Bone Into Stone
On translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
FEBRUARY 11, 2025
Less than 150 lines into the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the world, created out of chaos when the poem begins, degenerates into widespread corruption, fraud, and treachery (mankind’s doing), and is subsequently devastated by a flood (Jupiter’s doing). Only two people, Pyrrha and Deucalion, husband and wife who are also cousins, survive. They wash ashore on Mount Parnassus on a raft. Once Jupiter allows the waters to recede, the couple prays to Themis, a Titan goddess presiding over what we would call, today, the oracle at Delphi. Approaching her, they prostrate themselves on the steps of her temple, and then each “gelidoque pauens dedit oscula saxo.” Literally, “each gave trembling kisses to cold stone.” Touching their reverent lips to the steps of her sanctuary, they beg Themis to help them repopulate the earth with living people other than themselves. The goddess, taking pity on the reverent couple, says:
“Leave the temple,
veil your heads, loosen the clothes that gird you, and
throw the Great Mother’s bones behind your backs!”
Deucalion and Pyrrha are stunned into silence by Themis’s words. Eventually, Pyrrha says she is terrified to profane their mother in such a way. What happens next is a powerful instance of interpretation — I’d like to call it an act of translation:
Meanwhile they reconsider the baffling words,
draped in secrecy,
of the pronounced oracle, pondering them alone,
then together.
Upon further reflection, Deucalion suggests that Themis’s words may not be intended to be understood literally, but rather figuratively:
Then the son of Prometheus calms the daughter of
Epimetheus
with soothing words, saying: “Either my wits fail me or
(given that oracles are pious, and don’t encourage
monstrous deeds)
Great Mother is earth: I think by bones she means stones
in the earth’s body; we’ve been told to throw them behind
our backs.”
Though technically Themis does not speak a separate language, she does use words in an ambiguous way. Deucalion’s attentive act of decoding clarifies the meaning and transforms their understanding — and what is translation, if not a pondering of words, implying a clarification of meaning?
At a certain point, the ‘sacred stone’ of the source text must be cast behind my back so as to give birth to a new version in a new language in a new moment in time.
The term Ovid uses for the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha are instructed to throw behind their backs is lapis, distinct from the saxum of Themis’s holy space. But as the episode unfolds, he uses lapis and saxum interchangeably. The ambiguity established between bones and stones — the fact that one can be read for, and also become, the other — is central to Ovid’s poetics in The Metamorphoses, a work in which change serves as plot, and pretty much anything can become something else. In the end, after Pyrrha is persuaded, she and Deucalion obey the oracle, and the earth is repopulated with other human beings.
Reviewing this passage recently, in a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that I have been working on for three years for The Modern Library, I experienced an epiphany: for I understood that the seemingly irreverent gesture which Themis calls for was also my task, and arguably the task of every translator. At a certain point, the ‘sacred stone’ of the source text must be cast behind my back so as to give birth to a new version in a new language in a new moment in time. The passage was even more resonant given that I, like Deucalion and Pyrrha, am part of a translating “couple,” working side by side with Yelena Baraz, a professor of Classics at Princeton University who is both a colleague and a friend.
This second phase of translation, more arduous than the first, is an act of retrospection: a looking back, but also an effort to leave behind the Latin — or at least put some necessary distance between the Latin and our evolving English text.
Part of the psychological load that can weigh on the translator, especially when working on a canonical text such as The Metamorphoses, is what can seem to be a sacrilegious abandonment of the source-text. And yet, without our lightening this load, without our jettisoning the original words and forging ahead, we cannot remake the poem. The verb Ovid uses for Deucalion and Pyrrha’s task is iacere, to toss. But there’s another word he might have used, one he often uses to describe the act of leaving something behind: relinquere. This is the word he chooses to describe Europa when she looks back, for the last time, at the shore, before Jupiter, in a bull’s guise, carries her across the sea. It crops up again in a crucial moment in Book 7 when Medea is wondering whether or not to leave behind her family and fatherland for the love of Jason. The English word relinquish comes from this verb, as does reliquary: a small container to store what is left behind, often of bodies considered holy. Often, merely bones.
