by Daisy Dunn
Glen who was dropped from a wolf at birth, and the bitch who gathers
the flocks in, Shepherdess; Harpy, flanked by her two young puppies;
River, the dog from Sícyon, sides all taut and contracted;
Racer and Gnasher; Spot, with Tigress and muscular Valour;
Sheen with a snow-white coat and murky Soot with a pitch-black;
Spartan, wiry and tough; then Whirlwind, powerful pursuer;
Swift, and Wolfcub racing along with her Cypriot brother;
Grabber, who sported an ivory patch midway on his ebony
forehead; Sable, and Shag with a coat like a tangled thicket;
two mongrel hounds from a Cretan sire and Lacónian dam,
Rumpus and Whitefang; Yelper, whose howls could damage the eardrums –
and others too many to mention. Spoiling all for their quarry,
over crag, over cliff, over rocks which appeared to allow no approach,
where access was hard and where there was none, the whole pack followed.
Actaeon fled where so many times he had been the pursuer.
He fled from the dogs who had served him so faithfully, longing to shout to them,
‘Stop! It is I, Actaeon, your master. Do you not know me?’
But the words would not come. The air was filled with relentless baying.
Blacklock first inserted his teeth to tear at his back;
Beast-killer next; then Mountain-Boy latched on to his shoulder.
These had started out later but stolen a march by taking
a short cut over the ridge. As they pinned their master down,
the rest of the pack rushed round and buried their fangs in his body,
until it was covered with crimson wounds. Actaeon groaned
in a sound that was scarcely human but one no stag could ever
have made, as he filled the familiar hills with his cries of anguish.
Then bending his legs like a cringing beggar, he gazed all round
with his silently pleading eyes, as if they were outstretched arms.
What of his friends? In ignorant zeal they encouraged the wild pack
on with the usual halloos. They scanned the woods for their leader,
shouting, ‘Actaeon! Actaeon!’, as if he were far away,
though he moved his head in response to his name.
‘Why aren’t you here,
you indolent man, to enjoy the sight of this heaven-sent prize?’
If only he’d not been there! But he was. He would dearly have loved
to watch, instead of enduring, his own dogs’ vicious performance.
Crowding around him, they buried their noses inside his flesh
and mangled to pieces the counterfeit stag who embodied their master.
Only after his life was destroyed in a welter of wounds
is Diana, the goddess of hunting, said to have cooled her anger.
PYGMALION
Metamorphoses, Book X
Ovid
Translated by Ted Hughes, 1997
The sculptor Pygmalion, sickened by the immorality of some of the women he has seen, resolves to carve his own out of ivory. He soon falls in love with her. This story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is sung by Orpheus (see Story 63). There are obvious parallels with the ancient myth of Pandora (see Story 9). The Pygmalion myth has also had a busy afterlife, inspiring a significant handful of operas, and informing works as diverse as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and George Bernard Shaw’s eponymous play (1912), which was later re-adapted as the musical My Fair Lady (1956). Ted Hughes’s translation is splendidly visual and very much in Ovid’s spirit.
If you could ask the region of Amathis
Where the mines are so rich
Whether it had wanted those women
The Propoetides,
You would be laughed at, as if you had asked
Whether it had wanted those men
Whose horned heads earned them the name Cerastae.
An altar to Zeus,
God of hospitality, stood at the doors
Of the Cerastae, soaked –
A stranger would assume – with the blood
Of the humbly sacrificed
Suckling calves and new lambs of Amathis.
Wrong. They butchered their guests.
Venus was so revolted to see offered
Such desecrated fare
She vowed to desert Ophiusa
And her favoured cities.
But she paused: ‘The cities,’ she reasoned,
‘And the places I love –
What crime have these innocents committed?
‘Why should I punish all
For a few? Let me pick out the guilty
And banish or kill them –
Or sentence them to some fate not quite either
But a dire part of both.
The fate for such, I think, is to become
Some vile thing not themselves.’
The horns of the Cerastae suggested
One quick solution for all –
Those men became bullocks. As for the others,
The Propoetides –
Fools who denied Venus divinity –
She stripped off their good names
And their undergarments, and made them whores.
As those women hardened,
Dulled by shame, delighting to make oaths
Before the gods in heaven
Of their every lie, their features hardened
Like their hearts. Soon they shrank
To the split-off, heartless, treacherous hardness
Of sharp shards of flint.
The spectacle of these cursed women sent
Pygmalion the sculptor slightly mad.
He adored woman, but he saw
The wickedness of these particular women
Transform, as by some occult connection,
Every woman’s uterus to a spider.
Her face, voice, gestures, hair became its web.
