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Swimming with Translators

Clearly, either the swimmer or the translator is completely at sea, and I venture that Humphries was no swimmer at all, at least in his imagination, and had little pictorial sense of the necessary strokes.2 Hermaphroditus, in a recent translation by Alien Mandelbaum, shows us the motion even more sp...

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Published in:Harvard review (Cambridge, Mass. 1992) Mass. 1992), 2007-06 (32), p.62-68
Main Author: Kates, J.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Clearly, either the swimmer or the translator is completely at sea, and I venture that Humphries was no swimmer at all, at least in his imagination, and had little pictorial sense of the necessary strokes.2 Hermaphroditus, in a recent translation by Alien Mandelbaum, shows us the motion even more specifically than Ovid himself does, but the explicit left and right help recover an effect lost from the Latin word order-the ability to convey a back-and-f orth, alternating movement by the placement of adjectives and nouns: [...]suddenly he was swimming, a head bobbing, Chin surging through the build of a bow-wave, Shoulders liquefied, Legs as if at home in the frog's grotto ... while David R. Slavitt's water nymph Salmacis watches him dive into the pool and swim with strong arms that cut the water and legs that kicked the clear water to froth ... which is a clearly imagined crawl, allowing for some lack of discipline in the scissors kick. According to Dr. Phillip Whitten, "An ancient Egyptian wall relief clearly shows soldiers of Ramses II using an overarm stroke to pursue their Hittite enemies across the Orontes River more than 3,200 years ago." (Odysseus, obeying the first rule of water safety, clings to the wreckage of his boats as long as he can.) In Book V, when Odysseus is shipwrecked, he is urged (according to Robert Fagles) by Leucothea to "strip off those clothes and leave your craft... strike out with your arms for landfall there," but delays doing so until there is nothing left to cling to, and then he "dove headfirst into the sea, stretched his arms and stroked for life itself." Ovid's Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, edited by John Frederick Nims (Macmillan, 1965); Charles Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (Pantheon, 1992); Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Indiana University Press, 1964); The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by Alien Mandelbaum (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993); Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville (Oxford University Press, 1986); After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, edited by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated "freely into verse" by David R. Slavitt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Sextus Propertius, Charm, translated by Vincent Katz (Sun & Moon Press, 1995); Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1996).
ISSN:1077-2901
2328-739X