In our Metamorphoses in progress, we have typically been translating relinquere as to abandon: one of the great thematic underpinnings of the whole poem. Abandonment is pertinent to the Italian expression “traduttore-traditore” (translator-traitor), two words that sum up, in a tidy bundle of paronomasia, the eternally suspect practice of translation. Abandonment, needless to say, is often part and parcel of any betrayal; traduttore-traditore perpetuates the idea that translation betrays/abandons/tosses-behind-its-back the (real meaning of the) original. Though this may be true, it is a toss performed with fear, with misgivings. Ovid himself had to do something similar as he reworked a grand arsenal of Ancient Greek mythology as well as preceding Roman epic poetry into Latin, converting stories, characters, and ideas from another time and place into the lifeblood of his poem.
As I write this, I am halfway through a revision of the first full draft; it took Yelena and me two-and-a-half years to complete it. This second phase of translation, more arduous than the first, is an act of retrospection: a looking back, but also an effort to leave behind the Latin — or at least put some necessary distance between the Latin and our evolving English text. It is also a crucial return, the start of a new journey. For while many of the episodes (over 250) and passages and images are by now etched in my memory, I also realise, as I adjust and readjust the English, that I barely have any recollection of others. There is simply too much to hold in the mind. It’s not only the poem itself we are symbolically leaving behind, but so much, on the granular level, that it contains. Away with his hexameter! Away with his penchant for passive constructions! Away with his playful zeugmas and golden lines, his complex ways of naming characters, his hapax — features that surely dazzled Ovid’s readership but would stymie our modern one! Away!
Pacing the coast, keen for the hunt, my eyes were drawn to the sand under my feet, not to the waves or the horizon. To borrow from the saying: I often missed the sea for the stones.
If I go so far as to say that Ovid’s poem has “been my rock” for much of my life — a text I first read at university and have revered ever since — what am I saying, exactly? It means I feel safe in its presence, that it has provided me a foundation, something to hold on to when the waves are swelling. It suggests that the poem, in its supreme solidity, in its lifespan since its composition around 8CE, is something reassuringly unchanging. The Metamorphoses is the closest thing I have to a sacred text. (Psalms 78:35: “And they remembered that God was their rock…”) And yet, the labour of the past three years has been to alter the poem; the particular task of this translation has been to subject my literary rock to a radical transformation: to metamorphosis. The poem, by now, veins me, the way some stones are veined (Ovid describes how the veins in our bodies derive from veins in stones). The effect of sitting with this poem for so long has been profoundly grounding.
In Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, when my children were small, we would gather stones, dozens of them, tossed up by the waves of both ocean and bay. These stones, scattered on the sand, made my heart race; they were never the same, but their colours, their striations, their forms welcomed us, in every season. I would put them into the hood of my son’s zippered sweatshirt, and he would carry them, proud of his load, through the dunes as far as our car. (Proserpina, in Book 5, gathering flowers in a grove moments before Pluto abducts her, puts them not only into a basket, but into the folds of her clothing.) Pacing the coast, keen for the hunt, my eyes were drawn to the sand under my feet, not to the waves or the horizon. To borrow from the saying: I often missed the sea for the stones. We would drive the stones back to the house we rented, studying them, sorting them, tossing some among the slender pine trees behind the deck. We placed others by the front door for future renters to enjoy. When I had to leave Wellfleet, with a sad heart, stones were what I took back. I’d spread them through our small back garden in Brooklyn, heaping them into flower pots. In order to feel close to them when it grew cold, I would fill up transparent Ikea jars intended for rice or lentils with sea stones, and display them in different parts of the house. One of them became a fixture on my desk; I could not concentrate without looking to my stones from time to time.
As a child, on the beaches close to the New England town where I was raised, I was more interested in discovering living creatures in tide pools. Once, I brought home a bucket of starfish that my mother told me to leave outside the front door. They released a terrible stench before dying, cruelly snatched from their environment. But by carting stones from Wellfleet back to Brooklyn, I was displacing them, too. The gesture could be considered — let’s just say it: is — an appropriation. It is also an act of selection, of editing (no, yes, maybe, let’s toss these back in the water). Appropriating, selecting, studying: tossing back words, fingering new ones: the past three years of translation.
This text has been taken from Bone into Stone, the latest installment of The Cahiers Series, which is published by Sylph Editions in collaboration with the Center for Writers & Translators at the American University of Paris.
PHOTO: by EyeEm via Freepik
✺ Published in “Issue 25: Ghosts” of The Dial
