DOCSLIB.ORG

The Magical Donkey by GW Bowersock

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Magical Donkey by GW Bowersock The Magical Donkey by G.W. Bowersock | The New York Review of Books 12/22/12 10:54 AM Font Size: A A A The Magical Donkey DECEMBER 20, 2012 G.W. Bowersock The Golden Ass by Apuleius, translated from the Latin by Sarah Ruden Yale University Press, 272 pp., $30.00 Cleveland Museum of Art/Bridgeman Art Library Jacques-Louis David: <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, 1817 Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, wrote to his mistress Louise Colet in 1852: If there is any artistic truth in the world, it’s that this book [The Golden Ass] is a masterpiece. It gives me vertigo and dazzles me….It smells of incense and urine. Bestiality is married to mysticism. With these words a master novelist reveals his unerring insight into the unique character of the one novel in Latin to survive intact from classical antiquity. Its sole competitor might have been Petronius’ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/magical-donkey/?pagination=false&printpage=true Page 1 of 8 The Magical Donkey by G.W. Bowersock | The New York Review of Books 12/22/12 10:54 AM Satyricon, but that work, extraordinary as it is, has come down to us only in fragments and in a mixture of prose and verse that finds no parallel in The Golden Ass. Its author, Apuleius, was a successful rhetorician and writer from North Africa in the second century AD. He had an interest in Platonic philosophy and a taste for magic, which he had once been accused of using to win the affections of a wealthy widow. His novel, which survived from antiquity under the title Metamorphoses, is all about magic and the transformations it can cause. Early on it attracted the attention of another Latin writer from North Africa, Saint Augustine, who was credulous enough to imagine that Apuleius might have been writing autobiography rather than fiction, and he tells us that Apuleius himself named his novel The Golden Ass. The name must already have been current in Augustine’s day and, rightly or wrongly, attributed to Apuleius despite Metamorphoses in the manuscripts. It was undoubtedly because Augustine was so well known in medieval Europe that The Golden Ass prevailed. Like the Golden Rule or Golden Mean, this donkey was very special. The plot and the tone of Apuleius’ work are quite unlike anything else from the Greco-Roman world. A Greek traveler turns into a donkey, undergoes humiliations of many kinds (some crudely sexual) from the humans he encounters, picks up many obscene stories along the way, and then, after finally returning to human shape, witnesses an epiphany of the Egyptian goddess Isis and converts to her worship. In the midst of all this an insignificant old woman in the narrative tells, at great length and with matchless beauty, the story of Cupid and Psyche, which captured the imagination of European writers, artists, and composers for centuries. The different registers in which the novel unfolds are dazzling, as Flaubert observed. The reader swings wildly back and forth between rollicking vulgarity and exquisite loveliness, to reach at the end a tranquil scene of deep religious devotion. Flaubert was absolutely right to emphasize the union of urine and incense, of bestiality and mysticism. The only work in the Western tradition that remotely resembles The Golden Ass is The Magic Flute, which also ends with an Egyptian initiation. There have been relatively few translations of Apuleius into English. For many centuries after the work reappeared in the early Renaissance it was naturally read in its original Latin, but a quirky English rendering in 1566 by William Adlington eventually made it more widely available. It was this version from which Shakespeare borrowed the donkey episode in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Adlington’s text was taken over into the Loeb Classical Library in the twentieth century and slumbered there until it was replaced by a new translation that appeared, without adequate revision, four years after the death of the translator. A handful of other English translations also appeared in the last century without acclaim or competition. The publication of Sarah Ruden’s new version is a cause for celebration on many counts. Her recent Aeneid has been widely and justly admired, and when it comes to Virgil there is no shortage of http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/magical-donkey/?pagination=false&printpage=true Page 2 of 8 The Magical Donkey by G.W. Bowersock | The New York Review of Books 12/22/12 10:54 AM distinguished competition. Ruden has now given Apuleius his first plausibly contemporary English voice since Adlington made him address Elizabethan readers more than four centuries ago. Her translation slides felicitously across the vast range of styles in the original, with its thick syntax and a diction that lurches from the resonantly archaic to the bluntly colloquial, with a generous sprinkling of neologisms and old words with new meanings. Some earlier