TALES Very Far From Ovid would be more accurate. Classicists may throw up their hands in horror - and there's an awful lot of horror here - but, after all, what Hughes does to Ovid, Ovid did to prosy Apollodorus et al. The difference is, or should be, in the poetry.
Here, for instance, is Ovid translated by David Slavitt: "Next came the age and the race of bronze, of sterner stuff,/ hard men ready to take up the weapons of war, crude,/ even savage fellows and yet by no means wicked". And here is Hughes: "After this, third in order/ The Age of Brass/ Brought a brazen people,/Souls fashioned on the same anvil/ As the blades their hands snatched up/ Before they cooled. But still/ Mankind listened deeply/ To the harmony of the whole creation,/ And aligned/ Every action to the greater order/ And not to the moments blind/ Apparent opportunity".
So translation this ain't. But where Slavitt is flaccid and prosaic, Hughes is muscular and imaginative. On the other hand, the rhymes (mankind, aligned and blind) are misplaced and, far more unsettling, Hughes's Age of Brass when "mankind listened deeply" etc bears an uncanny resemblance to his Age of Gold a few lines earlier, where we read that "Listening deeply, man kept faith with the source".
Do these distinctions, or lack of them, matter? Does it matter that Ovid didn't say any of this? Maybe not. What, though, about these examples of ugliness? "Land here, sky there,/ And sea there./ Up there, the heavenly stratosphere./ Down here ..."; and, "Violence is an extrapolation/ Of the cutting edge/ Into the orbit of the smile"; and (incomprehensibly), "You are fated to marry./ And therefore fated, sooner or later, to live/ Yourself but other."
Does it matter that in a book written in the freest of free verse, the only rhyme scheme (albeit a bizarre one, the last line in a stanza rhyming with the first line in the next) is simply abandoned after a while? Does it matter that the stanzaic structure, usually in five line units, is merely a typographical device? Does it matter that there's no metre? It does.
The Romantic movement, according to the scholar Peter Green, found Ovid "stuffy, dull, overformalized and lacking in genuine passion". How times change: "Above all," Hughes says in his introduction, "Ovid was interested in passion." Funny things, words. But then Ovid was, comically, a poet. When he said "Everything human hangs by a thread" what inspired him was not the mess on the pavement but the miracle of so much weight afloat on a filament. Hughes isn't much interested in balancing acts.
He is, however, a very considerable poet in his own right, and he often wipes the floor with his competitors. Here, for comparison, is Horace Gregory's Venus hunting: "she sought harmless game,/ The nervous rabbit and high antlered deer./ Her rule was to keep shy of savage brutes -/ The "plunging boar, the wolf, the bear, the lion". And here is Hughes: "she plunges/ Down through brambly goyles, bawling at hounds,/ Hunting the harmless; the hare who sees best backwards,/ Hinds with painful eyes like ballerinas,/ Tall stags on their dignity. She has nothing/ To do with fatal boars. She shuns wolves,/ Their back teeth always aching to crack big bones./ Bears with a swipe like a dungfork. Lions,/ Lank bellies everlastingly empty,/ That lob over high bomas, as if weightless,/ With bullocks in their jaws."
The last image is very striking, but after you've looked up "boma" in the dictionary you still have to make allowances for the fact that a lion couldn't even lift a bullock off the ground, never mind jump over a fence with one in his mouth. As with the image so with the book: less observed than imagined, energetic, almost filmically visual, most unOvidianly careless and in the Hughes fashion, brawnily obsessed with blood and guts. All in all very readable, but a bit like seeing Psycho done in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. {CORRECTION} 97051600009
