BMCR 2004.09.46, Michael Simpson, The Metamorphoses of Ovid

Michael Simpson, The Metamorphoses of Ovid.  Amherst:  University of
Massachusetts Press, 2001.  Pp. 498.  ISBN 1-55849-309-3.  $24.95.

Reviewed by Sara Mack, University of North Carolina
(smack@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Word count:  1727 words
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Simpson's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses includes a table of
contents listing the stories in each book (vii-ix), a brief
introduction to Ovid and the poem (1-6), a prose translation (9-272),
endnotes in the form of a running commentary (273-469), a bibliography
(471-478), and an index of names (479-97). The translation is accurate,
concise and readable. Simpson states his aim in the introduction, to
make "a prose translation in the rapid and direct American idiom while
avoiding colloquialism on the one hand and academic translationese on
the other" (6). I think he has succeeded admirably. First time readers,
whether undergraduates studying the poem in a class, or general readers
with little or no Latin, will get a good sense of Ovid's poem from the
translation. A teacher teaching the poem in English will be able to
discuss Ovid from pretty much any angle. (I discovered years ago when
using Humphreys that I couldn't make most of the points I wanted to
make about Ovid as a story teller because Humphreys had left out almost
everything I wanted to talk about.) Simpson omits nothing, reshapes
nothing. And he doesn't play games with Ovid's text. There is no Hermes
who, surprisingly, abandons the blank verse of his surroundings and
addresses Odysseus in elaborately rhymed iambic tetrameter octets, as
happens in Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey 12. Nor are there any rapping
P-Airides (Pierides), who contend in their own inimitable style with
the Muses in Book 5 of Charles Martin's translation of the
Metamorphoses. There are no purple patches in Simpson's text.

The notes are excellent, a tour de force. They aren't really notes;
they are actually a commentary, full of useful information on
individual stories and on the poem as a whole. They might be daunting
to an undergraduate who is overwhelmed by the complexity of Ovid's poem
and only wants to find out who, say, Hermaphroditus is. Some of the
notes are two or more pages long. They do tell you who Hermaphroditus
is, but they tell you a whole lot more. They summarize stories, they
connect far-flung parts of the poem (very useful to the beginner); they
also refer to Greek texts, quote extensively from modern scholarship on
Ovid, and provide Simpson's own angle of perspective on Ovidian
narrative. Many of them are really mini-essays, the basis of the
monograph that he plans to write. I found them very useful when I was
teaching a graduate course on the Metamorphoses last spring. I also
recommended them to the graduate students. Reading them is a good way
to get into the poem, whether or not one is reading it in English.

I have taught Latin poetry, mostly in Latin, but frequently in
translation, throughout my career, and I have never chosen a prose
translation for a class. I have had colleagues (notably, my good friend
Nan Michels) who refused to teach the Aeneid in anything but a prose
translation on the grounds that Vergil is untranslatable, as indeed he
is. So is Ovid. But I continued to hope, despite a fair amount of
evidence to the contrary, that students would see, if only dimly, that
they were reading a poem and not a novel, when we read the
Metamorphoses or the Aeneid in English. What would I do now with this
edition of the Metamorphoses available to me? One reason I decided to
write this review was to immerse myself in a prose translation and
decide whether to break the habits of a lifetime. I'm inclined to think
I would. I mentioned earlier the problem I had with Humphreys. Just
when I was planning a class in which I would show Ovid's brilliance in
having Argus fall asleep listening to Mercury's story while the
narrator carries on in detail telling us what the god was about to say:
talia dicturus, I looked down at my text and discovered it wasn't
there. When you read Simpson you find that his translation makes very
clear exactly what Ovid is up to with Argus and Mercury, as with every
other episode, and that his commentary has some very useful remarks on
ways of interpreting a story. Simpson hasn't gained readability as
Humphreys does (and I do think Humphreys is readable) by thinning out
the text. It is all there.

Translations of Latin narrative poems tend to be much longer than the
originals. (Mandelbaum's translation of the Metamorphoses is an
egregious example of that tendency.) Frequently a translation is so
much longer than the original that it is difficult for readers to find
their place in the Latin text. I am always annoyed when I am teaching
from a translation that does not give the Latin as well as the English
line numbers. Simpson has only one set of line numbers, and that is all
he needs since his text matches the Latin text. It may not be line for
line, but it is pretty close, so you always know where you are in
Ovid's poem.

