Mirabile Dictu

 Ovid’s collection of elegies, Amores (Loves), abounds with double entendres.  Although it is a stitch in Latin, it can seem dry in English even in the hands of an expert translator. On the other hand, Ovid’s masterpiece, Metamorphoses, his epic collection of transformation myths, is vivacious and bubbly in translation. Epic is more straightforward, and Metamorphoses has influenced centuries of English poetry and art, while the elegies portray the pursuit of love in an exotic ancient world.

I have been rereading Ovid’s charming Latin elegies, and decided to translate Amores, II.iii, to give you a glimpse of Ovid’s world.   It is the second of two monologues addressed to a eunuch who is his mistress’s chaperone. 

The persona of the poem tells the eunuch that, if he had been able to enjoy the “mutual joys of Venus,” he would have sanctioned his mistress’s affair with Ovid.  But Ovid also subtly derides the eunuch’s sexual impotence:  he uses words like mollis (soft)  and facilis (yielding), similar to Catullus’s slangy references to not being durus (hard). Ovid advises the eunuch to implere (fill) the mistress with kindness.  Will the eunuch yield or resist?

Here is my literal translation of the poem.

Amores, II.iii

Oh! You are neither male nor female
 who guard my mistress, and you cannot
know the mutual joys of Venus (love).
The man who first gelded boys
should suffer the wounds he dealt.
If your love had grown warm
in any woman, you would be soft in compliance,
you would yield to those asking.  
You were not born for the war horse,
or useful with brave weapons:
A warlike spear did not fit in
your right hand.  Let the masculine men
 manage wars.  Put away virile hopes;
you must instead bear
the standards of your mistress.
 Fill her with kindness, and her friendship
 will profit you.  If you lose your mistress,
what use will you be? Her beauty –
these are years fit for sexual sport – and
figure are unworthy to die in sluggish abstinence.
She could deceive you, though you are troublesome
What two have wished for they will get.
But it is more fitting to have made a request :  
 we ask you while you still have
 an opportunity to place your favors well, with a good return.

In Hilma Wolitzer’s short story, “Sundays,” the narrator must coax her depressed husband Howard out of bed every Sunday morning.  To cheer him up, they drive after breakfast from Queens to the suburbs to tour model homes.  But they would never dream of moving to the suburbs.

I love the Paulie and Howard stories, and I know the feeling of looking down on the suburbs.  Nonetheless, I am enthralled by real estate. “I would love to live there,” I exclaim as I pass a Victorian house with a wraparound porch, or a Mid-Century Modern Home from the ’60s.  Even if the house is for sale, it is just a fantasy. I’m hooked on real estate ads in print and online. though I have no intention of moving.

Here is the link to the post at Thornfield Hall Redux:thornfieldhallredux.blogspot.com/2021/10/real-estate-is-not-prousts-madeleine.html

Many great American women writers flourished in the mid-to-late twentieth century.  It was a boom time for American literature.   Discerning women read with excitement the award-winning work of Mary McCarthy, Maureen Howard, Jean Stafford, and Alison Lurie, who captured, often satirically, features of American women’s lives.  Their piquant wit, gritty realism, and glittering prose should have won them a place in the canon.  But has it?

One of the most neglected divas of American literature is Maureen Howard, whose baroque sentences in her tetralogy of novels about the seasons (A Lovers’ Almanac, Big As Life, The Silver Screen, and The Rags of Time)  left me breathless. She won the National Critics Circle Award in 1978 for her memoir Facts of Life, which is now, astonishingly, out-of-print. Howard seems to be forgotten.  Yet only a decade ago Jess Row in The New York Times praised the complexity of The Rags of Time.   Row compared it to “one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes full of minutely arranged objects.”

I concentrate on Howard’s stunning style as I reread Facts of Life, a vivid memoir of growing up Catholic in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  This mixture of gritty  vignettes,  dramatic scenes, and fragments is like a modern symphony.  It is brilliant and melodic but not an easy read, because her sharp sensibility is demanding. And I have marked so many passages I want to share, but here is an especially vivid paragraph about Howard’s mother, a  teacher-turned housewife.

“In the role of the educated promising daughter my mother failed.  Her father had really wanted a safe local schoolteacher, an aging girl correcting papers up in her maidenly room. … But it was her own money in the Bridgeport Savings Bank.”

Howard’s mother relentlessly shared books and music with the children. But after Maureen and her brother George moved to New York, their mother gave up culture and reverted to watching  Lawrence Welk with their father. Maureen’s strange brother George lived in semi-squalor and at one time knew who was dancing on a given night in the ballet.  He liked “Orange crates and real Picassos.  Thousands of records and books, but no dishes, no curtains.”

Maureen is split between high culture and pop culture.  She writes,

‘While I’m split, split right down the middle, all sensibility one day, raging at the vulgarities that are packaged as art, the self-promotion everywhere, the inflated reputations.  In such a mood I am unable to sit in a theater or pick up a recently written book.  I am quite crazy as I begin to read in stupefying rotation–Anna Kareninga, Bleak House, Persuasion, Dubliners, St. Mawr, Tender Is the Night, The Wings of the Dove.  I play the Chopin Mazurkas until the needle wears out….  The atmosphere I demand is so rarified it is stale and I know it.”

Sound familiar?  I am loving this memoir and urge you to read it if you can find a copy.

Wheelock, Chapter 5.  Learn vocabulary and do all exercises.

Wheelock, Chapter 4:  Learn vocabulary and do all exercises.

Wheelock, Chapter 3:  Learn vocabulary and do all exercises.

I.  Decline tua philosophia (1st declension noun worksheet)

II.  Wheelock, Chapter 2, pp. 14-15, Sententiae Antiquae, 1-14 even; 16-20 all.

Wheelock, Chapter 1, pp. 4-7.  Learn vocabulary and translate the Sententiae (Sentences).