Having Their Say

In May 2018, at what seems in hindsight like the hopeful peak of the #MeToo movement—Bill Cosby had just been convicted of sex crimes; Harvey Weinstein was about to turn himself in—the classicist Stephanie McCarter wrote an essay for Electric Literature about English-language translators’ nasty habit of presenting the rapes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as if they were ambiguous or consensual sex. Her essay is remarkably clear and granular. Before she assembles an explicit political or artistic argument, she walks readers step by step through both Ovid’s Latin and Rolfe Humphries’s 1960 translation of a tale from the Metamorphoses’ Book Four, in which the Sun rapes a Babylonian virgin named Leucothoë. For readers who don’t read Latin, McCarter offers her own translation of this event, which is immediately identifiable as assault: “though the virgin feared the sudden vision, / defeated by the brightness of the god / she quit her protest and endured his force.”

But in Humphries’s English, the Leucothoë story feels quite different. He writes that she is “won over,” and the Sun “took his passion / With no complaint.” And this approach isn’t just Humphries’s. In David Raeburn’s 2004 translation, Leucothoë is “dazzled,” and “the Sun was allowed to / possess her.” McCarter asks her readers to

think carefully about why translators have mitigated, even erased Leucothoe’s rape. Their hedging in many ways reflects our own contemporary lack of adequate vocabulary for capturing sexual violence and our tendency to gloss over rape with language that mitigates and obscures it… These translations echo our failure to trust women who say they have been raped.

Not long after McCarter published this essay, an editor at Penguin Classics approached her about potential translation projects that might appeal to a broad audience. McCarter leapt at the chance to re-translate the Metamorphoses—and it comes as no surprise that her version of the epic is attention-grabbing from the start. In her translator’s note, McCarter writes that she opted for iambic pentameter because, to English speakers, “it simply sounds like poetry, even to the untrained ear.” Her language, meanwhile, is as blunt as her poetics are formal. Her Metamorphoses sometimes mimics conversational speech; at other moments, such as the wrenching scene in which the god Phoebus scolds and whips his chariot horses (“brutally—yes, brutally”) after his son falls to his death while driving them, it could pass for a contemporary novel.

And, of course, McCarter presents the text’s many rapes in stark language. Several chapters have titles such as “Jove Rapes Callisto,” and not one rape story gets softened, obscured, or laden with misplaced desire. In part, this is a feminist stance, but it’s also an artistic one. McCarter chooses clarity as both a translator and a scholar. It is her Metamorphoses’ guiding virtue, and one of its biggest pleasures.

McCarter is a classics professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. In 2020, the University of Oklahoma Press published her translations of Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare. She and I spoke recently about the differences between translating the classics and translating contemporary literature, as well as the infinite influence that her undergraduate students have had on her work. This conversation has been edited.  

Your poetic vision is so clear in this translation. How did you arrive at it?

One thing about reading Ovid is that his Latin is usually extremely clear. It’s fast-paced, and it feels contemporary, sort of, when compared to predecessors like Lucretius or Virgil. And, so, any kind of archaicizing language for him would be totally out of place. Of all of the Roman poets, Ovid needs to be a fast read. It needs to feel like poetry, but it also needs to feel very modern, contemporary, and complicated. That’s what I wanted to achieve.

Did you have to make Ovid’s stories new for yourself?

For years now I’ve been teaching Ovid to young people. My whole career has been a process of teasing out what feels new and fresh and relevant. Every time I teach this text, I find new things. In some ways, dealing with young people, speaking to young people, getting to know them, helps me see what those things are. Thinking about Ovid as a poet who speaks powerfully to our present moment is something I’m used to.

A good example of that comes at the beginning of Alcithoë’s narration. She makes an offhand remark about “gender-fluid Simon,” who never comes up again. I’m interested in your choice to use the term “gender fluid,” which I love, but which also makes this feel like a distinctly 2020s translation. How do you think about the temporality of translation and what it means to translate a work that’s been translated so much before, and that may be translated again?

Every translation has to be read within its contemporary moment. There will never be the translation that we arrive at and say, “OK, here’s the translation of Ovid for all time,” or “Here’s the translation of Homer for all time,” because translation is about merging two moments: the moment of the translator and the moment of the original source text. For “gender fluid,” the term that Ovid uses is “ambiguous,” and I guess that’s the most literal interpretation. But to me that doesn’t work. What does that mean to a contemporary reader? When you look at passages in Latin that use that word, in terms of gender, it very often suggests somebody who defies gender categories. And Ovid says that that particular character is “now a man and now a woman.” To me, that means somebody who can take on different gender roles at different times. What is the best way to capture that accurately within my own moment? This is a moment in which we’re talking about gender fluidity, and so that term seemed the best translation that would speak to, and be arresting for, somebody now.

I’m curious about your interactions with Mary Innes’s translation, which Penguin Classics published in 1955. She’s the only other woman to have translated the Metamorphoses.

