Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini

Author:Nicola Gardini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

I didn’t really start reading Ovid until after college. Rather than start right in on the Metamorphoses, I began with the Heroides, a collection of imaginary letters written by mythological women, and historical Sappho, all addressed to their distant lovers; an exquisite work, which has had its share of success in modern literature and which presents us with an utterly Ovidian characteristic: the desire to understand emotion—the pain of separation, in this case—and to express it in the most memorable form, blending passion and intelligence. While in the United States, between courses for my doctorate, I translated these letters. I’m not really sure why, or perhaps for reasons I’ve long ignored—I too was an emigrant at the time, and, as someone who’d been writing useless love letters since my childhood, I identified with these heroines.

Some years later, I translated the works of Ovid “the exile” (Tristia and Epistulae ex ponto), the fallen poet, banished by the very same Augustus whom he praised in the last book of his Metamorphoses. The reasons behind such an unexpected punishment are still vague. That Augustus was serious about the sentence, however, is clear: Ovid would never return to Rome, and for all his pleading with the prince and the trust he placed in his wife and few friends remaining in the capital to intercede on his behalf, he died right there where Augustus’s anger had landed him, on the coast of the Black Sea, in a place that went by the macabre name of Tomi, plagued by the memory of the example Medea had made there of her brother (tom- is the root of the Greek verb temno, meaning “to cut”). Apart from the human story behind them, Ovid’s exile poems are the least stimulating of his oeuvre, especially for someone trying to translate them. Ovid is far more successful when the suffering is merely imagined, as in the Heroides. When the pain is real, the work turns whiny and repetitive, and the poetry shies away from all commitment with polish and finish, as the poet himself is ready to admit.4 Seneca is definitely superior when speaking of his own exile. The emperor Claudius wanted to remove him from the opposition and therefore banished him to the rugged island of Corsica. During his exile, which lasted from 41 to 49 C.E., Seneca wrote his mother, Elvia, some of the most profound pages of Latin in the history of the language (Consolatio ad Helviam). While Ovid does nothing but feel sorry for himself and exaggerate the remoteness and ugliness of his new home, Seneca, with the explicit intention of consoling his addressee, denies outright that there’s even such a thing as exile. Movement, as he sees it, is a fact of life. The entire universe (mundus) is ceaselessly shifting its position, all is in motion; even the minds of men are constantly exploring and pressing new boundaries, because the mind itself is made of the stuff of the stars and heavenly bodies, which never stand still.

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