destroy, nor flame, nor steel, nor gnawing time. . . .

I will be read on people’s lips. My fame

will last across the centuries. If poets’

prophecies can hold any truth, I’ll live.’

 

Ovid begins a poem he wrote from exile by addressing the verses themselves: “even if you didn’t have a title your style itself would reveal you; / even if you wanted to hide, it’s clear that you are mine.” His confidence was not misplaced. Few poets have as instantly recognizable a style—in particular, a quality of elegant fleetness that gives his verses a quicksilver shimmer. This is no easy thing to achieve in Latin, a rather heavy language. Yet Ovid managed to lighten his lines. In Latin, one way to say “and” is to add a short syllable, -que, to the end of the second of the two words being joined (arma virumque, “arms and a man”); Ovid notoriously liked to pile up his -ques, a device that gives his lines a bobbing, cork-on-a-wave quality.

McCarter’s translation reproduces Ovid’s speed and clarity. She adopts a five-beat iambic-pentameter line—the “blank verse” natural to English and, by now, the standard meter for English translations of classical epics—while sensibly allowing herself a degree of flexibility. Even better, she is alert to many of the sparkling verbal effects for which the poet was famous in his own time. One favorite device was alliteration. In the story of the doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe (lifted by Shakespeare for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), the distraught Pyramus, thinking his beloved has died, stabs himself in the groin. Ovid compares the gush of blood to a rush of water spurting from a broken lead pipe, loading his lines with “s” sounds that replicate the sound of the spraying. This McCarter nicely conveys: “His blood shot high, / as when a pipe bursts due to faulty lead, / and through the hissing hole squirt slender streams / of water as the spray bursts through the air.”

She is less successful with some of the poet’s more sophisticated effects. If Ovid’s brio is reflected in his meter, and his wit in his sound-play, his important thematic interests—the passions that divide us, the relationship of bodies to identities, of form to content—often express themselves in the elaborate symmetries to which Latin, whose density can allow for extreme pithiness, lends itself. In Book 8, a queen named Althaea, on learning that her son has killed her brothers, finds herself torn between her maternal instinct and her sibling allegiances. Ultimately, her feeling for the ghosts of the brothers who shared her blood (consanguineas umbras) outweighs any sense of responsibility to be dutiful (pia) to her family by marriage and her child; and so she sheds his blood (sanguine), an act of appalling impiety (impietate). Ovid brilliantly compresses this complex thought into a powerful line and a half:

“et, consanguineas ut sanguine leniat umbras,

impietate pia est”

 

Literally, this means “And in order to appease her blood-kin with blood / She is pious / dutiful through an act of impiety” (although pius has emotional resonances far more profound than anything we associate with “pious”). In the 1986 Oxford World’s Classics translation by A. D. Melville—to my mind, still the version that best renders the original’s poetic finesse—the crucial tension created by the two pairs of juxtaposed, etymologically related words is retained: “determined to appease with blood the shades / Whose blood was hers, for love’s sake crushing love.” McCarter, by contrast, drops the first pair altogether (“To pacify her brothers’ shades with blood”), while her diction in the second (“she’s loyal through disloyalty”) fails to convey the power of pia / impietate. In a translator’s note, she acknowledges the difficulty of reproducing some of the meaningful symmetries characteristic of Latin verse; but the elegancies on which Ovid prided himself are intrinsic to his style, and other translators have shown that it’s possible to put them across.

McCarter is on more comfortable ground when it comes to other elements in the text which, as she points out, many previous translators have mishandled, distorting not only the meaning of certain lines but the entire point of certain tales. In the tale of Apollo and Daphne, for instance, we learn that the nymph, who emulates the virgin goddess of the hunt, Diana, “did not want a man and never had”; when Apollo first glimpses the tomboyish girl, the first thing that crosses his mind is how she might look after a trip to the beauty parlor:

 

“Seeing the loose hair down her neck, he says,

“Suppose that it were styled!” He sees her eyes,

gleaming like stars, her lips—but those it’s not

enough to see. He marvels at her fingers,

her hands, her arms, her shoulders (nearly bare).”