Hers was actually the first Ovid translation I ever read. It’s in prose. The first time I read Ovid, I wasn’t struck by the poetic qualities. It was like reading a novel. When you look at the reviews that Innes got in the mid-1950s, there were a lot of dismissive comments about the fact that she translated into prose, which was just standard practice for Penguin Classics at that time. In the mid-20th century, translations of Homer were even in prose. So, I’ve always been a bit disgruntled that she got criticized for writing in prose.

Another interesting thing about her translation coming out in the mid-20th century is that that was also when you had Rolfe Humphries’s translation. You had Horace Gregory’s translation. It was just a really important moment in the history of Ovidian translation. But Innes doesn’t get enough credit because she wasn’t seen as a great poet, and because of her gender. Rolfe Humphries has a Wikipedia page; he’s praised as a great poet of the 20th century. Innes doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. And that’s a real disservice, because having given us a Penguin Classics translation in the mid-20th century, she shaped the way Ovid was read. I’m proud to follow in her footsteps.  

I’d love to hear about the way in which you learned how to translate as a classicist.

My students learn to translate from the very first day they come into the classroom. But it’s not literary translation, it’s translation to demonstrate that you understand the grammar of the Latin or the Greek sentence. And, so, it ends up being really God-awful translation sometimes. Like, “With the city having been burned, all of the citizens were running for safety.”

Horrible.

It’s horrible. And, unfortunately, once you get into the habit of translating like that, it becomes very difficult to get out of the habit. This is one reason why there’s such a divide between translations done by classical scholars and translations done by poets. Because, as classicists, we get very into the technical aspects of language. We don’t want to make ourselves independent from the syntax of the original at all. We constantly want to prioritize the source text. Whereas poets are sometimes too independent of the source text. I’m trying to be accurate, and have a healthy regard for the source text, but I also want to create something that’s just fun poetry to read. For me, the meter really helps.

Essentially, you’re exchanging one constraint for another.

Exactly. And one thing I decided not to do was give myself yet another constraint and try to go completely line-for-line. Because it’s very hard in Latin. There’s no article in Latin, for example, so as soon as you say a or the you’ve taken up half a foot.

The hexameter line is much longer as well. Latin is very concise in a long line. I gave myself a lot of freedom with the lines, but I still did get more concise than in the other translation. If you look at Rolfe Humphries’s, his is the closest to mine and mine is still substantially shorter. I wanted to get the concision, the speed, that is very Ovidian. But I also wanted to give myself the freedom to write poetry that sounded effective to me. If I saw something and thought, man, that makes a really damn nice line of iambic pentameter, I grabbed it.

There are also a lot of inversions along the lines of, “I do not know what God is in that body, but in that body, there’s a God.” Is a sentence like that equally repetitive in the Latin, or was that another constraint you chose?

That would have been equally repetitive in the Latin. I used that repetition to build in some other effects that were untranslatable. One thing Ovid does a lot is use chiastic arrangements. So, like, AB, BA word order. Latin can do that through word endings, which makes them untranslatable into English because we have a much stricter word order. A line like that let me get some chiasm in. I often would use alliteration to build in chiasm, because it’s such a favorite poetic device of the Romans. Ovid, like all Roman poets, has these things called golden lines, which are very patterned lines. So, the verb will come in the middle, and then you’ll have either nouns or adjectives arranged around the verb in a kind of artistic way. So, either, you know, noun, adjective, verb, adjective, noun, or, noun, adjective, verb, noun, adjective. I don’t know if that makes sense.

How much did you think about the symbolic blurring between translation and metamorphosis while you worked?

Oh, all the time. I thought about this all the time. And that’s a fabulous question. I’m so glad you asked that and picked that up. Ovid centers metamorphosis, of course, from the very beginning. And there’s almost this idea that without metamorphosis, the universe would never have even begun, right? I mean, in order for there to be any continuation across time, change is necessary. Time and change sort of go hand in hand. This is true of texts as well. Texts are of a particular moment, they’re of a particular language. How do texts survive once that language is no longer spoken? The only process that can be used is transformation. In order to bring Ovid into my present moment, I had to transform him for that moment.

I wonder if you could recount the origin story of this translation.

So, I was writing quite a few essays that were trying to bring the ancient past into conversation with the present. One of those essays was “Rape, Lost in Translation,” which was about this scene in Book IV of the Metamorphoses where Leucothoë is raped by the god Apollo, the god of the Sun. I had taught that passage years prior in Rolfe Humphries’s translation, and it confused my students to no end. Is she raped? Is she not raped? It just wasn’t clear exactly what had happened. And the next time I taught Ovid in Latin, I put the Latin up, and there was no confusion. My students all knew that she had been raped. From that point on, I would bring in all of these different translations to show my students that translators had not just euphemized rape, but turned it into a scene of titillation.

Yeah.

In the course of writing my essay, I translated some of The Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter. I so enjoyed it that I just started translating it in my spare time, which has got to be, you know, an uber nerdy thing to do. But it was something I really enjoyed. I translated the whole Leucothoë episode. And then I started doing the whole opening scene of creation. Right around that moment, very fortuitously, Elda Rotor from Penguin Classics wrote to me, “Is there anything you might be interested in doing for us?” Within five seconds, I wrote back and said, “I would love to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” From there, I translated the Apollo and Daphne story and gave those samples to her and then got the contract very soon thereafter.

