The struggle to keep poetry alive is a game of tag-team wrestling, and the greatest poets play their matches with the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. We all know it for Latin. Plautus and Vergil are centones of Greek verse, their originality hidden, for some, by passage after passage taken directly from Greek poetry.

English poets have played in the same arena. Shakespeare learned how to make verse sing and stage action jump by rewriting Ovid and Plautus. The classic tradition of English verse begins with John Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas and hits its stride with Dryden’s Vergil and Pope’s Homer. (Professors should not be allowed to pontificate on “The Rape of the Lock” and “The Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot” until they have worked through Pope’s Iliad.) From Milton to T.S. Eliot our greatest poets have known Greek and Latin and other languages to boot and have filled their verse with echoes and quotations. English poetry grew strong out of that sometimes rough-and-ready contact sport.

So it is no wonder that our contemporary poetry is anemic and asthmatic, that it wheezes out limp phrases, mumbling to itself about personal problems or the politics of newspaper editorials. It needs to be sent south to the Mediterranean for its health. Its regimen must be the classics in the original tongues. It has to resign its current motto: “Better mendacities than the classics in paraphrase.”

If American poetry does manage to rise above easy despair and gimpy-legged verse, it may look back to David Slavitt as one of its chief benefactors. In 1971 he gave us The Eclogues of Virgil, a lively and exciting mosaic of translation placed carefully in the midst of poetic, moral, and political reflections, which is still my favorite book by him.

Now he has tried something bigger, maius opus, an attempt to re-feel and rewrite the extant poetry that Ovid wrote while passing the last decade of his life in Tomis, modern Constansa in Rumania. He had written a poem and he had made a mistake (carmen et error) and the Emperor Augustus sent Ovid out of Rome, never to return.

Ovid did not stop writing poetry. His career had been founded on his brilliant success in taking the conventions of Latin personal love poetry, born from Catullus’ genius and his affair with the wife of a Roman consul, and playing with these conventions so that they became immensely funny and perfectly unusable for later poets. Now at the end of his life Ovid came full circle and showed that great poetry could indeed be built on the rag-and-bone shop of personal experience and emotion.

Slavitt’s renderings are related to Ovid’s exile poetry as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis relates to the Metamorphoses. They are an attempt to solve Ovid’s problem as he would have solved it were he writing contemporary English. To put the question as Slavitt put it to Vergil’s Eclogues: “If you were ever a living, breathing poem, what could you conceivably have been about?” One by one the poems that Ovid penned so long ago on the shores of the Black Sea give an answer to that no doubt impudent question.

It is an American answer. Ovid calls his volume liber. Slavitt calls it “booko” and “little bookaroo.” In one poem, a kind of elegiac Alcestis, Ovid imagines what his wife felt like as she resigns herself to staying behind in Rome to try to win her husband’s reprieve. Slavitt turns the spotlight from Alcestis to Admetus and lets us hear Ovid’s feelings as he walked away from his home and his family.

A man can lose his life in different ways:

it bleeds out or flies away in that last gasp.

But to walk away from a life . . . I’ve no idea

whether it’s harder or not, but I

cannot suppose the dead

desire still to die, that the

suffering stop.

I never had anything like it

happen—so that survival

was something to be ashamed of Only a brute

could have kept on walking and

living past that corner.

Whatever worth there was in

me died there.

To catch the mood, Slavitt feels no need to stick to the words. So Vergiliutn vidi tantum becomes

I saw Vergil once at a party

but didn’t have the nerve to go up to speak

to the great man.

The grand rhetoric in praise of poetry that ends the Fourth Book of Tristia becomes in Slavitt’s hands a piece of personal reminiscence, but the gracious nod to the reader remains.

Some days, I lay down

my pen, stretch,

and go outside to tramp

along the beach,

lean into the cold salt wind, and

feel the earth

solid under my feet, and I

laugh, thinking

how it may not get me all. The

best could survive for years:

this profitless pursuit my

father, who gave me

life, disapproved of greets you

now, reader, with thanks

for your attention by which I

remain alive.

It is hard to believe that many classicists will use this version in their courses on Latin literature in translation. Ovid’s tone is here, his love of language, and the lively interaction of rhetoric and emotion. The imagery and the content are often different, and they form the basis of our lectures. This translation is for other poets. It shows them that a poet’s life can be a vital part of a creative persona and that the poetry of other times and other languages can still inform great English verse, as it has for so many centuries. It gives us all a part of Ovid we had lost. As Slavitt wrote about Vergil’s first Eclogue: “Dead, the Latin dead, his groan is still alive.”

 

[Ovid’s Poetry of Exile, Translated into verse, by David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press) 240 pp., $32.50 (hardcover), $12.95 (paper)]