 

McCarter hews closely to the Latin here—in stark contrast, as she points out, to earlier translators’ rather prurient expansions on Ovid’s simple description of the girl. One gives her a “fair” neck, another a “darling little mouth,” yet another “tempting” lips, “shapely arms,” and delicate fingers. (These enhancements are all the more regrettable since in the following line Ovid, ever the master of erotic insight, adds that, for Apollo, “the parts he cannot see he thinks are better.”) McCarter notes that such overtranslations, consciously or no, end up “effectively feminizing and sexualizing Daphne into something of a coquette”—that is, the opposite of what she is in Ovid, a girl who has no interest in the attentions of men.

This translator is equally clear-eyed about how to describe just what it is that Apollo is trying to do to Daphne. In a 1978 volume of a classics journal dedicated to the then novel topic of women in the ancient world, the University of Buffalo scholar Leo Curran argued that “rape is the dirty little secret of Ovidian scholarship.” At first glance, “secret” might seem odd: after all, about fifty of the Metamorphoses’ tales—one out of five—center on rapes or attempted rapes. But McCarter argues persuasively that the nature of the violence that takes place in so many of these tales has often been dulled by evasive or euphemistic translations—“ravish,” “plunder.”

McCarter, by contrast, is not afraid to use the R-word. “jove rapes ganymede,” announces the title of one of the dozens and dozens of sections into which McCarter has divided Ovid’s text, many of those titles taking the form of “x rapes y.” This may strike some readers as tendentious, but it is surely no more offensive than failing to describe the nature of the violence with which, in a typically Ovidian paradox, this dazzling and engrossing work is so unsettlingly replete. It is only unfortunate that these titles, each starting a new page, all in jarringly large type, as if they were newspaper headlines, shatter the continuity of the narrative, scissoring through the ingeniously stitched transitions from tale to tale which are the hallmark of this poet’s artful manner and an expression of his fascination with the endless mutability of human experience.

 

“Human experience.” There has been a good deal of debate in recent years about the Greek and Roman classics and their claims to universality; about the discipline’s long association with “élites” and the comfort that some aspects of Greco-Roman culture have given to racists; about the problematic way in which these “great books” remain central to our cultural self-understanding even when scholarship has long made it clear that the civilizations that produced them were founded on values and institutions a number of which we find repellent—patriarchy, misogyny, economies based on the labor of enslaved people. These debates have produced spasms of self-examination and self-critique both inside and outside the academy—debates like the one at Columbia about the Metamorphoses and trigger warnings.

The fact is that such crises have always been good for the field. Half a century has passed since the advent of feminist criticism—the last great upheaval—transformed the way we read ancient texts, thanks to a generation of groundbreaking women classicists. Scholars such as Nancy Felson, Helene Foley, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Froma Zeitlin, now in their seventies and eighties, paved the way for articles such as Leo Curran’s piece on rape as the dirty little secret of the Metamorphoses. Their work is a reminder that if the classics are “great” it is less because they model some simplistic nobility of thought and beauty of form than because the texts themselves, as a result of their dark complexities, keep speaking to us in new ways, insisting that we reconsider them even as we reëxamine our reactions to them.

Few works from antiquity remind us as powerfully as Ovid’s does that a wrenching engagement with these ancient authors cannot be separated from admiration for them. “The inclusion of so many stories of rape in the epic,” McCarter writes in the final section of her introduction, called “Reading Ovid Today,

“”suggests, in fact, that Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation. . . . To read Ovid with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality—allows us to scrutinize our own thorny relationship with the past and with the ambivalent inheritance we have received from it. To wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination.”

McCarter ends her introduction with a list of her poet’s themes: the fragility of the human body; the way power works; the traumatic effects of loss of agency; the dark force of the objectifying gaze; the sometimes surprising interplay among desire, gender, and the body; gender fluidity and asexuality; the human will to self-expression. If you didn’t know she was writing about the concerns of someone who died twenty centuries ago, you’d think her subject was still alive. As indeed he knew he would be. Vivam.

