Repository path: workshop/translations/metamorphoses/R04-v2/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

Ovid, Metamorphoses — ten windows of fourteen hexameters (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. Public domain. The exact Latin translated is workshop/experiments/E-20260726b-forced-or-borrowed/runs/windows.md, committed at b0bdcf1 before this file existed.

Regime. R04 (lead close translation, source-only), v0.1, with §5.2 and A18 of E-20260726b-forced-or-borrowed/design.md binding. Translator: the lead agent, as a labeled subject. Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Target. Ten windows of fourteen Latin hexameters — 140 lines, Books 10, 11, 12, 13 (×3), 14 (×2), 15 (×2). Second LA→EN entry.

How the target was chosen — and this time it was not chosen by a length rule. Each window is centred on a locus where Henry Riley (1851) and Brookes More (1922) share a verbatim English run of twelve or more tokens. The selection was made by select.py from the frozen design, deterministically, and the translator never saw the shared runs, or any English rendering of these passages, before this file and its log were committed. What the translator was given was windows.md: Latin, book and line numbers, nothing else. The key — target runs, control spans, Riley's and More's English — was written to runs/key.json and committed one commit earlier, so that it demonstrably predates the translation, and was not opened.

The translator therefore knew that every window contains something two Victorians wrote identically, and knew nothing whatever about what. There is no arm to guess: the control for each window is drawn from the same window.

Form. Prose, close. Declared in the frozen design (§5.2) before any Latin was read, and for a stated instrument reason: the strings being compared are Riley's prose, and a verse rendering would depress the measurement in both arms for reasons of form alone. T-metamorphoses-R04-v1 was verse; this is deliberately not.

Priming. No English rendering of any of these ten passages was read before this translation and its log were committed. Latin dictionaries and Latin-side commentary were permitted and used; no facing translation was opened. The one shared run the lead had already read — quoted in NEXT.md — was excluded from selection by exact string match (design §5.1 step 8), and select.py reports it excluded one candidate on that rule.

Contamination: high, on provenance. Metamorphoses is among the most translated poems in existence and English renderings of it are certain to be in the lead's training data. The declaration is about provenance, not about measurement; the measurement for these windows is computed in E-20260726b-forced-or-borrowed and reported there. For this design the direction of the risk matters and is stated in the design: contamination with the shared wording specifically would manufacture the result the design would read as FORCED.

Window 1 — Metamorphoses 10.669–682

She makes good the delay and the time she has squandered with a burst of speed, and once more leaves the young man behind her. Delayed again by the throwing of the second apple, she overtakes him and passes him. The last stretch of the course was left. "Now," he says, "be with me, goddess who gave the gift!" — and out to the side of the field, so that she would be the longer coming back, he flung the shining gold slantwise, with a young man's arm. The girl seemed to hesitate whether to go after it. I made her pick it up, and once it was lifted I added weight to the apple, and hindered her as much by the load's heaviness as by the delay. And so that my telling may not run slower than the race itself: the girl was passed, and the winner led away what he had won. Did I not deserve, Adonis, that he should thank me, that he should bring me the honour of incense? He forgot, and gave no thanks;

Window 2 — Metamorphoses 11.542–555

one man calls for help; into that man's mind come his brother and his father; into this one's, his home and the children left in it, and whatever else he has left behind. Alcyone is what moves Ceyx; on Ceyx's lips there is nothing but Alcyone; and though it is she alone he longs for, still he is glad she is far away. He would like, too, to look back towards the shores of his own country and turn his last gaze homeward — but he does not know where home lies. The sea boils in such a churning, and with the shadow drawn over it out of pitch-black cloud the whole sky is hidden, and the face of night is doubled. The mast breaks under the charge of the rain-heavy squall; the steering-oar breaks too; and a wave that has survived, made bold by its spoils, arches over like a conqueror and looks down on the waves below — falling no more lightly than if a man were to tear Athos or Pindus whole from its foundation and pitch it into the open sea,

Window 3 — Metamorphoses 12.56–69

Some of them fill up idle ears with talk; others carry off elsewhere what they were told; and the measure of the invention grows, and every fresh teller adds something to what he heard. There is Credulity, there is reckless Mistake, and groundless Delight, and Alarms in a panic, and Sedition newly born, and Whisperings with nobody to father them. She herself sees whatever is done in the sky and on the sea and on the earth, and goes searching through the whole world. It was she who had made it known that Greek ships were coming, and fighting men aboard them; nor does the enemy find the Trojans unprepared, and in arms: they hold the landing places and guard the shore; and first of all, by the spear of Hector, as fate would have it, Protesilaus, you fall — and the engagements, once joined, cost the Danaans dear, and Hector is made known by the killing of a brave soul.

