[...] What the translator can hope for is to bring over as best he may those elements of Ovid's style that can be translated. Chief among these would be that "thoughtful lightness" that Italo Calvino has spoken of in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. One can see it in the irony that so often undercuts the noble and the heroic, either by an inappropriate admission (as in Juno's monologue cited above) or by a simile that brings us from tragedy to comedy with no stops in between, as when Pyramus (in Book IV) nobly decides to take his own life in emulation of his beloved Thisbe:
"'Drink my blood now,' he says, drawing his sword, and thrusting it at once in his own guts: a fatal blow; dying, he draws the blade out of his burning wound, and his lifeblood follows it, jetting high into the air, as he lies on his back upon the ground. "lt was as when a water pipe is ruptured where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak...
The reader is torn from the world of undying love and in which we are trying to find a twenty-four-hour plumbing service.
So then, there is the speed of the narration, the casualness of tone, the rapid changes in point of view, the alternation between apparent sympathy for his characters and apparent indifference to their fates; there is the wordplay, the elaborate rhetorical and prosodic figures, the whimsical erudition, and the coining of new words: more than enough to keep a translator busy. If the translator cannot reproduce one of Ovid's jokes, he may perhaps substitute one of his own in a different place to give a sense of Ovid's playfulness.
Martin, Charles. "A Note on This Translation". Ovid, Metamorphoses. Trans. Charles Martin. 2010. Norton Critical Edition.
