![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Pursued by Apollo, the nymph Daphne runs away and prays to her father to save her. One of the most famous is the story of Daphne and Apollo. In Ovid’s tragicomic epic poem, Metamorphoses, the meaning of the transformation is sometimes ambiguous and baffles. I spent evenings with Lewis and Short (the dictionary) and Allen and Greenough (the grammar) as I translated Ovid’s myths about nymphs who turned into trees, beautiful women seduced by Jupiter and transformed into cows, a hunter turned into a stag and killed by his own hounds. I had never read a poem so elegant and loopy, fluid and witty. In a seminar room with a clanking radiator, a small group of us translated Metamorphoses. But after studying Latin at the urging of a classics professor, I fell in love with this resonant, elliptical language. If I had not taken an Ovid class, I would have been a Greek snob forever. I came of literary age with a close reading of Metamorphoses. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |