There is no evidence outside his own poetry that Ovid ever went into exile, which is strange given the prominence of the poet. We might have expected some later historian to mention the exile. There is in fact a view, far from an orthodoxy, but not in my view beyond belief, that Ovid never went into exile, on the Black Sea or anywhere else. In this line of thinking he could have been living in Rome, a villa on the Tiber perhaps, heading in the summer for the trendy Bay of Naples or the cool of his native Sulmona, in the mountains ninety miles north of Rome. This possibility does not need to be true in order to see Ovid’s exile poems for what they are, poetic constructions, practicing the essence of art that he—and Dylan—knew long before Rimbaud said it: “I is an other.” Ovid’s exile poems are exercises in the genre of exile poetry, artistic creations of the voice of one suffering from solitude in a hostile, unwelcoming setting at the ends of the earth. That is how and why Dylan was attracted to them as he created the masks and voices of the songs on Modern Times that look back to the Roman poet.
MEMORY, SONG, AND NOSTALGIA
Ovid’s poems are also powerful in the nostalgia they evoke, a nostalgia for the city he has lost, in reality or in his imagination, nostalgia also for absent friends and family. The Greek root means pain, algos for return home, nostos. The Odyssey was one of a number of poems about the return home, or failure to return home, of the Greek leaders after they sacked Troy. As a group these poems were called Nostoi. In one of the affectionate poems addressed to his wife, Ovid directed his solitary song to the stars and the night sky:
Turn your glistening faces on my lady, and tell me
Whether she thinks of me or not. Alas,
why seek the answer to what’s only too apparent?
Why do
my hopes slide into fear and doubt? Believe
what’s as you would want, quit agonizing over
what’s secure: bet safe on a safe bet,
and what the gleaming pole stars cannot tell you,
now tell yourself in veridic utterance:
That she, who’s your prime concern, has never forgotten
Your memory, that she cherishes your name
(all that’s left her of you), dwells ever on your features
as though you were present; and though far away,
if you still love, still loves you
—Ovid, Tristia 4.3, tr. Green
Clearly this nostalgia and play on memory and forgetting, absence and uncertainty, is what gives Ovid’s poems the very universal human appeal that they have for readers, Dylan included. Two examples from “Workingman’s Blues # 2” both come straight from Ovid, who at Black Sea Letters 4.6.42–43 has “Them I’ll forget, / but you I’ll remember always,” contrasting his friend Brutus with other friends who have betrayed him. But in both cases Ovid is only the jumping-off point for something more intense and developed. So Dylan gives us “Them, I will forget / You, I’ll remember always.” The verse, as sung on the album, then continues with a reiteration of the nostalgia and remembering: “Old memories of you to me have clung / You’ve wounded me with words,” then ends enigmatically, suggesting trouble, unspecified and mysterious, between the speaker and his addressee: “Gonna have to straighten out your tongue / It’s all true, everything you have heard.”
The second borrowing, or theft, of Dylan picks up on Ovid’s anxiety about the possibility of his wife’s forgetting him, since he has had no letter from her:
May the gods grant . . .
that I’m wrong in thinking you’ve forgotten me!
—Tristia 5.13.18
Dylan converts this into a nostalgic reflection as the sun goes down and he wishes someone from the past were with him to see:
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?
—“Workingman’s Blues #2”
When Dylan reworks Ovid’s line in “Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking / That you have forgotten me?” what we have is what we have always had in Dylan, the world gone wrong for the lover. “Something’s out of whack,” as he sings on “Nettie Moore.” That quality was what he discovered in Ovid, but it has been a feature of his songwriting from the beginning. Much of his genius has been to capture the pain of separation in space and time. That is the essence of folk music, and of the blues, in which memory of the past is what helps create song. From “Boots of Spanish Leather” back in 1963 and in many songs since, thoughts of the absent lover and the fear of being forgotten, or the pain that accompanies memory of someone or something, person, or place, is what goes into making the song so timeless. There is a reality behind that song, the well-known fact that Bob Dylan wrote it when he was separated from his girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
She was the Muse who gave him that song, but the song that Dylan created from that reality is the same even if we know nothing of the circumstances of its composition, even if the reality did not exist. The song alternates its first six verses between the singer who is left behind and the woman who is “sailing away in the morning” and asks what she can send him “from across the sea”—from Spain, it turns out, not Italy, where Suze Rotolo had gone in the summer of 1962. His request evokes the response that no gift can compensate for her absence: “Just carry yourself to me unspoiled / From across that lonesome ocean,” the adjective “lonesome” transferred from him to the ocean that separates them. The word comes back again in his voice later in the song: “I got a letter on a lonesome day.” He settles in the end for something she can send back, “Spanish boots of Spanish leather,” a resolution of sorts. Her last verse comes in the middle of the song—he sings the last four—as she asks the question for the last time:
That I might be gone a long time
And it’s only that I’m askin’
Is there something I can send you to remember me by
To make your time more easy passin’
His response then gets to the heart of the matter, the lover’s nostalgia, for which there is no sufficient recompense:
Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow
The beauty of this song came cross when he sang it, still a twenty-one-year-old, at the Town Hall concert in New York on April 12, 1963, as on November 6, 2013, when he seems to have bid it farewell in performance at Rome, in the country where he wrote it.