Should Ovid’s Metamorphoses Have a Trigger Warning? Stephanie McCarter’s new translation grapples intelligently with issues of sexual violence that have often been obscured by euphemism.By Daniel Mendelsohn. The New Yorker, November 7, 2022

Penguin Classics

Website Stephanie McCarter

Stephanie McCarter. Ryan Sellers talks with Stephanie McCarter about her Ovid translation.  Quintilian: The Latin Teacher Podcast. September  1, 2022.

 

What can ancient verse reveal about the current moment? In her forthcoming translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics, Oct.), classicist Stephanie McCarter renders the poet’s concern with questions of power, violence, and gender intelligible to a contemporary audience. McCarter spoke with PW about the poem’s continued significance and the challenges of translating sexual violence from the classical world to the present day.

 Why translate Metamorphoses?

 Two routes brought me to the project. The first is that I regularly teach courses on women and gender in antiquity for my job at the University of the South [in Sewanee, Tenn.]. I had noticed that much of the language around sexual violence is not handled very well; sometimes it’s unclear to my students what’s happening in these scenes. I wanted to clarify the issues around sexual violence and handle sexual violence responsibly.

 The other route had to do with changes in my own writing over the years. I’ve become convinced that academics need to speak not just to one another but to as many people as we can. Translation can open up literature from the past. We can get people who don’t have access to learning Latin thinking about what Ovid can tell us about our own culture.

 How did you approach the language of violence, gender, and sexuality in the text?

 I wanted to be consistent with how I used language that depicted rape. Ovid’s primary term is a legal term for rape as well as a term for various acts of violence or force: vis, this little word where we get our word violence from. I used the language of force every time that word showed up in the text whether it was to do with rape or not because I wanted the reader to be able to draw clear connections across the violence of rape with other violent acts. I wanted to be very careful with the language of the body because Ovid is so interested in the body. So much of the epic is about one thing taking on a new form, which he calls a new body. The way that he does or does not connect the body with gender, sex, sexuality, desire, lack of desire—this is all very interesting to me.

 When the text uses terms that are not gender-specific, I didn’t want to use gender-specific terms. One example of this is how the human chest often gets translated as breast for female characters. So you have a lot of breasts in other translations that aren’t there in the original. That makes a big difference in how some characters are envisioned and gendered.

 What makes Ovid’s work still relevant?

 Metamorphoses gets my students thinking the most about questions of their own identity and cultural moment. We’re still defined by change; we’re still reckoning with many of the same questions about gender and power. That makes Ovid feel very relevant. I want my students to be able to read a version of the text that feels relevant and contemporary to them.

Ovid is also interesting for us because he’s interested in many of the same questions we are. For example, how does violence change us? He’s interested in the psychology of trauma. He’s also interested in the power of art and how art can be used as a therapeutic device, a way of reasserting our agency. These are universal human questions.

 The Language of the Body: PW Talks with Stephanie McCarter. By Matthew Broaddus.  Publisher’s Weekly, June 3, 2022.

Sex, Rage, & Change: Feminist Adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

A conversation with Paisley Rekdal, Nina MacLaughlin, and Stephanie McCarter. Hosted by Sewanee's Department of Classics, and co-sponsored by The Sewanee Review, Sewanee's Programs in Humanities and Women's/Gender Studies, the Department of English, and the Office of the Dean of the College. Held April 8, 2021.

Stephanie McCarter, April 10, 2021. 

Tapped as the first female translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses into English verse, Classics Professor Stephanie McCarter takes a hard look at the way sexual violence has been—and might be—portrayed in translations of the myths.
 
Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Larry Nassar, Les Moonves. They’re a few of the nearly 240 high-profile individuals accused of sexual harassment, assault, or misconduct since October 2017 when the New York Times reported that Hollywood media mogul Weinstein was at the center of a more than two decades’ long scandal of sexual misconduct allegations and settlements.
 
