« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
October 25, 2022
Stephanie McCarter's Playlist for Her Translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is bold, lyrical, and alive.
Nina MacLaughlin wrote of the book:
"The Metamorphoses has it all: sex, death, love, violence, gods, mortals, monsters, nymphs, all the great forces, human and natural. With this vital new translation, Stephanie McCarter has not only updated Ovid's epic of transformation for the modern ear and era --- she's done something far more powerful. She's paid rigorous attention to the language of the original and brought to us its ferocity, its sensuality, its beauty, its wit, showing us how we are changed, by time, by violence, by love, by stories, and especially by power. Here is Ovid, in McCarter's masterful hands, refreshed, renewed, and pulsing with life."
In her own words, here is Stephanie McCarter's Book Notes music playlist for her translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses:
Creating a playlist for Ovid’s grand Roman epic, the Metamorphoses, is a dream assignment. Ovid’s many myths of physical metamorphosis have inspired countless works of art, literature, and music, but I wanted to avoid any direct retellings of his myths. Instead, I offer songs that engage with his key themes of metamorphosis, power, desire, art, grief, the body, gender, and sexual violence. Ovidian myth continues to fascinate us because it wrestles with such abidingly human concerns that persist despite two millennia of change.
1. David Bowie, “Changes”
This could very well be the theme song for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Both song and epic revel in the inevitability of change and the awesome strangeness of the new. Like Bowie, Ovid had a brilliant knack for artistic metamorphosis and for the construction of wonderfully inventive personas. Just as it is hard to know whether we are listening to David Bowie or Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, so it is hard to draw a clear line between Ovid and the irreverent lover of the Amores or the Ars Amatoria, or between him and the heartbroken exile of the Tristia, or between him and the many doomed artists of the Metamorphoses. Bowie and Ovid each blur and transgress boundaries of genre, of gender, of self and other, of art and life. Bowie is Ovid for the modern age.
2. John Cameron Mitchell, “Origin of Love,” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack
This song reworks an ancient myth, but not one from Ovid. It instead adapts a story from Plato’s Symposium that tells how humans first experienced love when Zeus split them into two. Yet it engages beautifully with Ovidian themes—its focus on origins, human defiance, and divine punishment would all be at home in the Metamorphoses. It’s also a myth Ovid playfully alludes to in the story of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection. In Plato, sex is a product of the original humans’ desire to reconnect, but Narcissus is already one with his beloved, making sex impossible. He’d like to be cut in half!
3. Tori Amos, “Me and a Gun”
One of the most significant, and most controversial, themes of the Metamorphoses is sexual violence and how it transforms and silences its victims. No consideration of the epic can ignore this theme, bound as it is to Ovid’s overarching concern with abusive power. When I was a teenager in the '90s, “Me and a Gun” was simply a watershed, making something that seemed so unspeakable feel speakable at last. Like many of the victims of rape in Ovid’s epic, such as Daphne or Philomela, Amos’ narrator grasps at what agency she can amid her victimization, finding a way to survive, though forever changed.
4. Ezra Furman, “Body Was Made”
Bodies and their changeability take centerstage as early as the opening lines of the Metamorphoses. Often these changes are wrought by those in power, such as the gods, who seek to shore up established hierarchies and punish defiance. “Body Was Made” is itself a defiant response to anyone who would exert such power over another’s body, and it joyfully celebrates remaking and defining one’s body on one’s own terms. For Ezra Furman, a transgender woman, such bodily autonomy is deeply connected to her gender and sexuality, and the song’s lyrics would suit not only Ovid’s own transgender characters, such as Iphis and Caeneus, but all characters who try—however fleetingly—to control how their own bodies are made.
5. Dolly Parton, “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That?”
As a Tennessean, I am duty-bound to include Dolly on this list! This song shares Ovid’s interest in the unreciprocated female gaze, which in the Metamorphoses is wielded by characters such as Echo, Salmacis, Medea, and Circe. When a powerful woman like Circe directs her gaze at a beautiful young man, it can be every bit as dangerous as the male gaze that regularly leads to objectification and sexual violence, yet less powerful women, such as Echo, often end up undone and transformed by their own desire. Dolly’s take on the gaze is of course much more playful, its threat neutralized. Her gaze is one of frustrated admiration rather than domination.
6. Carly Simon, “You’re So Vain”
This song about narcissism is a great pairing for Ovid’s eponymous narcissist. Like the “you” of the song, Narcissus keeps “one eye in the mirror,” trapped in a loop of self-regard. And no doubt he too thinks the tale is about him, despite the fact that it belongs to Echo too. Narcissism permeates the Metamorphoses as characters repeatedly fall in love with reflections of themselves. Salmacis spends her days gazing into her mirror-like pool, the artist Pygmalion longs for a statue of his own creation, and the “one eye” of the monstrous Cyclops admires his own hirsute image. Even Ovid himself was accused by the later Roman writer Quintilian of being nimium amator ingenii sui, “too in love with his own brilliance!”
