From nauplion@charm.net Sun Mar 26 04:00:28 2000 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id EAA20496 for ; Sun, 26 Mar 2000 04:00:27 -0800 Received: from fellspt.charm.net (root@fellspt.charm.net [199.0.70.29]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id EAA22073 for ; Sun, 26 Mar 2000 04:00:26 -0800 Received: from charm.net (coretel-116-213.charm.net [209.143.116.213]) by fellspt.charm.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA12114 for ; Sun, 26 Mar 2000 07:00:14 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <38DDFB3E.4360FA9B@charm.net> Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 06:57:55 -0500 From: Diana Wright X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-DIAL (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en,el,tr MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "classics@u.washington.edu" Subject: From Today's Sunday Times Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Ovid Metamorphosed edited by Philip Terry Chatto £14.99 pp250 LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT Shameless libertine, god-mocker, provoker of imperial displeasure, exile: there is much about Ovid the man to make him interesting to the modern mind, and even more about Ovid the poet. His Ars Amatoria is shocking, funny, cool in every sense. His Metamorphoses, with its vision of a cosmos in flux in which a man, a wolf, a woman, a stone, are all unstable phenomena, each capable of becoming another, relates with ease to our modern sense of the mutability of all matter. Its reformulation of myths already ancient in Ovid's lifetime matches postmodern practices of appropriation. Above all, its presentation of human identity as contingent, precarious and capable of drastic change rings true in a new age of uncertainty. Ovid Metamorphosed complements the poetry anthology After Ovid, published in 1994 (which started Ted Hughes on his magisterial Tales from Ovid). Now it's the prose-writers' turn. One of the most powerful stories is the one that stays closest to its source. M J Fitzgerald's version of the appalling tale of Tereus and Philomela, of the wicked king who raped his sister-in-law and cut out her tongue so that she could not tell on him, follows the outline of Ovid's narrative while amplifying its starkness and embellishing it with details variously terrible or gorgeous. Other writers use Ovid only as a launchpad for their own imaginative flight. Marina Warner's Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, hatches her twin babies out of two blue eggs and consigns them to the care of a she-wolf, as though her story was itself in a process of metamorphosis, changing into that of Leda and her swan-children, or of Romulus and Remus, the hybrid deriving a trebled vigour from its multiplicity of sources. Several authors update their chosen plots. Patricia Duncker's Underworld is a milieu of sex-clubs and organised crime, her nymph a computer-literate hooker. Margaret Atwood places the Cumaean Sibyl in a luxurious apartment block overlooking the Pacific, with daffodils outside to remind her of the Fields of Asphodel. The reason her pronouncements used to be so gnomic, she explains, was that her priests couldn't hear what she was saying inside her bottle. Modern microphones have overcome that problem, and her powers of foresight have allowed her to do very nicely on the stock market. Variously playful, sexy or frightening, each of the stories brings something fresh to the myth it retells, but Joyce Carol Oates's variation on the Actaeon story is outstanding. A huntsman, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds after he had inadvertently caught sight of Diana stripped to bathe in a river. Oates relocates the action in the grim society of a Nova Scotia fishing village. A drunken sailor sets upon his wife in the open street and strips her - middle-aged, fat, grey-haired, unlovely as she is - to her ugly underwear. Their six sons, big, hard men with their father's capacity for violence, turn on him and avenge her humiliation. The reinterpretation of the myth is informed by modern feminist thinking about the insult implicit in some acts of looking, but the story's highly charged language and its urgent passions feel ancient. Driven to its ghastly conclusion on long-drawn-out, hurtling sentences, it has an exhilarating, harsh power. Two other fine contributions are not stories but essays. A S Byatt uses the myth of Arachne, changed into a spider after challenging Athena to a tapestry-making contest, as the central node of a marvellously intricate web of reflections on spiders (literary and real), on girls' education, on weaving, on Velazquez's painting of weavers, and on the transformations involved in the act of creation. Gabriel Josipovici writes about Ceyx and Alcyone, who loved and died and came together again as kingfishers, and about his mother, who loved the story, who has died, and with whom he does not believe he will be reunited because death "is the ultimate source of metamorphosis". The latter insight, implicit in many of these stories, goes a long way towards explaining the longevity of Ovid's appeal. Those tales, superficially so quaint and peculiar, of people changed into shrubs or fountains by capricious gods, all address a theme, mortality, which is the one constant in a perpetually mutating world. Available at the Sunday Times Bookshop special price of £12.99 inc p&p on 0870 165 8585 .