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~
My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.
Thus Ovid invokes the muses, in accordance with the ancient tradition, as he begins his Metamorphoses.
When Monk read Elizabeth Cook's Achilles, he developed an appetite to get back into that ancient lore, along with a desire to re-introduce some poetry into his reading life, hungering a little for some song.
When Monk first looked for a translation years ago, he couldn't find any that worked for him, none that made the book truly fun and inspiring for him. But as he was about to give up hope, he came upon Allen Mandelbaum's translation, and now The Metamorphoses is among his favorites - it is beauty to read aloud.
___ ___ ___
Before the sea and lands began to be,
before the sky had mantled every thing,
then all of nature's face was featureless -
what men call chaos: undigested mass
of crude, confused, and scumbled elements,
a heap of seeds that clashed, of things mismatched.
there was no Titan Sun to light the world,
no crescent Moon - no Phoebe - to renew
her slender horns; in the surrounding air,
earth's weight had yet to find its balanced state,
and Amphitrite's arms had not yet stretched
along the farthest margins of the land.
For though the sea and land and air were there,
the land could not be walked upon, the sea
could not be swum, the air was without splendor:
no thing maintained its shape; all were at war;
in one same body cold and hot would battle;
the damp contended with the dry, things hard
with soft, and weighty things with weightless parts.
-- The Metamorphoses by Ovid
.
My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world's beginning to our day.
Thus Ovid invokes the muses, in accordance with the ancient tradition, as he begins his Metamorphoses.
When Monk read Elizabeth Cook's Achilles, he developed an appetite to get back into that ancient lore, along with a desire to re-introduce some poetry into his reading life, hungering a little for some song.
When Monk first looked for a translation years ago, he couldn't find any that worked for him, none that made the book truly fun and inspiring for him. But as he was about to give up hope, he came upon Allen Mandelbaum's translation, and now The Metamorphoses is among his favorites - it is beauty to read aloud.
___ ___ ___
Before the sea and lands began to be,
before the sky had mantled every thing,
then all of nature's face was featureless -
what men call chaos: undigested mass
of crude, confused, and scumbled elements,
a heap of seeds that clashed, of things mismatched.
there was no Titan Sun to light the world,
no crescent Moon - no Phoebe - to renew
her slender horns; in the surrounding air,
earth's weight had yet to find its balanced state,
and Amphitrite's arms had not yet stretched
along the farthest margins of the land.
For though the sea and land and air were there,
the land could not be walked upon, the sea
could not be swum, the air was without splendor:
no thing maintained its shape; all were at war;
in one same body cold and hot would battle;
the damp contended with the dry, things hard
with soft, and weighty things with weightless parts.
-- The Metamorphoses by Ovid
.