The other song Dylan partially wrote in Italy in 1962 or 1963 was “Girl of the North Country,” with its framing third line in the first and last verses: “Remember me to one who lives there,” followed by a reaching for the past that is gone but not forgotten, “She once was a true love of mine,” along with the juxtaposed lines ending the third and beginning the fourth verse: “That’s the way I remember her best / I’m a wonderin’ if she remembers me at all.” The melody and much of the beauty of the song come from its evoking of “Scarborough Fair,” the British folk song Dylan had heard in London at the end of 1962, but the lyrics are all Dylan and are what bring this song to life. Similar evocations of the past run throughout the song list of Dylan:
“Idiot Wind,” 1975
I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don’t look into mine.
But then his memory returns:
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory.
“Isis,” 1976
I still can’t remember all the best things she said
and:
I still can remember the way that you smiled.
In “I’ll Remember You,” 1985, each of the three verses opens and closes with the title line.
“Most of the Time,” 1989
Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine.
“Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” 1997
Every day your memory grows dimmer
It doesn’t haunt me like it did before
“Til I
Fell in Love with You,” 1997
When I’m gone you will remember my name. . . .
I’m thinking about that girl who won’t be back no more.
“Cold Irons Bound,” 1997
I’m gonna remember forever the joy that we shared.
“Workingman’s Blues #2,” 2006
The place I love best is a sweet memory
“My Wife’s Home Town,” 2009
Well there’s plenty to remember, plenty to forget
I still can remember the day we met
And finally, Dylan comes out and sings it as the leitmotif becomes the actual theme in Together Through Life’s “Forgetful Heart” from 2009, cowritten with Robert Hunter—a song frequently performed until Dylan replaced it with some of the American Songbook numbers that it so resembles and in hindsight was pointing toward:
Forgetful heart
Lost your power of recall
Every little detail
You don’t remember at all
The times we knew
Who would remember better then you. . . .
Any number of examples could be added: “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Sara,” “Shooting Star,” “Red River Shore,” all songs about the pain of remembering, songs whose beauty attracts us into the lyrics as we share in the aesthetics of remembering. Dylan did not need Ovid in order to bring out the nostalgia of remembering; indeed most of these instances above are from songs written before he read Green’s 1994 translation. But in Ovid he found a kindred spirit, and that is why he took on the persona of the Roman poet precisely by integrating him into his own verse.
OVID BECOMES ODYSSEUS
Like Dylan, Ovid was a trickster, and he was also attracted to Odysseus (“Ulysses” for the Romans), the ultimate trickster and lyre-playing teller of tales true and tall: “Sing to me, Muse, of a man full of many twists and turns,” as the Odyssey begins, a fine description of Odysseus, Ovid, and Bob Dylan. The exiled Ovid humorously compared himself to Odysseus in the exile poems that Dylan reused in Modern Times:
He wandered for years, but only
on the short haul between Ithaca and Troy
He had his loyal companions
His faithful crew; my comrades deserted me
At the time of my banishment. He was driven from his homeland,
A cheerful victor: I was driven from mine—
Fugitive, exile, victim. My home was not some Greek island,
Ithaca, Samos—to leave them is no great loss—
But the City that from its seven hills scans the world’s orbit,
Rome, centre of empire, seat of the gods.
I was crushed by a god, with no help in my troubles
He had that warrior-goddess [Athena] at his side.
What’s more the bulk of his troubles are fictitious,
Whereas mine remain anything but myth.
—Tristia 1.5.59–80
Really? This last line could be truth or untruth, with either being well and good. By the end of the fourth book of these poems, Ovid takes the comparison even further and has more or less become Odysseus, as he relives the journey:
By sea and land I suffered as many misfortunes
As the stars between the unseen and the visible poles.
Through long wanderings driven, I at length made landfall
On this coast where native bowmen roam; and here,
Though the din of neighbouring arms surrounds me, I still lighten
My sad fate as best I can
with the composition of verse: though there is none to listen
this is how I spend, and beguile, my days.
—Tristia 4.10.107–14.
Some may hear in the final line the last verse of “Pay in Blood,” the 2012 song from Tempest: “This is how I spend my days / I came to bury, not to praise”—with the clear addition from another voice in Dylan’s tradition, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I come to bury Caesar not to praise him.” But moving from Modern Times to Tempest, we also move on to another development.
