by Ovid
2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Translation copyright © 1993 by James Michie
Introduction copyright © 2002 by David Malouf
Biographical note copyright © 2002 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This translation was originally published in 1993 by the Folio Society, London.
This edition published by arrangement with the translator.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-80183-8
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-76117-1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.
[Ars amatoria. English & Latin]
The art of love / Publius Ovidius Naso; translated by James Michie; introduction by David Malouf.— 2002 Modern Library pbk. ed., Bilingual ed.
p. cm.
Translation of Ars amatoria.
ISBN 978-0-375-76117-1
1. Didactic poetry, Latin—Translations into English. 2. Erotic poetry, Latin—Translations into English. 3. Seduction—Poetry. I. Michie, James. II. Title.
PA6522.A8 M6 2002
871′.01—dc21
2002070264
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
OVID
The great classical poet Ovid was born Publius Ovidius Naso in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), Italy, on March 20, 43 B.C. Although biographical information is scant—and based largely on Ovid’s autobiographical poetry—it is known that Ovid’s father had the wealth and position to anticipate a political career for his son. Ovid was educated in Rome, where he studied rhetoric, and traveled in Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. Reluctantly, he held minor official posts upon his return, but poetry became increasingly important to him. The contemporary works of Virgil and Horace had spurred Ovid’s imagination, and he decided to give up public life and begin writing.
Ovid is believed to have written his first surviving work, the Amores (The Loves), between 25 and 20 B.C. The Amores consisted of short poems of 86 to 106 lines in proper elegiac couplets. With its simple and obvious theme, the Amores was a successful stepping-stone for the young poet, and it was republished in a shorter second edition years later.
At roughly the same time, Ovid composed the Heroides (Heroines), a collection of fifteen imagined letters from famous women of Greek mythology to absent or abandoned lovers. Though it is uncertain when the Heroides was written, some scholars date it after the Amores because Ovid again utilizes the form of the love elegy, but augments it with dramatic monologue and mythical themes. The influence of Greek tragedy on Ovid’s writing was significant, and he wrote his own version of the Medea, perhaps around the time he worked on the Heroides.
Building on some of the themes of the Amores, Ovid turned next to the composition of three poems on the art of seduction. The first of these didactic poems was likely the Medicamina Faciei (On Cosmetics), a short poem, of which only a fragment remains, that professes very technical knowledge on how to cultivate physical beauty. The second and more substantial work, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), was probably finished between 2 B.C. and A.D. 2 and published in three volumes—two addressed to men, one to women. This ambitious and very popular handbook taught readers how to find, catch, and hold on to lovers, and it highlighted Ovid’s lack of reverence for Emperor Augustus’ strict moral codes. While finishing the third book of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid wrote a follow-up poem titled Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love). In this recantation of sorts, Ovid offers cures for falling out of love in the spirited and burlesque style of the Ars Amatoria.
Soon, Ovid began exploring different literary themes and forms. Around A.D. 1–4, he worked on the Fasti (Calendar), a long poem consisting of twelve books of elegiac couplets that describe the origins of Roman religious festivals and holidays. The six surviving books of the Fasti chronicle the first six months of the year and are filled with bits of astronomical detail as well as patriotic enthusiasm. During this period, Ovid also began work on what is perhaps his most famous work, the Metamorphoses (Transformations). Totaling fifteen books and nearly twelve thousand lines, this long poem was inspired largely by Virgil’s Aeneid. Ovid’s epic, written in hexameter verse, sweeps from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar in a variety of historical and mythological tales. By A.D. 8, Ovid had completed the poem; final revisions, however, were left unfinished when Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from Rome that year (some claim that the hedonistic themes of Ars Amatoria were to blame). Exiled to the harsh Black Sea port of Tomis (now Constanta, Romania), Ovid continued writing and hoped for reprieve.
Ovid produced three major poems from exile: Tristia (Poems of Sadness), Ibis, and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from Pontus). It is believed that the Tristia, a set of fifty autobiographical poems in five books, was written first, between A.D. 8 and A.D. 12. In the Tristia, he returns to the first person and to the use of elegiac couplets as he woefully describes his journey into exile. The undated Ibis is a lengthy imputation directed at an anonymous enemy in which Ovid again shows the breadth of his mythological learning. The Epistulae ex Ponto consists of forty-six poems in four books written between A.D. 12 and A.D. 16. Like the Tristia, the Epistulae recounts the miseries of life in Tomis, but in this work Ovid addresses his melancholy “letters” to specific people in Rome—his wife, his friends, and the emperor—and appeals for aid and sympathy. These compositions failed to move Augustus, and although Ovid was popular among Romans, he remained in exile until his death in late A.D. 17 or early A.D. 18.
