Found in Translation: Stephanie McCarter Uncovers Images of Agency and Defiance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Whit Uden
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats—
Laughing, Stephanie McCarter interrupted her recitation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Although she strives in her translation “to create a clear, poetic rendering… in a modern idiom accessible to students, general readers, and specialists alike,” she asserted that Eliot, with all his erudition and obscure allusion, “wrote the greatest poem of all.” McCarter’s goal of concision does not stem from a failure to appreciate ornate description; rather, her literary endeavors respond to a gap in the broad range of modern translations of classical works.
Classics suffers from a language barrier—not between Latin or Greek and modern languages, but among the English translations of works written long before any Angle, Saxon, or Jute reached Britain. “I learned to translate,” McCarter recounted, “in a very stilted way that serves primarily to show that you understand what the Latin is saying.” Latin students quickly become accustomed to awkward constructions and frequent absolutes, and produce nothing literary at all in the classroom. On the other end of the spectrum, many published translations embellish the original work. Of course, elaborate passages are a valid stylistic choice when based in the text; some translators, however, have a habit of supplying descriptors that fit their own interpretations of events and fail to remain faithful to the source: “Ovid says [of Daphne], ‘She has fingers,’” McCarter explained. “Translators say, ‘She has delicate fingers.’ There’s this need to make her comprehensible as a desired woman by giving her these stereotypically feminine traits.”
McCarter believes these alterations accumulate throughout the work and distort its meaning. Although whether Daphne has “delicate fingers” may seem insignificant, the addition forces upon her the very femininity she has rejected. “She’s terribly defiant,” McCarter asserted. “She wants to be a virgin, and that’s not what women were supposed to do. She wants bodily autonomy.” McCarter argues that by assigning “feminine” delicacy to Daphne, translators deny this defiance and themselves reenact the first stages of Apollo’s crime.
These pivotal choices pervade the poem and comprise the character of any individual translation. Within the myth of Daphne and Apollo, for example, McCarter’s text departs from precedent in several crucial locations, most significantly in the story’s final line. Once the nymph becomes a laurel tree, where previous translators have taken the ambiguous, third-person implied subject to mean “she,” McCarter writes, “it seemed to sway its treetop like a head.” This difference fundamentally alters the conclusion of the myth. Daphne’s triumph “is the power of being totally inscrutable to him… She’s put herself in a completely unknowable situation that only she knows, and there’s power in that knowing.” Ovid reflects that essential uncertainty in his language, but English requires specificity and, therefore, a distortion of connotation. McCarter explained the conclusion that previous translations imply: to assert that Daphne remains at the myth’s conclusion presents “this terrifying thought that you can never be freed from danger even through transformation… that trauma will never go away, no matter how your body is transformed.”
Of course, this implication is not the result of some nefarious conspiracy to disempower Daphne further, but of the social context of previous translators. Literary translation, a fundamentally approximative art, cannot preserve both the meaning and form of the original. “It’s always a process of balancing your English in how it reflects the Latin and if it becomes poetry in English—it’s a process of compromise,” McCarter said. Even without conscious consideration of these choices, a translation amasses a film of its social context. She argues that “translation intrinsically is about connecting cultural moments, the cultural moment of the original text and the cultural moment of the translator who can't ever divorce themselves from the societal forces that have formed them.”
Twenty-first-century artists embrace this interaction of societal forces and have turned to Ovid for inspiration. In “Ganymede,” the first poem in Jericho Brown’s collection The Tradition, the eponymous myth acts as an interpretive framework for the transatlantic slave trade. When asked for other examples of art with Ovidian influence, McCarter found no shortage of material. “I teach a class on this,” she warned, before gathering a heap of books from her shelves. With arms overflowing—a few works suffered a fall onto the table—McCarter presented her catalog of contemporary Ovid. She listed countless plays and poems, including Naomi Iizuka’s Polaroid Stories, Cheri Magid’s one-woman show titled A Poem and a Mistake in reference to the reasons Ovid famously gave for his exile, Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, and Shanta Lee Gander’s Black Metamorphoses, which seeks “to debunk the Eurocentric patriarchy that Ovid represents.”
