Ovid's Erotic Poems: "Amores" and "Ars Amatoria" PDF
Preview Ovid's Erotic Poems: "Amores" and "Ars Amatoria"
Ovid’s Erotic Poems Ovid’s Erotic Poems Amores and Ars Amatoria 5 translated by Len Krisak introduction by Sarah Ruden University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ovid, 43 b.c.–17 a.d. or 18 a.d. [Amores. English] Ovid’s erotic poems : “Amores” and “Ars amatoria” / translated by Len Krisak ; introduction by Sarah Ruden. — 1st ed. p. cm. isbn 978-0-8122-4625-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Love poetry, Latin—Translations into English. 2. Erotic poetry, Latin— Translations into English. I. Krisak, Len, 1948– II. Ovid, 43 b.c.–17 a.d. or 18 a.d. Ars amatoria. English. III. Title: Ars amatoria. pa6522.a3 2014b 871’.01—dc23 2014012364 contents 5 Introduction by Sarah Ruden 1 Translator’s Preface 17 Amores Epigram of the Poet Himself 23 book i 25 book ii 52 book iii 80 Ars Amatoria book i 113 book ii 139 book iii 164 Notes 191 Glossary 205 Acknowledgments 225 introduction 5 It is a strange though critical irony that Ovid (43 b.c.e.–17 c.e.), the ancient world’s greatest love poet, has a reputation for outstanding frivolity, particularly in his fun- damental erotic works, the Amores (Loves) and Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Frivolity and romantic love don’t match up very well in our minds. But from one angle that characterization makes sense. Ovid is one of our richest sources on otium, literally “leisure,” and in Rome the word was particularly suggestive of things that are extra, ephem- eral, disposable—such as the love affairs a young man might indulge in as long as they did not involve serious infatuation that might dis- tract him from duties and prescribed ambitions. Every relationship Ovid depicts comes under the heading of dalliance: any assertion of real, lasting emotional involvement is canceled out by the poet’s satirical wit. His persona’s involvement with a woman whom he calls Corinna in the Amores amounts to little but a series of clichés brilliantly under- cut: the lover constantly protests his helplessness, for example, but his superb rhetorical control in itself makes that protest ridiculous. He is far more interested in declaiming on stock themes such as the wicked- ness of sailing, and in creating dramatizations in which Corinna—or another woman, or more than one—is a mere prop. In Book II, Poem 2 introduction 11 of the Amores, Corinna is about to go to sea, and he protests her decision and prays for her safety in fifty-six allusive lines that would be absurdly pretentious if he meant a word of them. Ars Amatoria, for its part, is a parody in its very form, that of di- dactic verse. Two long, discursive books instruct men on the science of selecting a woman, flirting with her, handling her—then, briefly, how to please her in bed. A third book tells women how to handle their side of the romantic confidence game. Again, spicing up what by this time had become the pabulum of literary eroticism is Ovid’s prevailing technique. Ovid’s love poetry is therefore the antithesis of negotium and its lit- erature. Negotium was almost the defining condition for respectable men of the citizen class. I prefer to translate the word according to its etymology, as “non-leisure” rather than “business,” because it covers everything someone would do to advance his interests in the public sphere. First, there were private commercial dealings, politics, and public administration, often jumbled together—all three were based on rhetoric, or the science of speaking and writing. Witness the orator Cicero’s mammoth yet exquisitely crafted personal correspondence that complements his published speeches and treatises. But negotium included even literary avocations such as writing history or poetry, a rather shocking example of which was Cicero’s (now mercifully lost) epic poem De consulatu suo (On His [Own] Consulship), celebrating his alleged heroism in Rome’s highest public office. The literature of negotium purported to show a man at his real, solid best. The literature of otium seems to have emerged only a generation or two before Ovid and is first extant in the work of the poet Catullus (who died, young, in the mid-fifties B.c.e.). Ovid’s erotic poetry rep- resents—to my mind, anyway—the ancient world’s tightest combi- nation of delight in the world with delight in writing. He is by far the keenest observer of early Imperial Rome’s details, and the wittiest introduction 3 confabulator to use this material, from the look and sound of public entertainments to the mechanics of recreational sex, and from the distant spectacles of large historical events to the moods in an apart- ment where a courtesan tries a new hairstyle to better suit the shape of her face or fights for her life after an abortion. But even though some of the topics are still customarily called “light,” the term “frivolous” is unfair: at this stage of his career (as opposed to his time of exile after 8 C.e., when loneliness, humilia- tion, and a campaign to be recalled produced what can look like real personal writing), Ovid is not concerned with anything so trivial as his own physical desires or emotional attachments, or even his own wider circumstances or experiences. Even his career as a roué may have been fictional or brief, given what he writes in exile in the collec- tions entitled Tristia (Sad Things) and Letters from Pontus (the Black Sea, beside which he made his involuntary new home) about his lov- ing, loyal, desperately missed third wife, whom he probably married around the age of thirty, when many Roman men contracted their first legal unions). But in the texts of the Amores and Ars Amatoria themselves lies the main evidence that Ovid’s love poetry was about itself, so that his freedom and achievement there went far beyond the necessary narrow limits of self-depiction or self-expression: it was creation in a broader sense that concerned him, creation feeding on the infin- ity of literary possibilities rather than the decidedly finite store of individual human experience. The writing luxuriates in rhetorical convolutions and send-ups of the love elegy genre that it technically inhabits, and is obviously determined to use all its contents as mere combustible material for verbal and dramatic fireworks. But in a stunt such as this, the indispensable thing, the thing that prevents the composition from being a mere pile of dry tiresome- ness that over time will grow soggy and rot, is the spark of genius. If
The list of books you might like
