Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> I'm reminded of the fourteeners in
> >Goulding's translation of the _Metamorphoses_ (which Pound called the
> >most beautiful book in English). They take time to get used to.
>
> Is that the translation you'drecommend? Is it still in print?
>
I haven't reread it in a long time, but my memory is that it started out seeming almost grotesque and then grew on one. One reason the fourteener as a form didn't last is that the line tends to break into the ballad scheme of alternating four and three beat lines. So the reader has to cooperate in preventing it from jingling. I have it in a limited edition published by Southern Illinois Univ. Press under the title of _Shakespeare's Ovid_, and if it is still in print it would probably be under that title. Goulding was a Puritan, and again if my vague memory is accurate, you can find that in his translation but it doesn't overbear it. Here it is on the fate of Chiron's daugher, Ocyroe:
. . . .This same fayre yong Nymph could not contented be To learn the craft of Surgerie as perfect as her Sire, But that to learne the secret doomes of Fate she must aspire. .......................................................... A sore deepe sigh, and downe hir cheekes the teares did trickle wet. Mine owne misfortune (quoth she) now hath overtake me sure. I cannot utter any more, for wordes waxe out of ure. My cunning was not worth so muche as that it should procure The wrath of God. I feele by proufe far better had it beene: If that the chaunce of things to come I never had foreseene.
(II, 801-03; 821-26) That line break to "The wrath of God" and a full stop is pretty effective.
I've read Ovid mostly in Rolfe Humphries translation, and taught it years ago in Horace Gregory's translation. I never came close to knowing enough Latin to judge any of them as translations. Pound certainly disliked a lot of good things, but the things he liked were almost always good it seemed to me.
And the thread on Bhaskar started me browsing in the Cantos again, and the following lines from Canto VII must be among the most wonderful compliments ever paid by one writer to another (they refer to Henry James):
And the great domed head, _con gli occhi onesti e tardi_ Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, _Grave incessu_, drinking the tone of things, And the old voice lifts itself
weaving an endless sentence. ***
Henry James, first as Sordello in Purgatory, then as Penelope putting off the suitors! And I guess he is Virgil also ("Moves before me").
I ramble.
Incidentally -- there's nothing wrong with being a formalist or an aesthete, unless one is nothing but a formalist and an aesthete. Who condemns city parks or decent carpet design?
And on art (skill, craft), I spent quite a bit of time re-formatting those posts from Bhaskar I forwarded, to make reading of them reasonbly pleasant, without all sorts of broken lines and endless walls of pointed brackets. Back in the '60s and '70s with only crude technology (IBM Selectric and a rebuilt mimeo machine) we still tried to make our leaflets as decent looking as possible. A little more attention to formalities and aesthetics in that sense on e-mail would seem to me to be good politics. If something is worth posting to the list it out to be worth giving reasonable care to its physical appearance. (I'm _not_ thinking of your typos but of the text people send with quote within quote and broken lines, etc etc. with not atttempt to clean the text up to make it readable.)
Carrol