Repository path: workshop/translations/metamorphoses/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Ovid, Metamorphoses — Books 4, 9, 11, 14, lines 51–80 (Latin → English)

Source. P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses, ed. Hugo Magnus (Gotha: Perthes, 1892), Perseus canonical TEI urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-lat2, retrieved 2026-07-26 from raw.githubusercontent.com/PerseusDL/canonical-latinLit. Public domain. 15 books, 11,986 lines in this edition.

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v0.1. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject. Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Target. Four passages of thirty Latin hexameters each — Books 4, 9, 11 and 14, lines 51–80 — 120 lines, 779 Latin whitespace tokens (Book 4: 200, Book 9: 193, Book 11: 193, Book 14: 193).

How the target was chosen — length only, before any Latin was read. Book 1 was excluded by construction, because it is the passage on which the two contemporary translators were checked for human authorship (note (mm)) and reading their English there must not be able to contaminate a target. Among Books 2–15, the four books whose Latin line count is closest to the median line count of Books 2–15 (median 800.5) were selected; ties to the lower book number. This yields Book 4 (804 lines), Book 9 (797), Book 11 (795) and Book 14 (852). Within each, the target is lines 51–80: a fixed thirty-line window at a fixed offset, declared before any Latin was read, the offset of fifty lines chosen so that no target begins with book-opening material. The rule uses line counts and nothing else. It cannot have selected passages that suit the translator or the measurement.

What it in fact selected, which the translator learned only on reading the Latin: the opening of Pyramus and Thisbe (4.55–80); Achelous wrestling Hercules (9.51–80); the aftermath of Orpheus's death and the rooting of the Maenads (11.51–80); Circe poisoning Scylla's pool, and Aeneas driven to Carthage (14.51–80).

Form. Unmetred verse lines, roughly line-for-line against the Latin but freely enjambed. Declared before translating, because form is a factor in the experiment this translation feeds: it makes the lead form-matched to Brookes More (1922) and Ian Johnston (2010), and form-mismatched to Henry Riley (1851) and A. S. Kline (2000). See E-20260726-ovid-period-form/design.md §5.6.

Priming. No English rendering of Books 4, 9, 11 or 14 was read before this translation and its log were frozen. Book 1 of Johnston and of Kline was read, in full for Johnston's opening and in part for Kline's, as the note-(mm) humanity gate; Book 1 is excluded from the targets by construction. See the design page §4 for the exact and weaker-than-S028 statement of what the freeze covers.

Contamination: high. The Metamorphoses is among the most translated poems in existence and English versions of Pyramus and Thisbe in particular are certain to sit in the lead's training data. The basis of the declaration is provenance, not measurement, and no measurement in the experiment that follows can turn it into none.

Evaluation. E-20260726-ovid-period-form / RS-20260726-ovid-period-form — a wording-overlap measurement only, not a quality judgement, and not made by the translator. Its finding about this translation: the registered rank statistic saturated, so it yielded no discrimination; descriptively, the lead's overlap is highest with Riley 1851 and lowest with More 1922, collapses to near nothing when proper names are excluded, and includes no 12-word run shared with any published translation. The declaration high stands on provenance regardless.

Each passage begins mid-sentence, because the selection window is fixed by line number and not by syntax. Ellipses mark the cut.

Book 4, lines 51–80

… until she suffered the same; or else how the tree that used to carry white fruit now bears black, its berries darkened by the touch of blood. This last one pleased them. Since the story was no common one, she began in words like these, her wool still following its thread:

"Pyramus and Thisbe — he the handsomest of young men, she preferred above all the girls the East possessed — lived in adjoining houses, there where Semiramis is said to have ringed her high city with walls of baked brick. Being neighbours made them known to each other, made the first approaches; and in time the love grew. They would have been joined by the marriage torch as well, but the fathers forbade it. What the fathers could not forbid: the two of them burned equally, their minds taken. No one is in the secret. They talk by nodding, and by signs; and the more the fire is covered, the more, being covered, it burns. The party wall between the two houses had, when it was built, been left with a thin split. Through the long centuries nobody had marked that flaw — but what does love not notice? — you were the first to see it, lovers, and you made it a road for the voice; and through it, in the smallest murmur, endearments used to cross in safety. Often, when they had taken up their places, Thisbe on this side, Pyramus on that, and each in turn had caught the other's breath, 'Jealous wall,' they would say, 'why do you stand in the way of lovers? What would it cost you to let us join, our whole bodies together — or, if that is too much, to open just enough for kisses? And we are not ungrateful: we own that we are in your debt for this, that words are given passage to loving ears.' Having spoken so, uselessly, each from their separate side, at nightfall they said 'Goodbye' and each gave to their own face of the wall kisses that never got across." …

