Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Analysis

If you have ever had a conversation with someone whose first language is not the same as your own, you are probably familiar with the idea that there are certain words and phrases that do not translate perfectly from one language to another. This conflict is usually a matter of one language having a single word or succinct phrase for a concept which another language might need an entire sentence to capture. When I was ten, my parents hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our home. Toward the end of the evening, my grandmother asked my grandfather if he wanted to go for a walk. “No,” he said. “I have the abbiocco.” My grandmother smiled. I asked my grandfather what that meant--he wouldn’t tell me. My grandmother explained, “The abbiocco is the

Too few? Is there such a thing as a translation that is not also an adaptation? On the one hand, Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses preserves several key elements of Ovid’s masterful use of music and language in a way that other translations do not. Mandelbaum consistently incorporates a musicality of meter that could not be achieved via a literal translation. Though he is often guilty of padding Ovid’s language with excessive “filler words”, his diction is rarely too complicated or lofty. On the other hand, Before we look into a few translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and assess the extent of their failure, there are a few things we should note about the nature of Ovid and this particular work: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a narrative poem, considered Ovid’s magnum opus--or best work. The poem is generally believed to meet the criteria for an epic, and is sometimes referred to as a mock-epic or an anti-epic because of the topics it treats and Ovid’s tendency toward comedy. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses are written in dactylic hexameter (which is the standard meter for epic classical poetry sometimes referred to as “heroic hexameter”, and, when observed strictly, sounds something like dum-dee-dee-dum-dum). Dactylic hexameter is Greek in origin and is often slightly warped to fit the structure of the Latin language, as Latin generally has

Srinivasa Iyengar, you don’t. Iyengar says, “poetry, by nature, is untranslatable. [A] competent translator can, however, play the good broker between the poet and the reader... and give the intimations of the poet’s sovereign utterance.” But even this seems to suggest that at best, the translator is only a middleman, able to convey the subtleties of the poet’s original work, but not without noted differences. Famous poet Bysse Shelley calls translation of poetry “vain”, saying “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principal of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no