Ovid’s adoption of Greek themes and meter into the Latin language, his mastery of classical mythology, and his technical precision are but a few of the reasons many consider him one of history’s most brilliant poets. His influence on Western literature is immeasurable.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION by David Malouf
Dedication
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
THE ART OF LOVE: [ENGLISH]
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
THE ART OF LOVE: [LATIN]
LIBER PRIMUS
LIBER SECUNDUS
LIBER TERTIUS
INTRODUCTION
David Malouf
The Ars Amatoria presents itself as a didactic poem in the manner of Virgil’s Georgics. But if we expect it to be solemn and improving, we will from the start be confounded. Its subject is neither farming nor military tactics, hunting, horsemanship, seafaring, rhetoric, or any other practical and socially useful activity. In the topsy-turvy “modern” world that Ovid introduces us to, the flaneur’s world of cruising the streets of a vast cosmopolitan city, of shopping and partygoing, of theaters, taverns, temples, synagogues, colonnades, racetracks, piazzas, Ovid’s subject is the entirely unsolemn and to this point unconsidered art (or so the poet would have us believe) of getting and keeping a lover.
Highly colored, allusive, audaciously tongue-in-cheek, the Ars Amatoria is from first line to last a series of surprising and provocative reversals, not only of established literary conventions but of anything that even the most alert and knowing reader might expect.
Comic disproportion is its method. Petty concerns are illustrated with large examples, great matters with ones that are trivial. Moral tags are misapplied, old tales are introduced
on the most tenuous pretext and given new twists, arguments are playfully exaggerated until they collapse under their own weight—it is the playfulness, not the argument, that we are meant to approve and be impressed by, psychological analysis, as in the recounting of Pasiphae’s passion for the bull, pursued to the point where it becomes comically absurd. Seriousness is at every turn averted, but with so disarming a mixture of slyness and candor, and so much infectious joy in the doing of it, that to charge the poet with crime—lèse-majesté or libertinism or the corruption of youth—would be, to steal an image from a later Augustan, like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Is this why it took Augustus so long to accuse and punish Ovid?
In A.D. 8, a good seven years after the poem first made its spectacular appearance, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, a place from which, despite many appeals for clemency, he was never to return. The Ars Amatoria is cited as one part of his offense, and it is not difficult to see in the poem what the emperor might have found offensive.
At its center is a character that was to have a long history in poems of this kind, and not only in Latin: the modern lover—the carefree, pleasure-loving man-about-town who has dropped out of the world of serious civic duty and become a hero not of the battlefield or the law courts but of the bedchamber, where the only “virtue” he recognizes is play. The poem really is subversive—not in the challenge it offers to the new morality, or because it has the effrontery to claim for the lover the same “professional” status as the farmer, the soldier, the holder of high public office, but because it makes the role it creates so invitingly attractive; most of all, because it establishes the lover/poet as the emperor of an alternative and privately constituted state. As one of Ovid’s later incarnations puts it: “She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.”1 The poem’s ostensible subject, the art of love, is a decoy. The real subject is the poet himself. To be a poet—to be the poet Ovid—is to be a world unto yourself. The emperor’s world, the great world of Rome, is simply the scene of operations, at the most, “material.” That is the immodest claim. No wonder Augustus felt he had to act.
Around this lively and youthfully impulsive dramatis persona (the poet himself, we should remember, was in his middle forties), Ovid organizes a spectacular ado, a series of brilliant sideshows in which what is on display is the poet’s delight in his own talent: the range of his erudition, his verbal dexterity and wit, his inventiveness in painting scenes of sweeping grandeur but also, since he has what we would now call a cinematic eye, illuminating close-ups. The poet can take literally anything into his poem in the assurance that what will hold it together is his own mercurial presence, as guide, joker, confidant, provocateur, storyteller, picture maker, mock scholar, mock sage, magician, stage manager.
At one moment he is leading us on a conducted tour of the city’s sights and monuments—with time out to comment on the usefulness of each as a pickup place. In the next he is playing knucklebones or spillikins, or recommending hairstyles or footwear or health resorts, or diverting us with old tales retold, of Pasiphae and her bull, of the birdman Daedalus, of Mars and Venus, Cephalus and Procris, and throwing out hints along the way to a whole company of poets and playwrights and novelists to come: to the school of English poets we call Metaphysical, who will find in his unexpected juxtapositions, his yoking together of disparate worlds and objects, the way to a new kind of imagery; to Molière for Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes; to the long line of eighteenth-century epistolary novelists; even perhaps, in his proposal that the safest way of transmitting a message is to write it on the back of the messenger, to a twentieth-century filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, for The Pillow Book.
It is the protean inclusiveness of the Ars Amatoria, its joy in the variousness and contrariety of things, their lovely capacity for surprise and paradox, that has made it such a treasure-house of literary tropes and genres, such a gallery of pictures that need only the stroke of a brush to make them actual paintings. Titian, Rubens, Poussin, and others had only to turn to the verbal pictures here—Bacchus in a chariot drawn by tigers, a drunken Silenus falling sideways off his ass, Cephalus stretched out in a grassy clearing—to discover the program, down to the smallest detail, for some of the greatest Renaissance and Baroque paintings.
