Many Transformations

[larryhammer]

Ovidius Naso (8):

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

Golding (1567):

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.

Dryden (1693):

Of bodies chang'd to various forms I sing:
Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with celestial heat;
Till I my long laborious work complete,
And add perpetual tenor to my rhymes,
Deduc'd from nature's birth to Caesar's times.

Gregory (1958):

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.

Melville (1986):

Of bodies changed to other forms I tell;
You Gods, who have yourselves wrought every change,
Inspire my enterprise and lead my lay
In one continuous song from nature's first
Remote beginnings to our modern times.

Slavitt (1994):

Bodies, I have in mind, and how they can change to assume
new shapes—I ask the help of the gods, who know the trick:
inspire me now, change me, let me glimpse the secret
and sing, better than I know how, of the world's birthing,
the creation of all things from the first to the very latest.

Hughes (1994*):

Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed
Into different bodies.

I call upon the supernatural powers
Who first invented
These transmogrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal, now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to this very moment.

Raeburn (2004):

Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me
now to recite. Inspire me, O gods (it is you who have even
transformed my art), and spin me a thread from the world's beginning
down to my own lifetime, in one continuous poem.

Golding is starched-collar Elizabethan; these lines don't show him at his best. Dryden makes me headdesk -- the swift first couplet are two lines of Ovid, then four padded lines for Ovid's next two; also, his perpetual and deduced are Latin, not English. I'm not happy with Gregory's line breaks, but he flows well; Melville is more my style. Slavitt's translation is very explain-y: rather than footnote, he writes it out in the verse; don't trust him for literal meaning, but he's very readable. Hughes is, of course, a master of words, but hexameters ⇒ free verse makes me look askance, and the gods' amusement is as editorial as Slavitt's glipsed secret. As is Raeburn's spun thread -- an effective image, but not in the original [ETA2: see comment] -- and worse, his verse drives me buggy.

It is possible I have enough translations.

* ETA1: This is the date of first publication, in the anthology After Ovid, rather than the 1997 collection Tales from Ovid.

---L.