critics occasionally called the Latin of Apuleius baroque or, more often, African, even though there is nothing demonstrably African about it apart from the fact that Apuleius, no less than Augustine, came from North Africa. But the Latin style is so exceptional and bizarre that a translation would either require extensive annotation or none at all. Ruden has wisely decided to offer a text that does not have a single footnote. Anyone who wants such assistance can find more than enough in the extensive commentaries that are currently issuing from the Apuleian industry at the University of Groningen. Ruden provides no explanations and no parallel citations. She obviously expects her readers to read this novel as they would any other, from beginning to end without erudite interference. This makes it possible to experience the book in all its wondrous diversity and strangeness without being buried in learned exegesis. What Apuleius tells us at the outset is quite sufficient to introduce a work that he calls a Greek story (fabula Graecanica—nothing so pedestrian as Graeca), which is indebted to a tradition of amusing if indecorous story-telling that had long been associated with the city of Miletus in Asia Minor: “Let me weave together various sorts of tales, using the Milesian mode as a loom, if you will.” We actually do know a little something about the Greek original to which he refers. This comes from a highly indecent novella preserved from antiquity among the writings of the satirist Lucian. The hero is called Lucius, just as he is in Apuleius, and he embarks on a journey through Greece to the town of Hypata in Thessaly to visit a family friend, where he is transformed into a donkey through the misapplication of an ointment. There are good reasons for supposing this story to be an abridgment of a lost Greek work that recounted at much greater length the story of a man transformed into an ass. Apuleius’ Lucius is explicitly connected with a Corinthian family engaged in commerce with Thessaly and even said to be related to the great writer Plutarch. In view of documentary evidence for trade of this kind between Corinth and Thessaly, Apuleius may have borrowed this lineage from his source. But overall, so far as can be told, the Greek original was extremely different from The Golden Ass. In particular, when the ass recovers his human shape he returns to the matron who had coupled with him as an animal, and the woman, vastly disappointed by what she now sees in the man Lucius, throws him out. There is no sacred initiation into the cult of Isis, and there is no trace of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. This means that the magnificently poetic registers of Apuleius’ novel were utterly lacking. and it must surely have been his inspired idea to combine the obscenities of the ass narrative with the limpid clarity of a fairy tale and the serene reverence of divine worship. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/magical-donkey/?pagination=false&printpage=true Page 3 of 8 The Magical Donkey by G.W. Bowersock | The New York Review of Books 12/22/12 10:54 AM Reading Ruden allows a modern reader to imagine how Boccaccio must have felt when at Naples in the beginning of the fourteenth century he had temporary access to a copy of the eleventh-century manuscript, written at Monte Cassino, from which all later manuscripts derive. Boccaccio was so taken by Apuleius’ novel that he annotated the manuscript as he was reading it and apparently took notes for his personal use back in Florence. Meanwhile his friend Petrarch had acquired another manuscript of the work, splendidly illuminated, for his personal collection. Boccaccio found yet another copy for himself and diligently copied out the entire text. * His deep knowledge of The Golden Ass served him well when he wrote the Decameron, in which he inserted two of Apuleius’ most lubricious stories in Book 9 about wives who cheated on their absent husbands. In both stories the wives not only covered up their adultery when their husbands returned but continued to deceive them after that with a riotous insouciance worthy of Chaucer. (There is no proof that Chaucer knew the Decameron or The Golden Ass, but the similarities are inescapable.) Boccaccio was as sensitive to the elegance of the tale of Cupid and Psyche as he was to the gross charms of the adultery episodes. In his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods he made ample use of Apuleius’ account of the love between the beautiful Psyche and Venus’ offspring Cupid.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Hackett Literature F09.Pdf