DYLAN BECOMES ODYSSEUS
“[N]o one can touch you, much less beat your distance!”
—Athena to Odysseus
Ovid “transfigured” himself into Odysseus, as Dylan would say, and Dylan, who had taken on the voice of Ovid on Modern Times, then followed suit and on Tempest got himself back to where it all began—with an intertextual brilliance that shows exactly how he sees his art and how to conjure up the long-dead souls of the poets he has been reading. Sometime around 2010, Dylan in performance abandoned the lyrics of the second-to-last verse of “Workingman’s Blues #2,” the one in which his voice borrowed from Ovid:
Dylan
Ovid
In you, my friend, I find no blame
You wanna look in my eyes, please do
No one can ever claim
That I took up arms against you
No one
can claim that I ever took up arms against you
In the performances of the last few years, as in the official text of Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012, the verse is gone, completely rewritten:
I’ll be back home in a month or two
When the frost is on the vine
I’ll punch my spear right straight through
Half-ways down your spine
I’ll lift up my arms to the starry skies
And pray the fugitive’s prayer
I’m guessing tomorrow the sun will rise
I hope the final judgment’s fair.
No sign of Ovid, except perhaps in the “fugitive’s prayer.” Instead Dylan, perhaps led there by Ovid, had gone back to the Odyssey, with whose hero, “the man of twists and turns,” he has long associated, specifically to Robert Fagles’s 1996 Penguin translation of Homer’s poem. Dylanologist Scott Warmuth gathered some of the Homeric intertexts, but what needs explaining is what these quotes are doing in Dylan’s songs. Dylan transfigured is here quoting and channeling Odysseus, from Book 10 of the Odyssey, on the island of the witch and temptress Circe—“you too have shared a bed with the wrong woman,” says Dylan in the Nobel lecture in June 2017 as he comes out and compares himself to Odysseus. The Greek hero is telling his host, King Alcinous, of going out to reconnoiter and killing a stag, dinner for his hungry crew, that some god sent his way:
Just bounding out of the timber when I hit him
Square in the backbone, halfway down the spine
And my bronze spear went punching clean through—
He dropped in the dust, groaning, gasping out his breath
In the second-to-last verse of the great 2012 song “Early Roman Kings,” the Roman kings undergo one of a number of transformations, and things get very strange:
I’ll strip you of life, strip you of breath
Ship you down to the house of death
One day you will ask for me
There’ll be no one else that you’ll want to see
Bring down my fiddle, tune up my strings
Gonna break it wide open like the early Roman kings.
The singer utters the taunt the Greek hero hurls at the Cyclops he has just blinded in Book 9 of the Odyssey: “Here was my parting shot,” Odysseus tells Alcinous:
Would to god I could strip you
of life and breath and ship you down to the House of Death.
As always when he means the intertextuality to be noticed, there is no question about its source. The line that Dylan adds—“There’ll be no one else that you’ll want to see”—cleverly represents Dylan’s own free expansion of the Homeric situation. By slipping in the words “no one,” Dylan points to the name Odysseus had given to the Cyclops, one of his many untruths.
Nor is the singer’s identification with the hero limited to this one song. In Book 5 of the Odyssey, the ship of Odysseus is wrecked by the storm that Poseidon (Neptune) sends in revenge for Odysseus’s blinding of the Cyclops. This storm is the ultimate source of all the storm scenes in the Western literary tradition, includin
g the one that opens Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Asked if the 2012 album was named after that play, Dylan replied in the negative: his was called Tempest, not The Tempest, a different title.
Odysseus, with the help of his patron goddess Pallas Athena (“Minerva” for the Romans), survives the storm, arrives at the island of the Phaeacians, and is challenged by one of the local princes to compete in the games the king is holding in his honor: “You’re no athlete. I see that!” Odysseus silences the younger men with a discus throw that far surpasses their efforts, but only after delivering a speech of admonition to him. The speech obviously appealed to Dylan, an older man silencing his younger critics by demonstrationg his superior strength. He borrowed five lines from the speech, scattering them across three songs of Tempest:
“You, you’re a reckless fool, I see that”
Odyssey 8.192
“You’re a reckless fool, I can see it in your eyes”
“Tin Angel”
“A god can crown his words with beauty, charm”
Odyssey 8.196
“but there’s not a bit of grace to crown his words”
Odyssey 8.202
“She has crowned my soul with grace”
“Narrow Way”
“Just like you, my fine, handsome friend”
Odyssey 8.203
“Just like you, my handsome friend”
“Pay in Blood”
“But the mind inside is worthless”
Odyssey 8.205
“He’s a gutless ape with a worthless mind”
“Tin Angel”
“despite so many blows”
Odyssey 8.213
“How I’ve survived so many blows”
“Pay in Blood”
Why Bob Dylan Matters Page 18