The Word for Sorrow :A work begins its progress
LIKE all potentially promising plans, The Word for Sorrow came about by chance. After working simultaneously on two classically-veined projects, a translation of Catullus’ shorter poems and a poetry collection, Chasing Catullus, I had long been promising myself a break from the classical world. And yet increasingly I found myself eying up Ovid’s much-neglected poems of exile, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, the epistolary verse written after the poet’s sudden and mysterious exile from Rome to the Black Sea in AD 8. For some time I had been struck by the depth of raw emotion it displayed, as if the mask of classical literary artifice had crumbled
away to reveal the pain of the man beneath (although Ovid, the master of disguise, could always have been adopting another). And then fate intervened.
One rainy spring day I was working on an initial translation from Tristia using the Perseus site's on-line Latin dictionary, when an electrical storm required me to log off . Turning to an old dictionary, bought at a village fĂȘte as a school-student, I noticed by chance an inscription on its fly-leaf which I must have seen many times over the years and yet barely registered: a name in faded ink and a date, early in 1900. Back on-line a few days later, I ran a search on the name, almost on a whim. The results were impressive: First World War documents and diaries relating to 1/1st regiment of the Royal Gloucester Hussars, posted to Gallipoli in 1915, to the Hellespont, near Ovid’s own place of exile and which, by coincidence, Ovid had just described crossing in the poem I was translating. Following link after link, more and more connections were revealed; old photos of the regiment lined up on Cheltenham Station just before leaving for the east, bringing parallels with Ovid’s famous poem describing his last night before exile. The eye-witness accounts detailing the sickness, deprivations and dangers of the Gallipoli campaign in which 50,000 Allied troops and 85,000 Turkish soldiers died, reminiscent of Ovid’s own powerful laments about his conditions of exile. And so The Word for Sorrow came about, versions of Ovid’s verse alongside original poems exploring the history of the second-hand dictionary used to translate it.
But how were Ovid’s poems to be approached and how were they to be transformed? From the start I knew I didn’t want to create another ‘straightforward translation’ (Peter Green’s excellent 1994 Penguin edition already filled that role with aplomb). I knew, too, that I couldn't possibly hope to cover all of Ovid’s exile poetry (there are around 95 poems in all in nine books). Similarly, I would need to be selective about what I used from each poem, as many ran to more than a hundred lines. Here, I soon realised, narrative drive would be the key; the poems and renditions had to spark off each other, to hold the dramatic tension between the two as each story progressed. For this reason I’ve condensed here and there, for example, in ‘Burning Books’, from Tristia 1.1., where I’ve used only the first eighty-two lines. In particular, I’ve found myself omitting many of Ovid’s incessant appeals for clemency to the emperor Augustus, perhaps rather craven, let alone cringing, for modern tastes. I am keen, however, to retain Ovid’s flashes of wit which didn’t appear to have deserted him in exile, despite his protestations. It is also important for the poems to flow into each other. For this reason I’ve often mixed up the line order of Ovid’s verse as well as condensing. For example, ‘All at Sea’, from Tristia 1.2., starts at line 15 of the Latin in order to provide a natural continuation from the end of the preceding poem, ‘Hail.’
Yet the guiding force here, as ever, is fidelity. I start by working in detail on the text, poring over commentaries and scholarly studies, weighing up the various theories and arguments, the prolonged discussions over every nuance of the Latin, to produce in the first instance faithful, literal translations. Only then can versions be shaped, like an abstract painter, perhaps, using figurative sketches and constructions as a basis for refining image into pure form or colour. For as well as tracking Ovid’s journey via my versions, I’m also looking for Ovid to creep into my own poems so that the two will have a truly symbiotic relationship. And so ‘Dancing in the Dark’ takes its cue from a line in Peter Green’s translation of Ex Ponto IV.2., while ‘The Horses’ uses images from Tristia I.4.
For what is becoming clear as the work takes shape, is that there is far more here than a simple Gallipoli/Tomis or text/dictionary equation; just as Ovid’s often ironic poetic voice interposes itself into his narrative, so can my own, offering a third story of discovery, the detective story running like an undercurrent beneath.
And just as Ovid writes about far more than his exile - his vocation as a poet, for example, or the wider role of the artist in social and political life - so there are also wider issues for me, such as the role of translation or indeed classical literature in today’s world. There are other narratives too; the private writings - diaries, letters, photographs, even poetry - of British soldiers on the eastern front, many of which mention my dictionary’s owner, as well the testimony of his daughter with whom I’ve been in contact, all providing, like Ovid’s verse, striking source material.
The challenge now, of course - the eternal prayer - is to be worthy of this material. As in Chasing Catullus, recontextualisation and juxtaposition will be central to the creative process, the dialogue between text and translator, writer and subject, between original and version, poetry and translation. Most important of all, though, are the links forged between ancient and modern, past and present, the invisible lines that connect us to often surprising points in history, finding common ground in unexpected places, celebrating the common humanity that binds us, whether we live at the beginning of the first, the twentieth or the twenty-first century AD.
The following extract comes from the opening of the sequence, as
Ovid makes his journey east, remembering his last days in Rome.
Meanwhile the dictionary’s secrets begin to be uncovered.
Page(s) 60-62
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