Window 4 — Metamorphoses 13.89–102

and your prayers carried the day! If you ask how that fight came out — I was not the one beaten. Look: the Trojans are bringing steel and fire and Jove himself against the Danaan fleet. Where now is fluent Ulysses? It was I, surely, who covered a thousand hulls with my own body, the hope of your return home. Give me the arms, for so many ships! And if I may speak the truth, greater honour is being sought for those arms than for me; our glory is joined together, and it is Ajax that the arms want, not the arms that Ajax wants. Let the Ithacan set his Rhesus against these, and unwarlike Dolon, and Helenus son of Priam taken along with the stolen Palladium: nothing done in daylight, nothing done with Diomedes out of the way. If you ever do give those arms for services so cheap, split them, and let Diomedes have the larger share.

Window 5 — Metamorphoses 14.390–403

and, outraged to be joining the woods of Latium suddenly as a new bird, he drives his hard beak into the wild oaks and in his anger deals wounds to their long branches. His feathers took the crimson colour of his cloak; the gold that had been a brooch and had bitten into his clothing turns to plumage, and his neck is ringed about with tawny gold; and nothing of the old Picus is left him but the name. Meanwhile his companions, having shouted for Picus again and again across the fields for nothing, and found him nowhere, come upon Circe — for by now she had thinned the air and let the mist be opened up by wind and sun — and press her hard with charges that are true, and demand their king back, and offer violence, and make ready to go at her with cruel weapons. She, and she is guilty, scatters poison and the juices of venom,

Window 6 — Metamorphoses 15.444–457

"I see, too, that a city is owed to the sons of Phrygia, one as great as none is now, none will be, and none was seen in earlier years. Other great men will make her powerful through long ages, but a man born of the blood of Iulus will make her mistress of the world; and when earth has had the use of him, the halls of heaven will have the enjoyment of him, and the sky will be his end." This is what Helenus, as I remember it, sang to Aeneas, who carried his household gods; and I am glad that walls of our own kindred are rising, and that the Pelasgians conquered to the profit of the Phrygians. But let us not stray too far, with horses that forget to make for the turning-post: the sky, and everything under it, changes its shapes; and the earth, and everything in it. We too, being part of the world — since we are not bodies only but winged souls as well, and can pass into the bodies of beasts

Window 7 — Metamorphoses 13.299–312

If you call having pretended a crime, we both pretended; if delay counts as a fault, I was the earlier of the two. A loving wife held me back, a loving mother held Achilles, and the first of our time was given to them, the rest to you. I am not afraid of a charge I share with so great a man, even supposing I could not now clear myself of it — though he was caught out by the wit of Ulysses, and Ulysses was not caught out by the wit of Ajax. And let us not be astonished that he pours the abuse of a dull tongue over me: he throws at you as well things you ought to be ashamed of. Or was it disgraceful in me to have accused Palamedes on a false charge, and honourable in you to have condemned him? But the son of Nauplius could not defend a deed so great and so plainly out in the open; and you did not merely hear the charges against him: you saw them, and the accusation lay open in the money.

Window 8 — Metamorphoses 14.465–478

although the reminder makes bitter grief new again, I will bear to tell it all the same. After lofty Ilion had been burnt and Pergama had fed the Danaan flames, and the Narycian hero, having taken a virgin by force from a virgin, spread out among us all the punishment that he alone had earned, we are scattered; and, swept by the winds across hostile waters, we Danaans endure lightning, darkness, rain, the anger of sky and sea, and Caphereus to crown the disaster. And not to hold you with a catalogue of our misfortunes in order — Greece at that time could have looked to Priam himself like something to weep over. Still, the care of Minerva, who bears arms, kept me safe and pulled me out of the waves; but again I am driven from the fields of my fathers, and kindly Venus exacts penalties that remember the old wound, and through such labours over the deep

Window 9 — Metamorphoses 15.538–551

and so that I should be safe, and could be looked at without harm, she added years to me and left me a face not to be recognised; and she hesitated a long while whether to hand me Crete to live in or Delos. Crete and Delos both given up, she set me here, and told me to lay aside at the same time the name that might put anyone in mind of horses. "You who were Hippolytus," she said, "be the same man now, and Virbius." From then on I keep this grove, and, one of the lesser gods, I hide beneath my mistress's divine power and am counted in her train. But another's losses have no power to lighten Egeria's grief, and lying at the mountain's lowest roots she melts away into tears, until the sister of Phoebus, moved by the devotion of her mourning, made a cool spring out of her body and drew her limbs out thin into everlasting water.

