Elizabeth A. Fisher Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sailing to Byzantium
Although the medieval Greeks of Byzantium inherited their imperial tradition from ancient Rome and even called themselves "Romaioi," the Latin language and Latin literature were virtually forgotten in the Greek East after the Sixth Century. Intermittent ecclesiastical and diplomatic contacts established some intellectual commerce between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, but in general the two traditions enjoyed little scholarly or cultural interchange before the Fourth Crusade (AD 1204) captured Constantinople and established Latin lords in the capitol of the Byzantine Empire.
In AD 1261 Michael VIII Palaeologos ousted the Latin overlords of the city and reestablished it as the cultural and political center of the Byzantine Empire. Among the scholars prominent in this restored Greek cultural climate was Maximos Planudes, a monk and teacher of broad learning who made his mark in literary, scientific, and mathematical studies. He also translated Latin literary works into Greek, introducing the western cultural heritage into Byzantium at a time when political and ecclesiastical relations between Latin West and Greek East were sensitive and strained. Some of these translations contributed to the dialogue over ecclesiastical union, some were useful for the traditional study of rhetoric, but some were purely literary in appeal. Among these last was a complete translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Planudes belonged to a circle of scholars representing broad expertise in a variety of disciplines. Planudes or his circle rediscovered and edited Greek dramatic texts, reassembled and edited the corpus of Plutarch, restored the maps to Ptolemy's Geography, and complied a comprehensive edition of mathematical texts. Their activities preserved the Greek literary and scientific tradition, rationalized it, and extended it. During this period foreign traditions were also acknowledged and incorporated into Byzantine culture through translations. Greeks translated from Persian various scientific manuals and poetic texts and translated from Latin Aristotle's lost work, De plantis. Planudes' literary translations from Latin acknowledged and established the cultural credibility of Byzantium's virtually forgotten Latin literary heritage, freshly endorsed by a scholar well respected by his contemporaries for his work in Greek literary and scientific studies.
Ovid's Metamorphoses is a work of daunting length and of enormous variety in many areas-- subject matter, complexity of syntax, controlled ambiguity (e.g., irony, sexual innuendo), emotional tone (e.g., humorous, tragic), and literary embellishment, to enumerate but a few. Both its length and its wild variations challenge the translator and discourage all but the most dedicated and persistent. To examine Planudes' practice in dealing with the multifarious Metamorphoses, I intend to analyze two episodes from Book I. The opening sections on the creation of the universe (Met. I.1-88) tests Planudes' ability to translate some fiendishly difficult Latin and also illustrates his reliance upon / independence from the vocabulary both of the Greek philosophical tradition and of the Creation story as told in the Septuagint. These two streams of the Greek literary traditions not only were familiar to Planudes' educated Christian audience, but are also similar in content to the Metamorphoses passage. However, this passage is not at all typical of the work as a whole becasue it does not challenge the translator to cope with Ovid's sexual innuendo, with his ironic treatment of the gods, nor with his casual references to those Roman political and social institutions which were familiar and comfortable to Ovid's original audience but which are puzzling and alienating to non-Romans. In order to examine Planudes' skill in handling these translation traps, I shall focus upon the Apollo / Daphne episode (Met. I.452-567), which presents them in abundance.
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