One of Ovid’s most sympathetic qualities for those who came later was his own sense of lateness—of being, as he must have seen it, postclassical. But what he also demonstrated, and by brilliant example, was that all we need to make old material new is freshness of invention and a previously unconsidered point of view.
Walking along the shore with Calypso, Ulysses maps the Trojan plain for her by drawing with a stick in the sand. So Ovid embarks, once again, on the well-known story. But Ulysses has barely got started on his “epic” when a wave sweeps up the beach and, in a wonderfully dramatic and affecting image, Troy and all the old world of gods and heroes is once more obliterated.
In the retelling of the Daedalus story, one of the most extended and fully imagined in the poem, an aerial view of the Greek islands Naxos, Paros, and Delos, in itself a remarkable piece of imagining, is momentarily suspended while Ovid shows us his two birdmen from another angle, through the eyes now of a supernumerary angler on the beach below. More than fifteen centuries later, Brueghel would appropriate this extraordinary image for a famous painting, and four centuries later again, W. H. Auden for an equally famous poem.
For the ancient reader, any suggestion of solemn intent would have been subverted by the poet’s choice of meter—not hexameters, as the didactic poem traditionally demanded, but elegiac couplets (hexameter followed by pentameter) of the sort used in the refined, playfully erotic poems Ovid had previously produced in his Amores. James Michie’s irregular couplets, with their unpredictable rhymes and quick-footed shifts of register and perspective, splendidly re-create the lightness of the original and its careless charm. We know this voice. It is the authentic voice of Ovid as it has been transmitted to us by a long line of English poets who, in localizing it, discovered their own:
Since ther’s no helpe, Come let us kisse and part,
Nay, I have done: You get no more of Me.…2
or
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?3
or
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.4
Michie is able to evoke an Ovid who seems so immediately present, so racily up to date, because the persona he created has turned out, by a kind of miracle, to be timeless.
To the wandering scholars and minnesingers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to the authors of The Romance of the Rose, and to Chaucer in the fourteenth, Ovid seemed like a man of modern sensibility, a contemporary out of his time, and he appeared that way also to the poets of the English Renaissance. His dedication to what Chapman called “Ovid’s banquet of sense” made him a natural alternative to Petrarch and the Petrarchans. It was his joy in the senses, in color and action, most of all in the self, that he offered Marlowe, who translated the Amores while he was still a student at Oxford. For Francis Meres, writing in 1598, Shakespeare was the “sweet witty soul” of Ovid mellifluously reborn. Thomas Heywood and Thomas Lodge both made translations of the Ars Amatoria. In France it is what a rejuvenated Ronsard turned to in the second and third books of his Amours. And when Goethe, in the fifth of his Roman Elegies, taps out his hexameters on the back of a sleeping girl, it is surely Ovid who is there in the shadows behind him, as it must have been Ovid, as much as any of the Italian painters, or Winckelmann with his promise of “classical ground,” who drew the great Northerner into that area of his nature that he called Italy.
Ovid represents the playful, irreverent element in our culture that, once a place has been made for it, we cannot do without. We have only to hear his voice in our own everyday language, as we do here in James Michie’s translation, to recognize
a lost but living contemporary whose boldness is a challenge to our own, and the charm of whose companionship is, as it always was, irresistible.
DAVID MALOUF is the author of fourteen books, including An Imaginary Life and the international bestseller The Great World. His work has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize, among other accolades. He lives in Tuscany and Australia.
* * *
1 John Donne, “The Sunne Rising.”
2 Michael Drayton, Sonnet 61, “Idea.”
3 John Donne, “The Good-morrow.”
4 John Donne, “Elegie. To His Mistris Going to Bed.”
TO JAKE AND DROGO
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Publius Ovidius Naso (the “Nose” no doubt reflects some distinguished ancestor) was born in 43 B.C. of a long-standing equestrian family. Though his birthplace was ninety miles east of the city, he belonged therefore to the second highest social class in Rome. As a teenager he was sent to Rome for a suitable education, which at the time heavily stressed the art of rhetoric, or the sophisticated gift of the gab which could lead a clever lad to the lucrative profession of an advocate in law; that is what his father hoped for, and that was the example set by his talented elder brother. It soon became clear to Ovid that, though he enjoyed the literary and emotional side of rhetoric, sheer argumentation bored him. He was writing poetry, and wanted to be a poet. His father, as fathers usually are, was aghast, but Ovid had his way. At about twenty, he did the equivalent of the Grand Tour, studying in Athens and visiting Sicily and the cities of Asia Minor. Like Catullus, in the same year he both gazed at the ruins of Troy and lost a beloved brother.
After his return to Rome he held some minor public posts, but his passion remained poetry: he made friends with Horace and Propertius, he mourned the early death of Tibullus, he saw Virgil but never spoke to him. Before long his verses were circulating and being publicly recited. First came the Amores, a series of clever love poems, most of them addressed to a probably fictional mistress, Corinna; next the Heroides, imaginary letters written by heroines of legend to their lovers or husbands; and then the Ars Amatoria, which brought him to the peak of popularity.