Poetry

The Rape of Europa

by Ovid

From "Metamorphoses," Book ii, 846-875

Majesty is incompatible truly with love; they cohabit

Nowhere together. The father and chief of the gods, whose right hand is

Armed with the triple-forked lightning, who shakes the whole world with a nod, laid

Dignity down with his sceptre, adopting the guise of a bull that

Mixed with the cattle and lowed as he ambled around the fresh fields, a

Beautiful animal, colored like snow that no footprint has trodden

And which no watery south wind has melted. His muscular neck bulged,

Dewlaps hung down from his chin; his curved horns you might think had been hand carved,

Perfect, more purely translucent than pearl. His unthreatening brow and

Far from formidable eyes made his face appear tranquil. Agenor's

Daughter was truly amazed that this beautiful bull did not seem to

Manifest any hostility. Though he was gentle she trembled at first to

Touch him, but soon she approached him, adorning his muzzle with flowers.

Then he rejoiced as a lover and, while he looked forward to hoped for

Pleasures, he slobbered all over her hands, and could hardly postpone the

Joys that remained. So he frolicked and bounded about on the green grass,

Laying his snowy-white flanks on the yellowish sands. As her fear was

Little by little diminished, he offered his chest for her virgin

Hand to caress and his horns to be decked with fresh flowers. The royal

Maiden, not knowing on whom she was sitting, was even so bold as

Also to climb on the back of the bull. As the god very slowly

Inched from the shore and the dry land he planted his spurious footprints

Deep in the shallows. Thus swimming out farther, he carried his prey off

Into the midst of the sea. Almost fainting with terror she glanced back,

As she was carried away, at the shore left behind. As she gripped one

Horn in her right hand while clutching the back of the beast with the other,

Meanwhile her fluttering draperies billowed behind on the sea breeze.

Translated from the Latin by Daryl Hine

Translator Notes:
These, the concluding lines of Book II of The Metamorphoses, detail, with a brevity unusual in Ovid, one of a series of "loves" of Jove, and one of his transformations. In other instances it is his victim who is transformed. The passage begins with a gnomic sentence which is illustrated in the following passage with all the visual elaboration so typical of Ovid, including a rather gratuitous simile. Perhaps the most striking of these lines is the last, a conclusion that has no parallel among all the fifteen books of The Metamorphoses, inconclusive, kinetic, and pictorial, in effect a moving picture, iconic in many paintings and mosaics before as well as after Ovid's time.

I have translated these dactylic hexameters, the most common of Latin measures, and indeed all of the poem which I have so far completed, with as much attention to the sound as to the sense, the meter as well as the meaning, and with care primarily for the overall effect. The meter of The Metamorphoses fortunately lends itself to easy imitation in English, if one substitutes stress for length of syllable and exploits the variety afforded by the ambiguities of English scansion. The other obvious candidate, blank verse, lacks length of line as well as the disyllabic closure of each line, and also elides the strong caesura. No iambic pentameter could convey the fluttering in the breeze of Europa's scarves as do these dactyls.

Ovid's Metamorphoses, the most popular and entertaining of extant ancient poems, is a loosely affiliated farrago of generally discreditable stories about the Greco-Roman gods, which provides, or perhaps I should say provided, a skewed and partial compendium of classical mythology for Renaissance painters and writers (e.g., Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream) as well as such handbooks as Bullfinch's Mythology. Read rather than recited to select audiences before Ovid's exile from Rome in 8 ce, it was subsequently disseminated in many copies.—DH