Book 9, lines 51–80

… Alcides to force my chest back off him. At the fourth attempt he shakes my grip away, unlocks my clenched arms, drives me with his hand — I am resolved to tell the truth — and turns me round on the spot, and hangs, a weight, on my back. If I deserve any credit, if no invented glory is what my voice is after now: I seemed to have a mountain set on me. Still, I barely worked my arms in, running with sweat; I barely loosened the hard holds from my body. He is on me while I gasp, he will not let me get my strength back, and he takes my neck. Then at last the ground was pressed by my knee, and my mouth bit into the sand. Beaten for strength, I turn aside to my arts and slide out of the man, changed to a long snake. And after I had wound my body into bent coils, and moved my forked tongue with a fierce hissing, the Tirynthian laughed, and mocked my arts: "Beating snakes," he said, "was the work of my cradle; and though you outdo the other serpents, Achelous, how small a fraction of the Lernaean viper will you be, one snake? She grew out of her own wounds. Not one head of the hundred could be cut away unpunished — the neck came back the stronger for its pair of heirs. Her, branching with the snakes born from her slaughter, thriving on her own damage, I mastered, and once mastered, opened. What do you think becomes of you, who wield borrowed weapons, turned into a false snake, hidden inside a shape that is only lent?" He had spoken; and he throws the fetters of his fingers on the top of my neck. I was being throttled as though tongs had my throat, and I fought to tear my jaws out of his thumbs. Beaten this way too, I had a third form left, the bull's …

Book 11, lines 51–80

… you take them up; and — a marvel — while it glides down midstream, the lyre complains of something, I cannot tell what, tearfully; the tongue murmurs, lifeless, tearfully; the banks answer tearfully. And now, carried out to sea, they leave the river of their own people and reach the shore of Methymnaean Lesbos. Here a wild snake goes for the head laid out on the foreign sand, and for the hair, wet through with dripping spray. At last Phoebus is there, and blocks it as it readies its bite, and freezes the serpent's gaping jaws to stone, and hardens the open mouth exactly as it was. The shade goes down beneath the earth, and knows again every place it had seen before, and, searching the fields of the blessed, finds Eurydice, and takes her in his arms and holds her hungrily. Here the two of them walk out together, side by side; now he follows her as she goes ahead; now he goes first — and Orpheus, safe at last, looks back at his own Eurydice.

Still, Lyaeus does not allow this crime to go unpunished. Grieving for the lost singer of his rites, at once, in the woods, he bound down every one of the Edonian mothers who had watched the outrage, with a twisted root: he drew their toes out, each as far as she had run, and drove the points of them into solid ground. As a bird, when it has put its leg into the snare a cunning fowler hid, and feels that it is held, beats and beats itself, and by fluttering pulls the bonds tighter — so each of these women, stuck where she stood, fixed into the soil, tried in her terror to run, and got nowhere; the tough root has her, holds her, checks her as she leaps up; and while she is asking where her toes are, where her foot is, where her nails, she watches wood come up her smooth calves …

Book 14, lines 51–80

There was a small pool, bent round into curving arcs, where Scylla liked to rest: to this she used to take herself out of the heat of sea and sky, when the sun stood at its highest in mid-circle and had made the shadows shortest from overhead. This pool the goddess spoils in advance, and fouls with monster-making poisons; over it she scatters liquids pressed from a harmful root, and with the dark riddling of unfamiliar words she mutters a spell three times nine over with her magic mouth. Scylla comes, and had waded down as far as the middle of her belly, when she sees her own loins made filthy with barking monsters, and at first, not believing that those things are parts of her own body, runs from them and drives them off and is afraid of the dogs' insolent mouths — and drags along with her the very ones she runs from; and, feeling for the body of her thighs, her shins, her feet, she finds Cerberus-jaws where those parts were. She stands on a rage of dogs, and holds the backs of the beasts beneath her down with her cut-off loins and her belly jutting out.

Glaucus her lover wept, and fled marriage with Circe, who had used the strength of herbs too much like an enemy. Scylla stayed in the place; and when the first chance came, in hatred of Circe, she stripped Ulysses of his companions. Soon she would have sunk the Trojan keels as well, had she not first been changed into a reef — which still stands there in stone: the sailor avoids the reef too. When the Trojan ships had beaten this with their oars, and greedy Charybdis, and the Ausonian shore was already close at hand, the wind carries them back to the Libyan coast. There the Sidonian woman takes Aeneas into her heart and house — she who would not bear well the parting from her Phrygian husband; and on a pyre built under the appearance of a rite …

Translator's log

Written at translation time and frozen before any evaluation of this translation was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence carries internal-judgment-only, and the lead never judges its own translation (charter §5).