The past decade has produced several popular feminist retellings of Ovid’s myths as well: Nina McLaughlin’s Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, Jennifer Saint’s Orphia and Eurydicius, and Madeline Miller’s Galatea all reconsider their focal stories from the perspectives of silenced women. As McCarter sees it, much of the beauty of these retellings lies in their position in a larger dialogue. Ovid retold existing myths to create his epic, modern writers reëvaluate them, and “two-thousand years from now, somebody's going to write a play about Daphne, inspired by Ovid. The stories are malleable, and we bring ourselves into every retelling.” In the world of fashion, McCarter pointed to Iris van Herpen’s Meta Morphism collection, which features dresses that recall spiders, trees, and streams and capture each scene in a state of perpetual change, as evidence of Ovid’s reach. Ovid, McCarter explained, tends to appear among the avant-garde. On the other hand, a fashion collection inspired by Vergil, she surmised, might be more conservative and “befitting of the royal family.” In film, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents an “anti-Orphic” retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice in which gaze is mutual. Finally, McCarter addressed “another one of [her] favorites,” Elizabeth Colomba’s Daphne, an oil painting depicting Daphne as a Black woman standing contemplatively before a leaf-printed wall. With the painting, Colomba simultaneously claims a place for black women in European myth and highlights their absence.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses also presents itself in McCarter’s passions outside of Latin—she describes herself as “a hobby person”—and these interests provide a personal interpretation of the epic. Living near a wetland in Australia during the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic inspired McCarter to visit and photograph the local birds. “That’s how I got through the pandemic,” she noted. Her involvement in birdwatching continued after returning to the United States and still provides opportunities to escape the house and experience the natural world with her son. One Australian bird, the Welcome Swallow, seems to her the ultimate passerine form of Philomela and Procne, sisters who become a nightingale and a swallow after they exact revenge on Procne’s husband, Tereus, by killing their son, Itys, and serving him to the unknowing father in a feast. The distinctive terracotta stains of the birds seem to seep from their chins to their fronts and offer evidence that “Their chests still bear / the signs of slaughter. Blood still marks their feathers” (trans. McCarter). The Welcome Swallow, whose current range does not extend beyond Australia and New Zealand, becomes “something very tragic and portentous.” So Ovid lives. His narrative performs yet another metamorphosis and transforms a bird, removed from Golden-Age Rome both temporally and geographically, into the avatar of these mythological figures.
“But this is a Welcome Swallow,” McCarter recalled. Named for their status as heralds of land to sailors, the birds have assumed a more cheerful (sanguine in the word’s modern sense) connotation in the current mythos. This contradiction reminds us that “nature itself is not imbued by these stories… Sometimes you just want a bird to be a bird.” A tree with a bulging trunk within Sewanee’s gates seems to take the form of Myrrha, pregnant in the form of a myrrh tree with Adonis. “And yet the child, conceived in sin, kept growing / beneath the bark,” McCarter’s translation reads. But the distinction between nature and myth must endure, she argues: the tree itself must remain separate from Adonis’s origin and Myrrha’s pain that “can’t voice itself.” As McCarter explains, “When you look at a swallow, you shouldn’t see a horrible myth.” The observer can see, however, the ways in which nature inspires narrative. This recognition of origin creates for McCarter a desire “to get out into the world” in order to experience it in its fullness—to which Ovid’s metamorphoses in the natural world testify. “I felt I needed that connection to nature to translate Ovid,” she explains. Witnessing the same phenomena that prompted the Metamorphoses simultaneously reinforces their narrative origin and “provides a corrective to all of it.”
McCarter’s yearning to engage in the world also contributes to her involvement in her other hobbies, which “keep [her] off [her] phone.” After her children fall asleep, McCarter “will listen to books on tape and cross-stitch” to unwind from the day. Coming from “a line of women involved in needlecraft,” she first began sewing while her grandmother would cross-stitch; her current project, a seemingly Herculean reproduction of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting Sappho and Alcaeus, pays homage to the Greek lyric poetry she so adores. The scene depicts Sappho’s listening to Alcaeus’s performance on a kithara, with four others in the audience spread lounging around the two tiers of white marble that overlook the Aegean. After, she plans to engage in yet another confluence of her interests by undertaking a work depicting a group of birds.