    2 ◆ 19TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN LITERATURE 19TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN LITERATURE ◆ 3 Gustave flaubert Fyodor dostoevsky New Madame Bovary Notes from the Underground Translated, with Introduction and Notes, New Translated by Constance Garnett by Raymond N. MacKenzie Edited, with Introduction, by Charles Guignon Sept. 2009 346 pp. $10.95 paper ISBN 978-1-60384-123-8 exam price: free and Kevin Aho “After his beautiful translation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Raymond N. Sept. 2009 144 pp. $6.95 paper ISBN 978-0-87220-905-3 exam price: free MacKenzie now offers us a fresh, superb version of Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Dostoevsky’s disturbing and groundbreaking novella appears in this new Impeccably transparent, this new translation captures the original’s careful, annotated edition with an Introduction by Charles Guignon and Kevin Aho. precise language and admirably conveys the small-mindedness of nineteenth- An analogue of Guignon’s widely praised Introduction to his 1993 edition of century provincial French towns. MacKenzie’s tour de force transports the “The Grand Inquisitor,” the editors’ Introduction places the underground reader to Yonville and compels him to look at Emma with Flaubert’s calm, man in the context of European modernity, analyzes his inner dynamics in disenchanted eyes.” the light of the history of Russian cultural and intellectual life, and suggests compelling reasons —Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago for our own strange affinity for this nameless man who boldly declares, “I was rude and took pleasure in being so.” “Raymond N. MacKenzie’s fresh and faithful translation of Madame Bovary will enable a new generation of readers to discover the wonderful complexities of Flaubert’s sardonic presentation of the CHARLES B.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ancient World 1.800.405.1619/Yalebooks.Com Now Available in Paperback Recent & Classic Titles
    2017 The Ancient World 1.800.405.1619/yalebooks.com Now available in paperback Recent & Classic Titles & Pax Romana Augustus War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World First Emperor of Rome ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY Renowned scholar Adrian Goldsworthy Caesar Augustus’ story, one of the most turns to the Pax Romana, a rare period riveting in western history, is filled with when the Roman Empire was at peace. A drama and contradiction, risky gambles vivid exploration of nearly two centuries and unexpected success. This biography of Roman history, Pax Romana recounts captures the real man behind the crafted real stories of aggressive conquerors, image, his era, and his influence over two failed rebellions, and unlikely alliances. millennia. “An excellent book. First-rate.” Paper 2015 640 pp. 43 b/w illus. + 13 maps —Richard A. Gabriel, Military History 978-0-300-21666-0 $20.00 Paper 2016 528 pp. 36 b/w illus. Cloth 2014 624 pp. 43 b/w illus. + 13 maps 978-0-300-23062-8 $22.00 978-0-300-17872-2 $35.00 Hardcover 2016 528 pp. 36 b/w illus. 978-0-300-17882-1 $32.50 Caesar Life of a Colossus Recent & Classic Titles ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY This major new biography by a distin- guished British historian offers a remark- In the Name of Rome ably comprehensive portrait of a leader The Men Who Won the Roman Empire whose actions changed the course of ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY; WITH A NEW PREFACE Western history and resonate some two A world-renowned authority offers a thousand years later.
    [Show full text]
  • Classics 20: Discovering the Romans 2018 Summer Session a MWF, 10-11:50Am, Bunche Hall 3143
    Classics 20: Discovering the Romans 2018 Summer Session A MWF, 10-11:50am, Bunche Hall 3143 Instructor: Chris Bingley [email protected] Office Hours: MW 12-1pm, Dodd 2 Course Summary: This course is an introduction to ancient Roman culture from its very beginnings (c. 800 B.C.E.) to the High Empire (3rd century C.E.). This course examines key historical moments and cultural trends during this period, including military conquest, government, religion, philosophy, ethnicity, and gender/sexuality. We will be looking at a variety of literary sources from the ancient Roman world in order to investigate these issues. Students will gain a firm grounding in how to read and analyze primary sources and, by the end of the course, have acquired considerable knowledge of this significant ancient culture. GE Foundation Areas: Arts and Humanities (Literary and Cultural Analysis) OR Society and Culture (Historical Analysis). Required Texts (Please be sure to get the exact translation and edition, because translations can vary widely): Antony Kamm and Abigail Graham, The Romans: An Introduction, 3rd edition (Routledge) Livy, Rise of Rome (Oxford World’s Classics) Virgil, Aeneid (trans. Sarah Ruden) Plautus, Four Comedies (Oxford World’s Classics) Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World’s Classics) Ovid, Art of Love (trans. Rolfe Humphries) Apuleius, Golden Ass (trans. Sarah Ruden) *All other assigned primary and secondary source readings will be available online through the course website (CCLE). Assignments and Grading: Participation (20%) In class, you should be asking questions of me and your classmates, presenting your own interpretations – whether they are half-formed impressions or well- thought-out arguments – and actively listening and responding to what your classmates have to say.