Three days later, Weinstein was fired from the production company he co-founded. Ten days after the Times story first appeared, actress Alyssa Milano, on Twitter, sounded a call to victims of sexual harassment or assault to tweet “me too.” It was a phrase first used by sexual assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to unite women and girls of color who were also survivors of sexual violence.
 
In the wake of Weinstein, new allegations mounted against powerful individuals, almost entirely men, across the arts, entertainment, media, politics, sports, technology, and business. “Me too” turned into #MeToo, and a movement was born.
 
Today, #MeToo is shorthand to unify survivors of sexual violence, but it is also a rallying cry for change. Powered by social media, the #MeToo movement, created out of Burke’s desire to turn her personal experience into a collective push against systemic sexual violence, is working its way into everything from comment threads to campaign trails, from boardrooms to classrooms.
 
And for Stephanie McCarter, associate professor of classics, that means bringing #MeToo back to 8 A.D. Tapped by Penguin Classics to be the first female English translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into verse, McCarter is stepping to the front of a male-dominated lineage—one that finds itself rife with what she calls “distortions, omissions, and mistranslations” in her essay, “Rape, Lost in Translation,” published earlier this year in Electric Literature. For the characters of Metamorphoses—those chased, raped, groped, and assaulted—McCarter could finally lead their #MeToo moment.
 
At nearly 12,000 lines across 15 books, Ovid’s Metamorphoses stands as one of the most influential works of art in Western culture, inspiring future literary heavyweights including Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Completed around 8 A.D., the epic poem, written in Latin hexameter, traces a theme of transformation—and power—through more than 250 myths. Of these 250 tales, more than 50 depict sexual violence or rape.
 
Many previous translations have turned a blind eye to or reframed these scenes, positioning them as romantic and even titillating encounters where women are “ravished” or “enjoyed” without their consent. Other translations give a nod to rape but forgo more accurate translation in favor of euphemism, like translator Charles Martin’s “she gives in to him without complaint” or David Raeburn’s “the Sun was allowed to possess her” — each a description of the Sun’s rape of Leucothoe, a young woman caught in the crosshairs of a dispute between gods.

 
Leucothoe stands at the center of much of McCarter’s early inspiration for this new translation project. Before Penguin Classics approached McCarter, who holds a Ph.D. in classics from the University of Virginia, she found herself troubled by the lack of translations from which she could actually teach.
 
“A lot of [translations] are not aging well, and I just found myself struggling sometimes with translations that were too free. I would find myself saying [to students], ‘Well, this is what the Latin actually says,’ or ‘This is what the Greek actually says.’”
 
Channeling the frustration produced by inadequate and inaccurate translations, McCarter started her own side project in 2016 of translating Horace’s Odes and Epodes. Her work was picked up by the University of Oklahoma Press. When the translation is completed early next year, she will also be the first woman to have produced a complete translation of the four books of odes and 17 epodes.
 
Around this same time, another female translator, Emily Wilson, was working on a new translation of The Odyssey which was then published in 2017. As Wilson’s approach to righting the inaccuracies of previous translations picked up steam in the press, McCarter kept coming back to Ovid.
 
“Ovid is a text I have taught over and over again. So, I started thinking about the Leucothoe episode, which I first taught 10 years ago when I came [to Sewanee],” she recalls. “I remember teaching it out of Rolfe Humphries’ translation and thinking something’s just not right in the way he’s translated this. I didn’t have the Latin in class with me that day ...  so I went back and looked at the Latin [later] and said, ‘Of course it’s not right, because he’s hidden the rape.’”
 
In Book IV of Metamorphoses, Venus, enraged with the Sun for revealing her affair with Mars, the god of war, fills the Sun with desire for Leucothoe, a mortal. The Sun appears to Leucothoe disguised as her mother and then rapes her. Later, when the young woman’s father finds out she is no longer a virgin, he buries her alive.
 
In Humphries’ translation, published in 1960, he translates the rape of Leucothoe as:
 
"And she, still fearful of the sudden vision [of the Sun],
Won over by that shining, took his passion
With no complaint."
 