In addition to providing personal insight into many of the metamorphoses, cross-stitching, for McCarter, acts as a metaphor for translation: needlework, she explains, “reminds me a lot of translation because of the meticulous concentration it involves, and, if you mess up, you have to undo a lot.” The interconnectedness of translation becomes especially apparent when translating into meter, as McCarter does. She is hardly the only writer to draw parallels between tapestry and poetry: Catullus’s “Carmen LXIV” (McCarter is currently drafting a translation of his Carmina) describes in fluent and stirring verse the impossibly precise scene depicted on the covering of a wedding bed of Peleus and Thetis. Many scholars interpret the impracticality of the detail as Catullus’s assertion of poetry’s triumph over visual art, and the German Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published an essay comparing the two art forms. Even Ovid himself makes a similar connection. In the first lines of his Metamorphoses, the poet commands the gods, primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen (lit. “and, from the first beginning of the world to my time, spin out unending song”). Deducere often functions as a poetic term meaning to elaborate, but the verb also features in the lexicon of weaving practice (see Thesaurus Linguae Latinae p. 279). With this verbiage, “the myth, the poem itself, becomes a tapestry”; this tapestry, however, “cannot be grasped by the mind.” Like Catullus’s ekphrasis of the wedding bed and like Arachne’s art, Ovid’s can exist only as verse.
Although McCarter does not think “about [her] office too much,” its decorations evince her craft. A throw pillow displaying the opening lines of Vergil’s Aeneid lies on a couch, and bookshelves house smaller classics-themed pillows and face masks, gifts for her students during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. An “accumulation of nerdy things over years” accompanies these handmade decorations: stamps reading “BENE FACTVM” and “EX LIBRIS” rest next to a tiara used as a mnemonic device for teaching the forms of the present subjunctive, and another shelf features an owl (for Athena) and a replica of a terracotta lamp used as anti-Cleopatran propaganda under Octavian. Miniature statuary line the back wall of the office and include likenesses of Julius Caesar, Aphrodite, and Nike, alongside replicas of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s fluid Apollo and Daphne and the Venus de Milo, whose price was discounted because of its “missing” arms—classical study can lead to unexpected bargains. Completing the room’s imitation of Roman decoration, framed pictures of mosaics extend across the walls and end next to Colomba’s Daphne.
Despite her present immersion in classical creation, McCarter entered college with the intention of teaching high school English. A “very big poetry nerd” who adorned her bedroom walls with poetry—mostly Emily Dickinson’s—she decided to take classics courses at the University of Tennessee, where she recognized Horace’s and Vergil’s verse as “the source of something really interesting.” The prospect of scholarships for majoring in the classics convinced McCarter, a first-generation college student, to change course. She graduated with majors in Latin and English and a minor in ancient Greek and, hoping to continue writing after college, earned an MA and a PhD from the University of Virginia before she began teaching at Sewanee alongside her colleague and husband, Daniel Holmes.
Now “in a very writerly place,” Stephanie McCarter’s interest in translation as a literary endeavor flourished. In her Horace seminars, she encouraged students to consider the translation histories of each ode and epode; differences between early modern translations and older renderings of the same text highlighted for McCarter and her students the effects of social context on translation, while individual quirks reinforced each version’s unique character. But frustration struck when she tried to select a translation of Horace’s poems for a class on lyric poetry in translation. Thoroughly familiar with Horace’s work (in addition to teaching Horace seminars, she published a commentary, Horace between Freedom and Slavery: The First Book of Epistles), McCarter struggled to find “a nice translation that felt like poetry and that still let [her] teach the poems as Horace[’s].” The recent publication of her book left “nothing on [her] plate” (such unremitting focus seems typical of McCarter) so she spent one summer day translating Horace’s ode on Cleopatra’s death, discovering “the most fun I’ve ever had.” She then resolved to transform what she considered a “terrible prose translation” into poetry, and the project progressed at an unusual pace: “by the end of the summer, I had a proposal for a book I had never expected or planned to write.”
Her Metamorphoses translation, too, arose from teaching. After McCarter presented one of her classes with translations of the rape of Leucothoe, “the most egregious mistranslation of a rape,” one student convinced her to write an article on previous failures to convey the violence present in phrases like vim passa est (McCarter’s rendering “she endured his force,” more accurately reflects the verb’s well-established connotation). Within a day, Electric Literature notified her that they would publish the article immediately. The essay first garnered the attention of “a person in the publishing industry in the UK” who urged McCarter to translate the Metamorphoses herself. Despite her article’s resounding response and this suggestion, self-doubt swayed her reaction: “I just don't know if I have what it takes to translate the Metamorphoses. I thought that this was something that people more important than I would do.”
