Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English Poetry (review)

As Sabine Coelsch-Foisner explains in her introduction, this volume of essays on the reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English poetry was produced under the aegis of a research center jointly sponsored by two universities in Salzburg: the Paris-Lodron University and the University Mozarteum. The center, entitled Interdisciplinary Research Centre: Metamorphic Changes in the Arts (IRCM), is “dedicated to exploring the critical potential of the concept of metamorphosis for the analysis of dynamic artistic and cultural processes of change, transfer, transformation and translation” (ix). Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a principal subject for the center and has been featured in several of its earlier publications. This volume contains seventeen critical essays on “the metamorphoses of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English poetry from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century” (vii), as well as two short translations. A brief précis of each essay is included in the introduction.

The volume is less interdisciplinary than its pedigree suggests. The authors of the essays are diverse in nationality and represent a wide range of institutions from Korea to Texas and several European countries as well; but all are scholars of English or American literature, and for the most part they have not strayed beyond the traditional boundaries of their discipline. As a consequence, the volume as a whole lacks the sophistication, nuance, and breadth that would mark it out as a distinguished or interesting contribution to the study of Ovid’s reception. The most obvious omission is the general (but fortunately not universal) lack of engagement with Ovid’s poetry. Many of the authors base their work on translations. Fair enough, we might say, since many of their poets do the same. But it is important to realize that a translation is an interpretation. A poet using a translation is reading Ovid through an intermediary, and the contribution of the intermediary must be taken into account in assessing the poet’s treatment of Ovid. When the poet and the author of the essay are using different translations, the discussion is necessarily not about Ovid, but about a story in Ovid.

The quality of the essays is very uneven. A few are so weak that they did not merit publication. Of the rest, I will mention only the discussions most likely to interest classicists and students of reception.

Per Serritslev Petersen’s sophisticated essay on the hermeneutic complexity of the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus treats the gender politics not only of Ovid and his (female) narrator, but also of the episode’s readers; his discussion moves from Thomas Peend and Arthur Golding in the sixteenth century to Ted Hughes in the twentieth and Jeffrey Eugenides in the twenty-first. William Rossiter teases out the different Ovidian strains in Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet on Actaeon: the Latin Ovid, the English Ovid of Chaucer, and, above all, the Italian Ovid of Petrarch. Glyn Pursglove presents an intelligent survey of the reception of the story of Procris with special focus on its reception in Victorian poetry, which he argues was inspired by the acquisition of Piero di Cosimo’s painting by the London National Gallery in 1862. This essay deserved an illustration. Andrew Hui’s essay on the use of Procne and Philomela in Titus Andronicus is one of the best in the volume; it illuminates Ovid as well as Shakespeare and muses interestingly on metamorphosis as a feature of storytelling. Anne Tomiche’s fine discussion on Philomela in modernist poetry is an excellent companion piece to it. The essays on Derek Mahon by Maryvonne Boisseau and Christopher Moylan are also worth reading as a pair. Boisseau treats Mahon’s translations of Procne and Philomela and Pygmalion and Galatea in an excellent close reading of Mahon’s translations against Ovid’s text; this is one of the few essays to consider the nuances of translation. Moylan is concerned with the use and meaning of metamorphosis...