7. Celeste, “Strange”
I love this song because it offers a poignant counterpoint to the many physical transformations in the epic. After all, the most significant changes we endure are often not physical at all. Metamorphosis can take many different forms as we move through the world and reconfigure who we are in relation to one another. These transformations can feel no less “strange” than those Ovid describes.
8. Nick Cave, “Breathless”
I’ve always suspected this song is about Orpheus, the mythical singer who takes centerstage in the epic’s tenth book. The song is, after all, on an album named The Lyre of Orpheus and follows a track of the same name that tells of Eurydice’s death and Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld. “Breathless” feels unlike any other Nick Cave song, with its evocation of an exuberant natural world of frolicking beasts and leaping streams. Nature pulses with life in this song, despite the refrain of breathlessness that runs through it. In the Metamorphoses, Orpheus’ song likewise animates nature as he sings in his grief for Eurydice. In both works, loss seems to transform into life and art and breath.
9. Lady Gaga, “Plastic Doll”
With Pygmalion and his ivory statue, Ovid gives us the original story of the artificial woman. There is something deeply misogynistic about this tale, which would later inspire such retellings as My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman. The only perfect woman, the story implies, is a manmade work of art, a lifeless, dehumanized object that serves the male gaze. Lady Gaga’s song is a powerful rejection of such a role—she is no “toy for a real boy” and, despite her own constructedness, is pained by such objectication. If any artist is going to create Gaga, it’s Gaga.
10. Decemberists, “The Crane Wife 1 & 2”
This two-part song calls evokes key elements of the Metamorphoses, though it takes its subject matter not from Greco-Roman myth but from Japanese folklore. The song’s tale takes up two Ovidian motifs: bird metamorphosis and weaving. The ingenuity of the crane wife as she weaves her feathers into sumptuous fabric feels akin to Arachne’s brilliant artistry or Philomela’s clever tapestry, while the song’s focus on marriage calls to mind Ovidian couples such as Baucis and Philemon. I love how these old stories resonate with each other even when they spring from different traditions.
11. Stevie Nicks, “Edge of Seventeen”
This song interweaves several Ovidian strands. The speaker’s gaze at the boy on the “edge of seventeen” is reminiscent of Ovid’s tales of women desiring young men, though in Ovid this liminal age often bring danger. But ultimately this is a song about heartache—Nicks wrote it in the wake of two deaths, those of John Lennon and her uncle Jonathan—and so the Ovidian theme it connects with the most is women’s grief. Like Ovid’s Procne or Hecuba, Nicks is not cowed by grief. She too becomes ferocious in its wake, though she channels this into art rather than destruction.
12. Nina Simone, “I Put a Spell on You”
A playlist for an epic that prominently features Medea and Circe needs to include an amazing woman singing about magic. Nina Simone’s rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” easily matches the power and intensity of these most formidable women of myth. All these women wield what in Latin would be called carmina, “spells” or “songs” or even “poems.” Witches, singers, and poets all work a similar magical art.
13. Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”
This early song, in which Dylan positions himself as Woody Guthrie’s successor, launched Dylan on a singular career full of abrupt turns and transformations. Taking its tune from Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre,” the song also refers directly to “Hard Travelin” and “Pastures of Plenty.” Just as there could be no Dylan without Guthrie, there could be no Ovid without Vergil. Toward the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid narrates the “hard travelin’” of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome and the hero of Vergil’s Aeneid. Carefully following Vergil’s footsteps, Ovid recounts what Vergil had skimmed over and skims over what he had recounted, crafting a careful balancing act between dependence and innovation. Such a balancing act ultimately helped both Dylan and Ovid find unique voices.
14. Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”
“The Circle Game,” like the epic, paints a world “captive on the carousel of time.” In the epic’s fifteenth book, Pythagoras—a real 6th c. BCE philosopher Ovid introduces into his poem to espouse a kind of doctrine of metamorphosis—compares the various stages of human life to the seasons of the year, the same ground Mitchell covers in her famous song. For both Mitchell and Ovid, time and change are one and the same thing.
15. Darren Hanlon, “Letter from an Australian Mining Town”
This song makes the list not for Ovid but for me as the translator. I completed much of the translation while living for a year in Australia, where Darren Hanlon’s music, with its gorgeous poetic lyrics, acted as my writing soundtrack. I listened to “Letter from an Australian Mining Town” countless times during this year of my life that was unlike any other, a year full of fire and plague that changed the world.
Stephanie McCarter is Professor of Classical Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee. She has published translated work on Horace and has written for Sewanee Review, Eidolon, Electric Literature and The Millions.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