“Why not? Why not try?” she eventually asked, employing an especially Ovidian sentiment. When Pyrrha and Deucalion, the only surviving postdiluvian humans, consider whether they can save the human race after a cryptic command from Themis, Ovid calls them to action: spes tamen in dubio est: adeo caelestibus ambo / diffidunt monitis. Sed quid temptare nocebit? (“they hesitate to hope—they so distrust / heaven’s decrees. But what’s the harm in trying?”; trans. McCarter). Driven by this question, McCarter began to translate sections of the epic and had drafts of the myths of Apollo and Daphne, the creation of hierarchy out of Chaos, and Leucothoe by the time Elda Rotor of Penguin Classics contacted her. A contract quickly followed and began her partnership with the publishing house with which she plans to produce translations of Catullus’s Carmina and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, as well as an anthology, Women in Power: Classical Myths and Stories, from the Amazons to Cleopatra.
Her Metamorphoses completes the endeavor begun with her essay on Leucothoe, a reconsideration of power structures in the epic: “if there is a sustained thread, apart from transformation, it is power,” writes McCarter in the introduction to her translation. Indeed, interactions with hierarchy cause many of the metamorphoses described, and Ovid makes the established order clear. The first change of the poem describes a clear division of spheres. Out of unus… naturae vultus… / quem dixere Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles (“the one face of nature, which they called Chaos, a rough and unsorted mass”), a god creates an ordered land, sea, and sky and establishes the hierarchy of animals, humanity with its “towering countenance” (os… sublime; lit. “lofty mouth”), and celestial beings. “What we have here at the beginning is the creation of the κόσμος [order].”
Humans present “the most pervasive threat to this hierarchy” through “artistic defiance, sexual defiance, gender defiance, and the defiance where you just look up at the heavens and shake your fist.” While Daedalus’s construction of wings for himself and Icarus “takes up the power of metamorphosis,” one reserved for the gods, other instances of defiance challenge the mores of Rome rather than the gods’ established order. In a world where only “men are allowed libertas, the freedom of their bodies, freedom of speech, [and the] freedom to choose their activities,” Daphne’s role as a virginal huntress introduces sexual autonomy incompatible with patriarchal Roman society and with the expectation of marriage. Narcissus, too, desires similar independence and his position as a virginal male hunter makes him “a mirror reflection of Daphne” and feminizes him. Both “on the cusp of adulthood,” the hunters’ unwillingness to “conform to the ways of the city”—“in this world, wanting to have agency over their bodies”—accounts for their defiance and provokes their metamorphoses. But not all translations reflect the parallels between Daphne and Narcissus. The stereotypically feminine traits that some translators supply for Daphne are the very characteristics Ovid assigns to Narcissus. In the stream he sees inpubesque genas et eburnea colla decusque / oris et in niveo mixtum candore ruborem (“his beardless cheeks and ivory neck, his face’s / splendor, the blush combined with snowy paleness”; trans. McCarter). Translators “will let his gender slip, but not Daphne’s, because they feel this need to correct what Ovid omits,” McCarter explained.
These intertextual connections allow readers to navigate Ovid’s complicated, protean world. The labyrinth, McCarter argues, acts as the epic’s “chief structural metaphor” and its placement at the beginning of Book VIII centers it in the narrative and draws it into comparison with the epic’s structure. “Just as Ariadne gives Theseus the thread to go through the labyrinth, Ovid offers us clues,” said McCarter, eager to point out that the word clue comes from the more antiquated clew, meaning, fittingly, a ball of thread. One such clue is the verbal echoes Ovid employs: in the myth of Aurora and Cephalus, Cephalus uses forms of the verb rapere in his recount of the rape of Orithyia by Boreas, the god of the North Wind, and repeats them in his description of Aurora’s descending upon him. He calls his wife Procris raptae soror Orithyiae (lit. “the sister of raped Orithyia”) and reports invitumque rapit. McCarter renders the second clause as its own line, “Against my will she snatched me off and raped me,” while David Raeburn’s “forced me away to the sky” loses this connotation and supplies “to the sky” as if Aurora deifies Cephalus and relieves him of his earthly burden. The similarities in narration between the myth of Cephalus and Aurora and that of Orithyia and Boreas indicate a much more iniquitous reality, and Aurora’s frequent depiction as “a character who looks like the wind gods” strengthens this connection. In Cephalus’s case, these echoes supply clarity to a frequently misunderstood passage—according to McCarter, our “cultural blinders” obstruct faithful readings because “we don’t think of men as rape victims very often”—and lead us out of Ovid’s labyrinth.