The standing decision: what "close" means against a hexameter

R04 says source-only; it does not say what form to use. I decided the form before reading the Latin, because the experiment this feeds treats form as a factor and a form chosen after seeing the passages would be a free parameter tuned on the material. I chose unmetred lines running roughly one-for-one against the hexameter, freely enjambed. What that buys is that Ovid's line-end placements — sanguinis arbor, paries, quid amantibus obstas, non pervenientia contra — can be kept at line end. What it costs is any metrical claim at all: these are lines because the Latin has lines, not because they scan.

The four-line-per-sentence density of Ovid's paratactic narrative kept pushing me toward prose. I did not go there, but I noticed the pull most in 14.59–67 (Scylla) and 11.71–80 (the Maenads), where the Latin is one long grammatical machine and English lineation does nothing for it.

Book 4 — Pyramus and Thisbe

• lana sua fila sequente (54). An ablative absolute: she keeps spinning while she talks. Options: drop it (it is decoration), footnote it, or render it and let the reader work out that spinning is what the Minyeides are doing. I rendered it — "her wool still following its thread" — because the detail is the frame of the whole book and dropping it would smooth over the reason these tales are being told at all.
• Taedae quoque iure coissent (60). Literally "they would have come together also by the law of the torch." The marriage torch is the metonym and it is not live in English. I kept "the marriage torch" rather than writing "they would have married", losing the legal register of iure — the alternative was "would have been lawfully joined in marriage", which buys iure back and loses the torch. I chose the image over the register.
• quoque magis tegitur, tectus magis aestuat ignis (64). The line is built on the repetition tegitur / tectus, and the English wants to say it once. "The more the fire is covered, the more, being covered, it burns" is deliberately clumsy in the same place the Latin is deliberately neat. Alternative considered and rejected: "the more it is hidden, the hotter it burns" — idiomatic, and it throws away the figure.
• primi vidistis amantes (68). Ovid breaks into second-person apostrophe mid-narrative and it is abrupt. I kept the abruptness ("you / were the first to see it, lovers") rather than normalising to "the lovers were the first to see it", which is what a prose translator under pressure to be readable would do.
• quantum erat, ut sineres (74). Idiom: "how much would it have been for you to allow" ≈ "what would it have cost you". I used the idiom. quantum erat is a colloquialism and "what would it cost you" is the closest live English colloquialism I could find. Also considered: "would it have been so much to ask".
• partique dedere / oscula quisque suae non pervenientia contra (79–80). The hardest two lines in the passage. parti suae is each lover's own side of the wall, and non pervenientia contra is the point: the kisses do not get through. "Each gave to their own face of the wall / kisses that never got across." I used "face" for parti to keep the wall physical; "side" was ambiguous between the wall's side and the lover's side.
• Pronouns. I used "they/their" for the pair jointly and singular "their" once ("each gave to their own face"), which is a register choice, not an accuracy one; "each gave to his or her own face" was the alternative and is stiffer.

Book 9 — Achelous and Hercules

• Alcides, Tirynthius (51, 66). Ovid uses three names for Hercules in thirty lines and never the plain one. I kept both patronymic and cult title untranslated rather than flattening to "Hercules", which is the choice a reader-friendly translation would make and which erases the fact that the narrator, defeated, is avoiding the name.
• certum est mihi vera fateri (53). A parenthesis of shame — the river-god is admitting he lost. "I am resolved to tell the truth." The alternative, "I may as well admit it", is more natural and less formal; I chose the formal reading because certum est mihi is a decision, not a shrug.
• inposito pressus mihi monte videbar (56). "I seemed to have a mountain set on me." Slightly awkward English word order preserved so that the mountain lands where Ovid puts it, at the end.
• cunarum labor est angues superare mearum (67). The joke is that strangling snakes was a labor of Hercules' cradle, i.e. an infant's job, and labor is also the technical word for his Labours. English cannot hold both. I chose "was the work / of my cradle" — losing the Labours pun, keeping the insult. "One of my cradle's labours" would keep the pun and read as a translationese.
• pars quota … eris unus (69). pars quota is "what fraction", a real arithmetical taunt. Rendered "how small a fraction … will you be, / one snake?" — I added nothing, but the word order makes the sting land on "one snake", which in Latin is unus in the same emphatic position.
• domui domitamque reclusi (74). reclusi is the crux: "opened up", i.e. cut open, dispatched. I translated "I mastered, and once mastered, opened", keeping the figura etymologica domui / domitam as "mastered / once mastered" and leaving reclusi as the bald "opened", which is obscure in English exactly as it is compressed in Latin. Alternative: "and having tamed her, finished her" — clearer, and it deletes the word.
• forma precaria (76). "A shape held on sufferance" / "a borrowed shape". precaria is a legal term for something held at another's pleasure. "A shape that is only lent" keeps the loan, drops the law.