Simpson does not try to be poetic; he does try to be direct and rapid.
Does he succeed in this endeavor? I chose at random two passages to
consider from that point of view: the whole of the story of Salmacis in
Book 4 and the first segment of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in
Book 10 (lines 1-85). In both cases I read the selections aloud in
Latin and in English to see how readable the English was and how well
it moved. I also timed my readings to see whether the translation moved
more slowly than the Latin. I was pleased with the results at every
point. Simpson's English is fast moving. In fact, I was surprised to
discover that the equivalent passage in his translation took me a
couple of minutes less to declaim than did Ovid's Latin in each case. I
did not expect that, in part because prose looks longer than poetry,
and, indeed, Simpson often uses more words than Ovid does, but his
English moves along at a good clip. Ovid's hexameters tend to move
fluidly and fast and are very easy to read aloud (in contrast to, say,
Lucretius's verses), in part because Ovid uses so many dactyls and easy
elision (in contrast to, say, Vergil). Simpson's English is also easy
to read aloud. He uses many long sentences but they are well
articulated. Parentheses and dashes keep readers on track when they
might otherwise have tripped up. Listen to how the seduction builds as
Salmacis tries to win over Hermaphroditus (with Odysseus and Nausicaa
in the background) (4.320-8):

... puer o dignissime credi
esse deus, seu tu deus es, potes esse Cupido,
sive es mortalis, qui te genuere, beati
et frater felix et fortunata profecto,
siqua tibi soror est, et quae dedit ubera nutrix;
sed longe cunctis longeque beatior illa,
siqua tibi sponsa est, siquam dignabere taeda.
haec tibi sive aliqua est, mea sit furtiva voluptas;
seu nulla est, ego sim, thalamumque ineamus eundem.

Dear boy -- oh, you could so easily be taken for a god! If you are a
god, perhaps you're Cupid; or if you're mortal, how lucky the parents
who gave birth to you, how happy your brother, too, and how truly
fortunate your sister is, if you have a sister, and the nurse who gave
you her breast! But the happiest of them all by far is the girl engaged
to you, if there is one, if you've found the right girl to marry. If
there really is someone else, then let my pleasure with you be our
secret, but if there is no one, let me be yours -- and let's lie down
together, right now.

"Right now" brings us down with a thud. It is not actually in the
Latin, but it expresses vividly what the whole passage conveys, and the
last half verse slams home: Salmacis' determination to get
Hermaphroditus into bed with her immediately, no matter what the terms.


Simpson can be poetic when it suits Ovid's text. I find his death of
Meleager (139) very moving: "The fire, far away, and his pain flared up
together, together they died down, together they went out; and his
spirit gently entered the soft, still air, as white ash slowly covered
the fading ember." Here is Ovid's version. "... crescunt ignisque
dolorque / languescunt iterum; simul est exstinctus uterque, / inque
leves abiit paulatim spiritus auras / paulatim cana prunam velante
favilla" (8.522-5). It takes Simpson many more words than it takes
Ovid, but I don't see how English could do it better.

As I have indicated, I think I would use Simpson's translation in an
undergraduate class, but I would wait for the second edition. The first
edition is seriously flawed by a very large number of typographical
errors. Some are minor: missing commas, commas where semicolons should
be, missing quotation marks, stray periods. These are unfortunate and
disturbing to those readers who have a good proofreader's eye, but they
don't detract seriously from the text. Others are more serious, since
they can cause momentary confusion: 'warm' for 'warn,' 'exalting' for
'exulting,' 'nothing' for 'noting.' I did not find many inaccuracies in
the translation. When I checked the Latin text because of something
that struck me as strange in the translation I usually found that
Simpson's version was accurate or at least plausible: sometimes because
he was using Miller-Goold rather than Anderson's Teubner, sometimes
because he had interpreted something in a way that I had never thought
of. I don't like reading Latin poetry in translation, but it does have
its uses. Every now and then you are forced really to think about a
passage you had not noticed particularly. This happened to me when I
read that Minerva puts the Hill of Mars on the Acropolis in her
tapestry in Book 6. I had read that passage many many times and
accepted the commentaries' explanation that Ovid was confusing the
Areopagus with the Acropolis. Only when I read Simpson and looked more
closely at the Latin, did I see that Ovid isn't so much confusing the
one hill with the other as setting the one on top of the other.

With luck the revised edition, which is now in the works, will be out
during this academic year. If so, next year's teachers of the
Metamorphoses in translation will have a real choice.