What’s the editorial experience been like for you?

Elda Rotor really embraced my vision for the translation. I told her I wanted to think carefully about the dynamics of rape. I wanted to think carefully about the dynamics of gender and the body. One of the very first things I said to her had to do with the way that Daphne’s body had been translated, for example. David Raeburn, who is the present Penguin Classics translator, has a line where Ovid says that Apollo looks at Daphne’s lips, and the word is just “lips,” which it is not enough to just look at. Raeburn says it’s her “teasingly tempting lips.” I wrote to Elda and said, this idea of teasing is part of rape culture as well.

I’m not a classicist, but it seems to me that you’ve returned closer to what Ovid himself wrote, which required peeling away a lot of ideas about gender, sex, and rape that male translators have imposed before you.

You see these examples everywhere, where translators are really projecting our later ideas, very patriarchal ideas about sex, gender, and the body, into Ovid’s texts that aren’t really there. In so many ways, I think Ovid challenges these later ideas about sex, gender, and the body. What feminist translation does is actually give you tools to say, “What are my biases? How can I be sure that I’m not imposing them on the text? And how then can I arrive at a more accurate translation?” Feminist translation is a tool for accuracy.

What are the responsibilities that you feel as a feminist translator? And what are the joys of this specific feminist translation, which has so much difficult material?

To a degree, there’s just the joy of writing poetry. And the joy of reading Ovid. As horrific as his texts can be, they bring a lot of artistic pleasure. I think I also took a lot of joy in giving these characters who are raped a sympathetic understanding of what happened to them. It was almost as though they hadn’t been believed in a long time. And this is not just the women characters who are victims. Male characters are also victims.

There’s the story of Cephalus, who is raped by the goddess Aurora. Nobody has ever described him as raped or understood his story as a rape story. I took a lot of personal satisfaction out of feeling that I was trying to let these victims have their say, and let it be clear what happened to them.

One story that really jumped out to me on that front was “Salmacis Rapes Hermaphroditus,” in which you do a phenomenal job translating a scene that was clearly a rape, performed by a woman, while also really getting the sense of her desire into the text.

Salmacis, to me, is the buildup of this theme across the epic, the theme of the sexual gaze. She’s looking at him with such desire that her eyes are almost glowing like the sun, right? I mean, it is so palpably there. I wanted there to be no ambiguity about the fact that she’s a rapist, and that she’s animated by the same kind of destructive passion that animates Apollo. I really needed to make that unambiguous in the text. A lot of the vocabulary she uses is the same vocabulary that other rapists use. There’s this moment where she says, “I’ve won.” It’s the same thing that Tereus says once he’s got Philomela on his ship.

Can you describe the responsibilities you feel not only to the many characters in the text, but to your readers?

I know what I’m asking my readers to do when they enter this text. They have to read a lot of very difficult stories about violence that they may themselves have experienced and been victimized by. It would be a terrible disservice to them if I tried to euphemize or romanticize that violence. Treating that as clearly as I possibly could was a big part of my responsibility to my readers. I didn’t want to treat it ever as something that was just the way it was in the ancient world, right? That wasn’t just the way it was to the victims of violence in the ancient world. In terms of Ovid’s sexual dynamics, I felt a huge amount of responsibility. But I also knew that this is a text that, for 2000 years, people have been reading and loving and enjoying. They’ve used it as inspiration for stories and paintings and sculptures. And I wanted to give them a text that would continue to inspire that sort of rethinking of Ovid.

Are there poets, not translators but poets, who are blunt in a way that you found useful to look at while you worked on this translation?

I was reading a lot of Philip Larkin. I read “Aubaude” a lot when I was working on this translation. You know, “I work all day, and get half drunk at night” has to be one of the best, bluntest lines of iambic pentameter there are. I really like his line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” I really wanted to achieve that kind of gut punch.

I find that translation is a very bodily process for me. I really need that kind of gut feeling of, “Oh, yeah, now this is right.” What’s your process like? Other than reading Larkin?

To some degree, it was really a laborious process. I woke up with a full-time job for over a year, for 16 months. I had a year-long sabbatical from teaching, and we moved to Australia, where my husband is from. My kids went to school every day, and I would either come back to our house and work at our dining room table, or I would go to the library. And it was nine-to-five. I never said, “I don’t want to do this.” It was pleasurable, but it was also very focused labor. I can only compare it to the process of building a house. You know, if you screw one thing up, the whole thing is going to collapse. I just devoted myself to this translation. It became almost an obsession. There were nights I went to sleep, and I just couldn’t wait to get back to it.

Do you miss it?

Oh, hugely, hugely. I love the fact that it’s about to go into the world. But I don’t like the fact that I can’t transform it anymore. I taught it to my students and got their feedback. I spent months in my office revising and revising. I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where I have thought, “This is the final product.”