Window 10 — Metamorphoses 13.274–287

the Trojans back from the ships that were about to burn, and their defender with them. He thinks, too, that he alone dared to go against the weapons of Hector, forgetting the king and the leaders and me — he was ninth for the duty, and was preferred only by the favour of the lot. And still, bravest of men, what came of that fight of yours? Hector went off without a wound on him. Wretched that I am — with what pain I am made to remember that hour, when Achilles, the wall of the Greeks, went down. Tears did not hold me back, nor grief, nor fear, from lifting his body high off the ground and carrying it away. On these shoulders — on these shoulders, I say — I carried the body of Achilles, and his arms along with it, which even now I labour to carry. I have the strength that is good for weights like that; I have, for certain, a spirit that will feel the honours you award.

Translator's log

Frozen with the translation, before key.json was opened and before any measurement of this translation existed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only.

The condition that shaped everything. Ten windows, each of them containing — somewhere — a string of twelve or more English words that Riley in 1851 and Brookes More in 1922 both wrote. I could not see the strings. The temptation this creates is very specific and worth naming: the pull is toward the most obvious English at every point, on the theory that the obvious English is what two Victorians would have converged on. I decided at the outset not to translate against that theory in either direction — not to reach for the obvious and not to avoid it — because either would corrupt the measurement, and the second more subtly than the first. What I did instead was translate each window the way I would have translated it if nobody had told me anything, which is the only defensible reading of R04 §1. Whether I succeeded is not something I can certify from the inside.

Prose, and what prose cost. Fixed in the design before I read a line. The loss is heaviest in Window 2, the storm, where the Latin's Frangitur … / frangitur et … puts the two breakages at the head of consecutive lines and the repetition is the effect. Prose gives me "The mast breaks … the steering-oar breaks too", which keeps the anaphora but not the metrical hammer-blow of a line-initial verb twice. Window 10's His umeris, his, inquam, umeris survives better — "On these shoulders — on these shoulders, I say —" — because the figure there is oratorical rather than metrical, and oratory travels into prose.

Windows that begin or end mid-sentence. Seven of the ten are cut out of the middle of a period, because the selection rule is about line numbers and knows nothing about syntax. I rendered them as fragments rather than closing them off: Window 10 opens on an accusative with no verb (Troas ab arsuris … carinis), and I began "the Trojans back from the ships that were about to burn", supplying nothing. Window 6 ends inque ferinas — into the shapes of beasts — with the noun in the next line, and I let the sentence run off the edge with "and can pass into the bodies of beasts". The alternative was to complete the thought from the surrounding Latin, which would have put words in the window that the window does not contain, and which would have been measured as mine.

Hard places, and what was live at each.