The ambiguity surrounding Leucothoe’s consent that Humphries introduces, McCarter could not find supported by the Latin. Ovid uses the phrase vim passa est, which McCarter translates as “endured his force.” The same passage, as translated by McCarter, then becomes:
 
"But though the virgin feared the sudden vision,
defeated by the brightness of the god,
she quit her protest and endured his force."
 
Much hinges on the word vim, the accusative form of vis. Translated as “force,” vis, in the ancient world, is connected to violence or aggression.
 
“If you are trying to overthrow the state, for example, you can be tried for vis,” says McCarter. “But you can also be tried for vis if you raped a woman who was off limits to you. The Romans didn’t conceive of rape as necessarily a unique kind of violence. It is very tied in to other types of violence. Rather than rape, I translate [vis] as ‘force.’ So, he conquered her with force rather than he conquered her with rape.”
 
By translating vis as “force,” McCarter accomplishes what many other translators have failed to do: opening the text up to a greater and more thorough interrogation of its depictions of sexual violence.
 
“Power is the central theme of the Metamorphoses, and it is an epic about power in lots of different manifestations. So, it’s the power that gods exercised over humans. It’s the power that tyrants exercised over their subjects. And it’s the power that men exercised over women,” she says.
 
With this translation, vis shows that rape is a kind of power. It’s an abuse of power. Throughout the epic, Ovid uses the language of force to describe not only rape or sexual violence but also other misuses of power.
 
After her father kills her, the Sun tries to bring Leucothoe back to life. Ovid repeats the use of vis here.
 
“It’s really troubling when [the Sun] uses the force of his rays to try to bring her back to life after he’s used the force of sexual violence against her,” says McCarter. “So I think [the translation] enables you to see connections across the poem a bit better.”
 
The Leucothoe episode is unsettling in a different way than, say, the far more explicit and brutal depiction of the rape and silencing of Philomela by Tereus just two books later. The majority of translators don’t mince words here and name her experience rape outright. Others still though lean on words like “overpower” or “ravage,” verbs more likely to populate the pages of a dime-store romance novel.
 
It is this inconsistency in translation surrounding episodes of sexual violence, especially those like Leucothoe’s or, earlier, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne, which seem to say as much about the culture in which the translators are living and translating as the themes or societal takeaways of the myths themselves. What does it say about a culture that perceives Leucothoe’s silence as consent or overly sexualizes Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree to escape being physically violated?
 
When teaching texts like Metamorphoses, McCarter first offers her students a content warning. Beyond just telling them that scenes of rape and sexual violence lie ahead, she provides students access to her motives, revealing how and why they’ll be interrogating these types of scenes. “I don’t want my students to ever think that the things we’re talking about in class are somehow removed from the world in which they live,” she says.
 
She encourages her students to examine translations for what they’re not saying as much as for what they are. In class, she’ll display various translations and debate with her students on the choices that were made, how sexual violence was represented or misrepresented.
 
“One of the big questions we often focus on is did previous translators want to cover [rape] up because they’re uncomfortable with rape? In other words, they see it but don’t want this seminal work of ancient literature to be full of rape and violence so they cover it up,” she says. “Or, do they just not see it? Are their eyes not attuned to it and does it take someone who has been thinking in a scholarly way about gender and sexuality to see it?”
 
They’re questions apropos of the age of #MeToo. The myths and their translations open up a deeper critical analysis of the modern world. The gap between 8 A.D. and 2018 narrows when Apollo looks like Weinstein and Daphne an up-and-coming actress. Or the Sun a high-ranking public official and Leucothoe an entry-level employee. What is consent in the light of a power imbalance? Do present-day Daphnes and Leucothoes have a voice? When their stories are told, what is being lost in translation?
 
“I think one of the things that’s come out of the conversation that has ensued from Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is about the role of the translator and to what degree is the translator complicit in the misogyny you see in a text, the violence that you see in a text,” says McCarter. “No translator can remove herself from her cultural moment. Obviously, I can’t because I’m using my own cultural moment as a lens through which I read this text. That needs to be a part of the conversation more.”
 