Her perfume was a floating horror. Her glance
Left a spider-bite. He couldn’t control it.
So he lived
In the solitary confinement
Of a phobia,
Shunning living women, wifeless.
Yet he still dreamed of woman.
He dreamed
Unbrokenly awake as asleep
The perfect body of a perfect woman –
Though this dream
Was not so much the dream of a perfect woman
As a spectre, sick of unbeing,
That had taken possession of his body
To find herself a life.
She moved into his hands,
She took possession of his fingers
And began to sculpt a perfect woman.
So he watched his hands shaping a woman
As if he were still asleep. Until
Life-size, ivory, as if alive
Her perfect figure lay in his studio.
So he had made a woman
Lovelier than any living woman.
And when he gazed at her
As if coming awake he fell in love.
His own art amazed him, she was so real.
She might have moved, he thought,
Only her modesty
Her sole garment – invisible,
Woven from the fabric of his dream –
Held her as if slightly ashamed
Of stepping into life.
Then his love
For this woman so palpably a woman
Became his life.
Incessantly now
He caressed her,
Searching for the warmth of living flesh,
His finger-tip whorls filtering out
Every feel of mere ivory.
He kissed her, closing his eyes
To divine an answering kiss of life
In her perfect lips.
And he would not believe
They were after
all only ivory.
He spoke to her, he stroked her
Lightly to feel her living aura
Soft as down over her whiteness.
His fingers gripped her hard
To feel flesh yield under the pressure
That half wanted to bruise her
Into a proof of life, and half did not
Want to hurt or mar or least of all
Find her the solid ivory he had made her.
He flattered her.
He brought her love-gifts, knick-knacks,
Speckled shells, gem pebbles,
Little rainbow birds in pretty cages,
Flowers, pendants, drops of amber.
He dressed her
In the fashion of the moment,
Set costly rings on her gold fingers,
Hung pearls in her ears, coiled ropes of pearl
To drape her ivory breasts.
Did any of all this add to her beauty?
Gazing at her adorned, his head ached.
But then he stripped everything off her
And his brain swam, his eyes
Dazzled to contemplate
The greater beauty of her naked beauty.
He laid her on his couch,
Bedded her in pillows
And soft sumptuous weaves of Tyrian purple
As if she might delight in the luxury.
Then, lying beside her, he embraced her
And whispered in her ear every endearment.
The day came
For the festival of Venus – an uproar
Of processions through all Cyprus.
Snowy heifers, horns gilded, kneeled
Under the axe, at the altars.
Pygmalion had completed his offerings.
And now he prayed, watching the smoke
Of the incense hump shapelessly upwards.
He hardly dared to think
What he truly wanted
As he formed the words: ‘O Venus,
You gods have power
To give whatever you please. O Venus
Send me a wife. And let her resemble –’
He was afraid
To ask for his ivory woman’s very self –
‘Let her resemble
The woman I have carved in ivory.’
Venus was listening
To a million murmurs over the whole island.
She swirled in the uplift of incense
Like a great fish suddenly bulging
into a tide-freshened pool.
She heard every word
Pygmalion had not dared to pronounce.
She came near. She poised above him –
And the altar fires drank her assent
Like a richer fuel.
They flared up, three times,
Tossing horns of flame.
Pygmalion hurried away home
To his ivory obsession. He burst in,
Fevered with deprivation,
Fell on her, embraced her, and kissed her
Like one collapsing in a desert
To drink at a dribble from a rock.
But his hand sprang off her breast
As if stung.
He lowered it again, incredulous
At the softness, the warmth
Under his fingers. Warm
And soft as warm soft wax –
But alive
With the elastic of life.
He knew
Giddy as he was with longing and prayers
This must be hallucination.
He jerked himself back to his senses
And prodded the ivory. He squeezed it.
But it was no longer ivory.
Her pulse throbbed under his thumb.
Then Pygmalion’s legs gave beneath him.
On his knees
He sobbed his thanks to Venus. And there
Pressed his lips
On lips that were alive.
She woke to his kisses and blushed
To find herself kissing
One who kissed her,
And opened her eyes for the first time
To the light and her lover together.
Venus blessed the wedding
That she had so artfully arranged.
And after nine moons Pygmalion’s bride
Bore the child, Paphos,
Who gave his name to the whole island.