An image in competition with the labyrinth for the title of “chief structural metaphor” is weaving, an art with which McCarter has firsthand experience. Ovid’s work itself becomes a tapestry of sorts as he stitches together disparate scenes into a narrative with coherent themes. The cover of her translation, a photograph of a tapestry created by Aiko Tezuka, a Japanese artist who unweaves and restructures previous art, reflects Ovid’s art of reworking existing narrative. The threads of the vine-adorned background become an oval of vertical lines in the center, bearing the text “METAMORPHOSES by OVID.” The absence of a central image reflects the epic’s lack of a central character. Around the title are the outlines of images of modernity: double helices, an “at” sign, and the trefoil of the universal ionizing radiation symbol feature alongside the image of a uterus. The cover features mostly red imagery on a white background and recalls Philomela’s tapestry. Before Philomela’s arms become wings, “she hangs a warp, and into its white threads / she weaves red markings that reveal the crime” (trans. McCarter). Unlike the cover of the previous Penguin translation of the epic, which features Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, McCarter’s returns the focus from disempowerment to agency and to a metaphor that applies to the poem more broadly.
She interprets the significance of this dominant metaphor as its ability to “align Ovid with the female weavers of the poem.” He faces the question of which tapestry his song imitates: does Ovid mimic Athena and place himself (or any other figure for that matter) at the center in an attempt to conserve power, or does he create a defiant narrative that places him in discontented subordination to the Empire? Ovid’s poem exhibits a duplicitous attitude towards Imperial Rome. Ostensibly Augustan propaganda (or at least art in favor of the emperor—he and Julius Caesar are deified in the last book, after all), the poem contains details that lead shrewd readers to consider it a defiant work. In the Metamorphoses, Venus departs from her role as Venus Genetrix, the celestial mother of the Romans, that she assumes in Vergil’s Aeneid; instead, she “returns to being the very, very mischievous and dangerous goddess of love” who “wants Cupid to shoot all the gods and bring them into her power and uses the language of empire.” Venus’s imperial ambitions mirror Rome’s departure from the Roman Mission issued to Aeneas in Elysium, pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos (lit. “and to impose the manner of peace, to spare those having been thrown down, and to conquer completely the proud”), and satirize the image of Venus Genetrix essential to Augustus’s claim of divine lineage. Even the deifications seem halfhearted: the wild musings of Pythagoras precede them, and Ovid devotes more lines to his descriptions of reincarnation and lynxes whose urine becomes stone than he does to the Caesars’ apotheoses. Furthermore, McCarter argues, “when Ovid has so vilified the gods in a way throughout the epic, it makes you wonder what it says to become one.” The gods of the Metamorphoses become images of selfish imperialism, intent on preserving the hierarchies that benefit them, so the deifications of Caesar and Augustus constitute indictments rather than eulogies.
Furthermore, Ovid reserves the last metamorphosis for himself, not for an emperor, and binds his fate to his poem: McCarter’s translation reads,
I've made a masterpiece Jove's wrath cannot
destroy, nor flame nor steel nor gnawing time.
That day, which governs nothing but my body,
can end at will my life's uncertain span.
And yet my finer half will be eternal,
borne among stars. My name can't be erased.
Where Roman power spreads through conquered lands,
I will be read on people's lips. My fame
will last across the centuries. If poets'
prophecies can hold any truth, I'll live.
Ovid’s assertion of immortality through his work after bodily death provides an optimistic reading of the transformations. In the epic’s opening lines, he clarifies, In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora (“My spirit drives me to tell of figures changed into new bodies”). “These are things done to the body,” McCarter specified, “but have they taken away life?” Ovid’s separation of life from the body in the poem’s final word, vivam (“I will live”), suggests that they have not. Ovid’s conclusion “does yoke him to Roman power,” but McCarter argues that translation frees him from the necessity of its spreading “through conquered lands.” The ultimate metamorphosis, translation allows Ovid to transcend the boundaries of Roman control and language, and, with her incisive rendering, Stephanie McCarter breathes life back into Ovid’s work.