Rather than being weighed down with the responsibility of the task ahead, McCarter, who is only in the very beginning stages of a project that she anticipates will take at least a couple of years, seems instead buoyed.
 
“It is possible to do a beautiful poetic translation in pentameter that is enjoyable to read, that is informed by the latest scholarship on gender in the ancient world, and that also takes into account our own cultural moment. These things are not separable. They can be unified, and that is my main goal.”
 
And it’s her students she wants to serve first. It was the lack of accurate translations available to them that first inspired the Horace project, and now the Metamorphoses endeavor. It is forging connections between academia and art, between antiquity and today, between us and them.
 
McCarter says, “When you tear apart an ancient text and you think critically about it and you don’t put it on a pedestal and then you see something from your own world that speaks to it, that resonates. I think that’s the moment where education happens.”
 
 
Translation in the Age of #Metoo.  By Kate Parrish. Sewanee  The University of the South,  November 15, 2018.

Leucothoe is only one of the many raped women of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though she is not as famous as Daphne, Io, Persephone, or Philomela. She is collateral damage in Venus’s revenge against the Sun, who exposed the goddess’s affair with the war-god Mars. To torment the Sun, Venus enflames him with desire for Leucothoe, a mere mortal, and each day he prolongs his light by watching her — until watching her is not enough. We’re told versions of this tale time and again in the epic: a beautiful girl, caught in the gaze of a powerful male, violated, and forever transformed. Translations of Ovid often pass lightly over these violations, describing women as being “ravished” or “enjoyed.” But in Leucothoe’s case in particular, translators have so obscured and mitigated Ovid’s language that it seems almost no rape at all but a consensual sexual liaison, a woman won over by the brilliant beauty of a god.

Since translation is an art centered upon small details, I must consider what may seem minutiae in order to glean exactly what happens to her. But, as any rape victim whose every action has been parsed knows, defining rape has far too often been a matter of minutiae. Translation all too often replicates contemporary social attitudes regarding what constitutes seduction, rape, and consent — and the often problematically hazy lines we have drawn between them.

The Sun comes to Leucothoe disguised as her mother. Dismissing her slave girls, he discloses his identity:

 

“She was frightened,

Let fall the spindle and distaff, but even her fright

Was most becoming. He delayed no longer,

Turned to his true appearance, the bright splendor,

And she, still fearful of the sudden vision,

Won over by that shining, took his passion

With no complaint.”

 

This is Rolfe Humphries’ now classic mid-century translation. It is hard to understand here precisely what happens in Leucothoe’s bedchamber. It’s clear that the Sun will take her whether or not she is willing — but she seems almost to consent. She is “won over.” Is this, in the memorably horrific words of an erstwhile U.S. congressman, “legitimate rape?”

There is less ambiguity in the Latin. Here are Ovid’s words followed by my own translation in iambic pentameter, the meter preferred by many translators of the epic:

` pavet illa, metuque

et colus et fusus digitis cecidere remissis.

ipse timor decuit. nec longius ille moratus

in veram rediit speciem solitumque nitorem;

at virgo quamvis inopino territa visu

victa nitore dei posita vim passa querella est.

 

She quakes, and in her fright

distaff and spindle fell from fingers slackened.

Dread made her lovely. He delayed no more,

returned to his true form and normal brightness.

But though the virgin feared the sudden vision,

defeated by the brightness of the god,

she quit her protest and endured his force.`

 

Vim passa est (“endured his force”) is as clear a description of rape as one can find in Latin. Passa est, from the Latin word pati, has one connotation of being the recipient of sexual penetration. Seneca the Younger, for instance, describes someone penetrated by a man as “enduring (pateretur) the man.” This aspect of Ovid’s Latin is untranslatable without destroying its terse subtlety. But passa est more explicitly suggests suffering something deeply unpleasant, which makes Humphries’ “took” feel off the mark. This is, after all, the word that gives us “passion,” not only the erotic passion of lovers but the bodily passion, the suffering, of Christ or his martyrs.