OVID’S DEFENCE
Tristia, Book I
Ovid
Translated by A. D. Melville, 1992
In AD 8, Emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis (modern Constanţa, in Romania) on the shores of the Black Sea for reasons which are now unclear. The poet blamed his miserable fate on carmen et error – ‘a poem and a mistake’. The poem was his Ars Amatoria, a scandalous guide to love and love-making. Augustus had embarked upon a moral crusade against adultery in Rome, and Ovid’s text did not sit well with the legislation passed to revive old-fashioned values. Ovid here embarks upon his journey and pens a heart-breaking self-defence, which forms part of a longer work of Tristia (‘sad poems’). Whatever ‘mistake’ Ovid made, it was not forgiven, for he died in exile in AD 17 or 18.
I do not plough the main in greed for endless
Riches and trade, my wares from shore to shore,
Nor, as in student days, do I seek Athens
And Asian towns and places seen before.
Nor do I sail to Alexander’s city
To see the merry Nile’s delightful strand.
Why I want easy winds—who would believe it?—
Is that my sails shall reach Sarmatia’s land.
To reach the Black, unlucky, Sea I’ve made my
Vows—and complain my flight from home’s so slow!
I pray my journey’s short—to see Tomitans!
Where in the world that place is, I don’t know.
If you gods love me, quell these ghastly billows,
Bless my poor ship, and keep the waters flat.
Or if you hate me, steer me where I’m ordered,
Part of my punishment’s the place I’m at.
Drive my ship, you swift winds—here I’ve no business—
Why do my sails hanker for Italy?
Caesar forbids. Whom he expels, don’t hamper;
My face the Black Sea now must surely see.
Those orders—I deserve them. Crimes that Caesar
Condemned I don’t deem proper to deny.
But if gods aren’t deceived by human actions,
You know my fault is free from villainy.
And, if you know, if a mistake has wrecked me,
If I was foolish, never criminal,
If I accepted Caesar’s public edicts
And backed his house as is allowed to all,
If, in his rule, I sang good times and offered
Incense to Caesar and his family,
If that was my true mind; ye Gods, have mercy!
If not, may I be sunk in the deep sea!
Am I deceived or is the cloudbank thinning,
The ocean changing and its anger laid?
This is no chance. You, called to hear my pledges,
Who can’t be duped, are coming to my aid.
[…]
When in my thoughts that tragic night is pictured
Which in the City formed my final hour,
That night on which I left so much I treasured,
Now once again from my sad eyes tears shower.
The dawn was near on which by Caesar’s order
From Italy’s last bounds I must depart.
No more delay! My mind was numb: for proper
Arrangements I had neither time nor heart.
No thought of choosing slaves or a companion,
No kit or clothes an exile ought to wear.
I was as stunned as someone struck by lightning,
Who lives, yet of his life is unaware.
But when my pain itself cleared my mind’s stormcloud,
And senses in
the end some strength regained,
I spoke to my sad friends last words of parting:
So many once—now one or two remained.
I was in tears. My wife, in tears more bitter,
Held me, her blameless sheets wet endlessly.
My daughter, far away on shores of Libya,
Could not be told the fate befallen me.
Look where you might, it seemed a noisy funeral;
You heard the sounds of grief and sorrow swell
Inside the house, with tears in every corner,
As men and women grieved, and slaves as well
If great events may be compared with little,
Troy had the same appearance when she fell.
The voices now of men and dogs were quiet,
And through the night the moon was riding high.
Gazing at her and by her light discerning
The Capitol (my home in vain hard by),
‘Ye Powers’, I said, ‘whose dwellings are my neighbours,
Ye shrines that now my eyes must never see,
And gods, whom I must leave, of Rome’s tall city,
Take for all time this last farewell from me;
‘And though I take my shield too late and wounded,
Yet free from hatred this my banishment,
And tell that man divine what error duped me,
That, my fault deemed no crime, he may relent,
And what you know my punisher may know too;
If his godhead’s appeased, I’ll be content.’
I made that prayer to gods above; my wife made
Adore, but her sobs cut short the words she said.
She even lay before the hearth, hair flowing;
Her trembling lips touched embers cold and dead.
She poured her words to Household Gods unhearing;
No help to him for whom her tears were shed.
The hasting night allowed no time to linger;
Around the Northern pole the Wain had rolled.
What could I do? I loved my country dearly,
But that night was my last—go, I was told.
How often I said when someone tried to hurry me,
Why rush? Think whence and where you’re hastening.
How often I said, quite falsely, I had fixed on
The time convenient for travelling.
Thrice I was on the doorstep, thrice was called back;
In kindness to my thoughts my feet were slow.
Often ‘Goodbye’, and then again much talking
And kisses given as if I meant to go.
Often I gave the same instructions, fooling
Myself, and on my dear ones turned my gaze.
‘Why haste?’, I said, ‘it’s Scythia I’m sent to,
Rome I must leave—both reasons for delays.