Book 11 — after Orpheus

• flebile … flebile … flebile (52–53). Three occurrences in two lines, in three different constructions: internal accusative, adverbial, adverbial. I kept "tearfully" three times and accepted the monotony, because the monotony is the effect. Rejected: varying it ("plaintively / mournfully / in grief"), which is what makes the line sound better in English and cancels it.
• nescio quid (52). "Some I-know-not-what." Rendered as a parenthetic "of something, / I cannot tell what", which spreads it over a line break; the tighter "some unknown lament" makes it a noun and loses the speaker's uncertainty.
• flumen populare (54). "Their people's river" — the Hebrus is Thracian and Orpheus is Thracian. "The river of their own people" rather than "their native river", because populare is about a people and not about birth.
• arva piorum (62). Not "Elysium", which is a later and more specific word; "the fields of the blessed" keeps it vaguer, as piorum is.
• iam tutus respicit (66). The whole point of the poem's ending is in tutus: he can look back now, safely, because there is nothing left to lose. I put "safe at last" and let "looks back" carry the rest. Nothing was added to gloss it.
• The bird simile (73–75). Latin postpones the subject (volucris) into the middle of the relative clause. I front-loaded it ("As a bird, when it has put its leg into / the snare") because the English sentence collapses otherwise. This is the largest word-order departure in the four passages.
• plangitur (75). Middle voice: it beats itself. "Beats and beats itself" — the doubling is mine, and it is compensation for the middle, which English does not have.
• exsternata (77). A rare, strong word for panic-struck. "In her terror" is weaker than the Latin and I could not find a single English word at the same pitch that was not archaic.

Book 14 — Circe and Scylla

• praevitiat (55). Ovid appears to have coined it: prae- + vitiare, "to spoil beforehand". I rendered "spoils in advance" — visibly a compound, visibly odd, which is the most I could do about a coinage. There is no English verb for it.
• portentificis venenis (55). Another compound: "monster-making poisons". Kept as a compound, hyphenated, for the same reason.
• obscurum verborum ambage novorum (57). ambages is circumlocution, riddling indirection; novorum is "strange, unheard-of" rather than "new". "The dark / riddling of unfamiliar words." I chose "unfamiliar" over "new" deliberately; "new words" in English suggests neologism, which is a different claim.
• ter noviens (58). Three times nine — twenty-seven, a magic number, and Ovid says it as a multiplication. "A spell three times nine over" keeps the multiplication. "Twenty-seven times" would be the same number and not the same sentence.
• Cerbereos rictus (65). "Cerberus-jaws". I used the proper name as an attributive rather than "the jaws of Cerberus", because the Latin adjective makes it a kind of jaw, not a possession.
• statque canum rabie (66). She stands on a madness of dogs — abstract for concrete, and grotesque. I kept the abstraction ("She stands on a rage of dogs") instead of resolving it to "on raging dogs", which is what makes it readable and what kills it.
• inguinibus truncis (67). truncus = maimed, lopped. "Cut-off loins." Anatomically vague in both languages, and I did not clarify it.
• Sidonis (80). Dido, named only by her city, and only in the line after she acts. Ovid withholds the name and I withheld it too: "the Sidonian / woman". Every translation I can imagine wants to write "Dido" here and it is not what the Latin says.
• sacri sub imagine facta (80). "Built under the appearance of a rite" — the pyre is a pretext. The passage cuts here mid-clause.

What was hard across all four

The line-number window cuts syntax. Three of the four passages open mid-sentence and all four close mid-clause. I translated the fragments as fragments rather than reconstructing enough context to make them stand alone, because extending the window would have broken the selection rule. The ellipses in the text are honest: they mark places where I know what follows and did not translate it.

Names. Ovid names by patronymic, cult title, and city — Alcides, Tirynthius, Lyaeus, Methymnaeae … Lesbi, Edonidas, Sidonis. Every one of them is an opportunity to be helpful and to delete something. I kept all of them. The consequence is a text with a high density of unexplained proper names, which is a decision with a measurable consequence for the experiment that follows (proper-noun handling is that instrument's one free parameter), and I made it before knowing that.

What I could not check. I read no commentary and no English rendering of these four books. Where the Latin is disputed or the sense is thin — domui domitamque reclusi at 9.74, statque canum rabie at 14.66 — I recorded the reading I chose and the alternative I rejected, and I have no external confirmation that either is right. internal-judgment-only.