Where “passion” appears in Humphries’ rendering, it’s not a translation of passa est, from which it’s derived, but of vim, “force,” a word that communicates aggression, not ardor. In sexual contexts this is frequently the Latin equivalent for the English “rape.” Later in the epic, Ovid tells how Vertumnus nearly rapes Pomona but wins her instead through mutual desire. In my translation:

 

`He readies force but needs no force — the nymph,

seized by the god’s good looks, felt equal wounds.`

 

There are parallels here to the rape of Leucothoe. Pomona is “seized” and Leucothoe “defeated.” Ovid even likens Vertumnus to the bright sun just before these lines. But whereas Ovid explicitly states that “force” is unnecessary for Vertumnus (though he was quite willing to use it), “force” is exactly what Leucothoe endures. The similarities between the two stories make the differences starker.

The same nexus of language is seen in Valerius Maximus’s description of prince Sextus Tarquinius’ rape of Lucretia, perhaps the most notorious incident of sexual violence from Rome. Here the famously chaste Roman matron is “forced to suffer (pati) sexual intercourse through violence (vim).” This rape, according to the legend, so enraged the Romans that they overthrew the kings and instituted the republican system of government.

Where is such anger on Leucothoe’s behalf? Why would Humphries downplay her brutal rape?

Two aspects of the text overly influence translators. The first is the god’s nitor, which has not only the primary meaning of “brightness” but also the secondary meaning of “beauty.” This suggests, just maybe, that Leucothoe is actually seduced by the god’s handsomeness. This detail combines with Leucothoe’s failure to complain. In this view, she consents — he is just too dreamy to resist.

There is a better explanation. Leucothoe does not protest because sexual violence silences her, as it does many rape victims both in Ovid’s epic and today. The Sun’s awesome beauty and blinding illumination combine to be undeniable proof that her assailant is a god, against whom she is simply powerless. What good would protest do? Failure to complain is hardly equivalent to verbal consent, no matter how handsome the rapist. And can she even see his gleaming nitor? Can any mere mortal look directly upon the sun? In just the previous book of the epic, another mortal, Semele, beholds the true form of a god, her lover Jupiter — and is incinerated.

When Leucothoe’s father discovers her loss of virginity, he flies into a rage — not at the Sun, but at her. Pointing to the Sun, she insists he raped her in what is her only direct speech: “He inflicted force on me, unwilling.” Her words vim ferre echo other rape accounts. Seneca the Elder uses precisely these words when speaking of a young woman who killed the man raping her (vim inferentem). Humphries’ “He made me do it!” fails to fully render Leucothoe’s unambiguous statement. Leucothoe’s father does not believe her and buries her alive, killing her. The Sun, in a bizarre act of pity applied too late, transforms her into frankincense.

Why do we too not take her at her word? Why do we refuse to believe Leucothoe when she insists she was raped?

I choose Humphries’ translation as my prime example because it’s widely taught and read, not because it is the most egregious in stretching Ovid’s Latin. In fact, it’s quite typical. Some translators veer from Ovid’s original language in only a few details — but details are crucial. Vim becomes “advances” (Stanley Lombardo) or even “ardent wooing” (Frank Justus Miller). It is distressing how breezily violent rape becomes insistent courting.

Some elide the key word “force,” vim, entirely. For instance, Charles Martin:

 

`This unexpected apparition frightens

the virgin, but its radiance overwhelms her,

and she gives in to him without complaint.`

 

Or Allen Mandelbaum:

`That sudden vision finds her still afraid,

but godly radiance is just too great.

And she — unable to protest — submits.`

 

There is no “rape” in these rapes. Others euphemize Leucothoe’s direct statement accusing the Sun of rape. A.D. Melville gives, “He ravished me against my will!” Martin, “He plundered me! I did not pleasure him!” Mandelbaum maintains the rape accusation but changes it to indirect speech: “even as she claims…that she was raped against her will.”