• 10.673, ades, dea muneris auctor. auctor is the giver, the originator, the one who stands behind the gift. "Author of the gift" is available and is what the Latin literally says, but in English "author" has drifted so far toward writing that it reads as a pun. I took "goddess who gave the gift" and lost the sense of Venus as the source of the whole stratagem, not merely the donor of three apples.
• 10.675, iuvenaliter. An adverb English simply does not have: in the manner of a young man, with the connotation of unspent strength. "With a young man's arm" adds an arm the Latin does not mention. "Youthfully" was rejected as meaning something else in modern English. This is a style-correspondence loss and I could not find a way round it.
• 11.542, subeunt. The verb is doing something precise: the brother and the father come up into the drowning man's mind. "Come to mind" is the natural English and is flat; "steal over him" is not flat and is not the Latin. I wrote "into that man's mind come his brother and his father" and inverted the English so the arrival keeps its position.
• 11.552–3, spoliisque animosa superstes / unda, velut victrix, sinuataque despicit undas. The hardest sentence in the ten windows. superstes is both "surviving" and, with spoliis, faintly "standing over" the plunder; sinuata is the curve of the wave at the top of its arch; despicit is both "looks down on" and "despises". English can have two of the three. I kept the curve and the looking-down and let the contempt go, though "looks down on" preserves a little of it by accident.
• 12.61, dubioque auctore Susurri. Literally Whisperings with their author in doubt. "Of doubtful source" is exact and dead. "Whisperings with nobody to father them" is livelier and imports a metaphor of paternity that auctor will bear but does not force. I took the livelier one and record that it is an addition.
• 12.68–9, commissaque proelia magno / stant Danais. stare with an ablative of price: the battles cost the Greeks dear. "Cost the Danaans dear" is the standard English idiom and I could not improve on it; it is also exactly the kind of place where two independent translators would land in the same words, and I noticed that while writing it. I did not change it on that account. Changing it would have been the corruption.
• 13.97, atque Aiax armis, non Aiaci arma petuntur. A chiasmus turning on one verb. English cannot repeat petuntur in both directions without a limp. I wrote "it is Ajax that the arms want, not the arms that Ajax wants", which reverses the grammatical subject to keep the figure and, in doing so, makes the arms agents. The Latin's passive keeps them objects. A real distortion, accepted for the shape.
• 13.100, luce nihil gestum est. Nothing was done in the light — meaning both "by daylight" and, with a sneer, "out in the open". "Nothing done in daylight" holds both; I did not gloss it.
• 13.305, deprensus Ulixis / ingenio tamen ille, at non Aiacis Ulixes. The whole point is the missing verb in the second clause. English needs it. "Though he was caught out by the wit of Ulysses, and Ulysses was not caught out by the wit of Ajax" spells out what Ovid leaves as a gap, and the joke goes slightly slack for it. The alternative — "but Ulysses not by Ajax's" — is tighter and, I judged, harder to follow at speed in prose.
• 13.312, pretioque obiecta patebant. pretium is the bribe, the gold planted in Palamedes' tent. "The accusation lay open in the money" is nearly literal and slightly odd; "the bribe made the charge plain" is smoother and loses patebant's spatial sense of lying open to view, which matters because the previous clause is about seeing.
• 14.468, a virgine virgine rapta. Two ablatives of the same word, one the goddess and one Cassandra, jammed together. English cannot do it. "Having taken a virgin by force from a virgin" keeps both nouns adjacent and loses the identity of form. Every solution I tried either separated them or turned one into a pronoun.
• 14.472, cumulumque Capherea cladis. Caphereus, the heaping-up of the disaster. I wrote "and Caphereus to crown the disaster", which reads well and imports a crown. cumulus is a heap, and the English "crowning disaster" is so idiomatic that the metaphor is dead in it; that is why I allowed it.
• 15.444, Urbem etiam cerno Phrygios debere nepotes. The construction is genuinely ambiguous in a way commentators divide on: nepotes may owe the city (they are destined to found it) or be owed it. I took "a city is owed to the sons of Phrygia", which keeps the passive shape of debere and leaves the agency unstated, as the Latin does.
• 15.453–4, Ne tamen oblitis ad metam tendere longe / exspatiemur equis. A charioteering figure: horses that have forgotten to make for the turning-post and run wide. English readers have no turning-post. I kept it — "with horses that forget to make for the turning-post" — rather than substituting a generic "let us not digress", because the figure is Pythagoras' and the flavour is the point. This is the copy-opaque choice, knowingly made; a reader who does not know the circus will get something is being said about horses and not much more.
• 15.543–4, qui fuisti Hippolytus … nunc idem Virbius esto. idem is doing a lot: the same man, i.e. you have not been replaced, only renamed. "Be the same man now, and Virbius" keeps it. Dropping idem — "now be Virbius" — would have been smoother and would have deleted the consolation.

One thing I noticed and did not act on. In several windows the Latin has exactly one obvious English equivalent for a whole clause — 12.68's magno stant Danais, 13.90's non sum superatus ab illo, 14.466's perpetiar memorare tamen. If I had been trying to guess where the shared runs were, those are where I would have guessed. I have written them down here, before opening the key, so that the guess is on the record and can be scored against what the key actually says. It is a guess, not a prediction registered in the design, and it carries no weight in the analysis.

Revision. One drafting pass and one revision against the Latin, per A18. The revision changed Window 3's "unfounded Joy" to "groundless Delight" (vana Laetitia: vanus is empty rather than unjustified), Window 8's "endure" to "bear" in the opening clause to avoid repeating "endure" three lines later where perpetimur needs it, and Window 9's "thinned her limbs into everlasting waters" to "drew her limbs out thin into everlasting water" — tenuavit is a drawing-out, and the plural "waters" was importing a grandeur the singular spring does not have.