Some versions play up Leucothoe’s consent far beyond what the Latin could ever justify. David Raeburn, for instance:

 

`Shocked as she was by this sudden appearance, the girl was utterly

dazzled. Protest was vain and the Sun was allowed to possess her.`

 

Or Horace Gregory:

 

`The god, revealed,

Showed her his sudden heat, his manliness,

At which she trembled, yet could not resist it;

She welcomed the invasion of the Sun.`

 

Gregory later has Leucothoe accuse the Sun not of raping but of “dazzling” her, with no suggestion of her unwillingness.

David Slavitt, who admits to taking “all kinds of liberties” in his translation, gets far too carried away imagining the details of Leucothoe’s desire:

`The distaff falls from her numb fingers and onto the floor,

making the only noise in a long and dreamy silence.

She stares in disbelief as his features blur and change

from those of her mother to new and grander proportions — it is

indeed Apollo who stands there, splendid and awesome! The girl,

meek, is in shock as he comes to enfold her in his strong arms.`

 

These additions seem almost meant to make us feel a frisson of erotic titillation. Have we been made complicit in a rape that has been glossed over and concealed from us?

The thing is, even with these distortions, omissions, and mistranslations, the Sun still rapes Leucothoe. No other word suffices for when a man (a god!) comes to a woman (a mortal!) when she’s alone, terrifies her, asserts his power over her, then sexually penetrates her. It is indeed doubtful that clear consent can even be offered in such a situation. And what if Leucothoe had offered a vocal sign of compliance? As Monica Lewinsky points out in a recent article for Vanity Fair, such highly disparate power dynamics create “a circumstance [where] the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”

Is such nitpicking, in the end, really valid? Isn’t this a small moment in a grand, sweeping epic? Aren’t translators meant to take liberties to make something new that stands independent of the original text? To a degree, yes. Yet the translator does a disservice by eliding or diminishing the disturbing aspects of the original, particularly when these involve sexual violence or abuse of power.

To quote a comment by Emily Wilson on the Odyssey that equally pertains to Ovid’s Leucothoe, “Rape culture is deeply intertwined with how this scene is read, and how it’s taught to impressionable teenagers.” It was indeed the Metamorphoses that gave rise to the trigger warning debate on college campuses when a Columbia student complained about a professor’s failure to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of rape in the poem, instead “focus[ing] on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery.” Educators and translators alike have a responsibility to do better. Rape in Ovid’s poem has indeed received renewed scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo movement, as has rape in Greco-Roman myth and Classical antiquity more generally. It is irresponsible, especially in our present moment, to overlook rather than interrogate the epic’s sexual violence.

 

We must think carefully about why translators have mitigated, even erased Leucothoe’s rape. Their hedging in many ways reflects our own contemporary lack of adequate vocabulary for capturing sexual violence and our tendency to gloss over rape with language that mitigates and obscures it. We still lack clarity about what exactly constitutes consent — is it communicated with words or with the body alone? Rape remains a topic around which more questions swirl than clear, definitive answers. Even now, some think it is rape only if a woman screams. These translations echo our failure to trust women who say they have been raped, and they reenact how we downplay female victimization while exonerating male perpetrators, biases recently outlined by Kate Manne.

These mishandlings of Ovid’s Leucothoe tale illustrate well how gender biases in society at large are reproduced in the art of translation, a phenomenon Emily Wilson has eloquently illuminated. As she has pointed out, such “biases can lead to some seriously problematic and questionable choices (such as…translating rape as if it were the same as consensual sex).” It matters that the person shedding light on such biases is the first woman to publish a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English.

It is fitting to conclude by observing that only one woman, Mary M. Innes, has published a complete translation of the Metamorphoses into English, more than 60 years ago — Jane Alison’s 2014 Change Me comprises decontextualized selections, not including the story of Leucothoe. Here is Innes’ prose version of Leucothoe’s rape: “Leucothoe, though frightened by the unexpected sight, was overcome by his magnificence, and accepted the god’s embraces without a murmur.”

Perhaps it’s the right time for another woman to be given a try.

Rape, Lost in Translation. By Stephanie McCarter. Electric Literature, May 1, 2018.