    [Show full text]
  • The People Beside Paul
    THE PEOPLE BESIDE PAUL Press SBL E arly Christianity and Its Literature David G. Horrell, Editor Warren Carter Amy-Jill Levine Judith M. Lieu Margaret Y. MacDonald Dale B. Martin Press SBLNumber 17 THE PEOPLE BESIDE PAUL THE PHILIppIAN ASSEMBLY AND HISTORY FROM BELOW Edited by Joseph A. Marchal Press SBL Press SBLAt lanta Copyright © 2015 by SBL Press A ll rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by means of any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permit- ted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to the Rights and Permissions Office,S BL Press, 825 Hous- ton Mill Road, Atlanta, GA 30329 USA. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The people beside Paul : the Philippian assembly and history from below / edited by Joseph A. Marchal. p. cm. — (Early Christianity and its literature ; Number 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62837-096-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62837-098-0 (ebook) — ISBN 978-1-62837-097-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Bible. Philippians—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Philippi (Extinct city)— Church history. 3. Philippi (Extinct city)—Civilization. I. Marchal, Joseph A., editor. BS2705.52.P46 2015 227'.6067—dc23 2015030957 Press Printed on acid-free paper. SBL Contents A cknowledgments ...........................................................................................vii
    [Show full text]
  • Juno's Peacock
    JUNO’S PEACOCK Or the Eyes have it Newsletter of the Wesleyan University Department of Classical Studies Issue 15 Summer 2010 When Argus, the hundred-eyed guard animal (and also the name of Wesleyan’s student newspaper) was killed by Hermes (Jupiter’s hit-man, and the name of Wesleyan’s alternative campus paper), some part of him survived death. His eyes were saved by Juno and set in the tail of her peacock. Argus, you lie low; the light you had in so many eyes is extinguished, And your hundred points of light are now all dark. But Juno saved the eyes, and set them in the feathers of her peacock: She filled its tail with jewels as bright as stars. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1,720-23) We have had a great response from alumni for the past issues so keep the news coming, to the address listed below or to email ([email protected]). Please let us know what else you would like to see in Juno’s Peacock, and thanks to all of you who sent in information for this issue. Logo by Cindie Cagenello (’88). FACULTY DOINGS LAUREN CALDWELL had an enjoyable and productive year. In Fall 2009 she offered a new course for first-year students on the Roman family. A highlight of the course was cross-cul- tural study of family commemoration of death. Di Longley, former director of the Middlesex Historical Society, led the class on a tour of the Old Durham Cemetery, near Middletown, and compared 18th-century funerary monuments to Prof. Caldwell’s class, CCIV 124: The Roman Roman imperial epitaphs.
    [Show full text]
  • Hackett Classics Catalog, Fall 2007
    HACKETT New Titles in CLASSICS GREEK LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK ◆ page 2 ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE ◆ pages 3-7 GREEK MYTH ◆ page 8 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORY ◆ pages 9-10 LATIN LITERATURE ◆ pages 11-15 ALSO OF INTEREST ◆ page 15 ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY ◆ pages 16-17 STUDENT WRITING GUIDES ◆ page 18 ORDERING INFORMATION & ORDER FORM ◆ pages 18-19 Fall 2007 2 ◆ GREEK LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK C. A. E. LUSCHNIG New An Introduction to Ancient Greek A Literary Approach, 2nd Edition Revised by C.A.E. Luschnig & Deborah Mitchell Sept. 2007 392 pp. $34.95 paper ISBN 978-0-87220-889-6 exam price: $5.00 C.A.E. Luschnig’s An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach prepares students to read Greek in less than a year by presenting basic traditional grammar without frills and by introducing real Greek written by ancient Greeks, from the first day of study. The second edition retains all the features of the first but is more streamlined, easier on the eyes, more gender-inclusive, and altogether more 21st century. It is supported by a Web site for teachers and learners at http://worldwidegreek.com. “I have used C.A.E. Luschnig’s text for my beginning Greek sequence for over twenty years. I find that her approach brings students to competency quickly and efficiently. The new version improves what was already a good text, keeping the many exercise sentences, providing a realistic selection of ‘real Greek’ readings with translation aids conveniently below. The proof is in the pudding: after doing beginning Greek with Luschnig’s text, my Greek students have been able to move easily to the second year reading classes in either Euripides or Plato.” —Karelisa Hartigan, Professor of Classics, University of Florida “Luschnig’s excellent An Introduction to Ancient Greek offers a thorough and clear account of grammar and syntax, copious exercises for practice, and a wonderful array of brief passages from ancient authors for translation and discussion.
    [Show full text]
  • CLA391-2000: Ancient Laughter: Comic Tradition in Greece and Rome Online Summer II 2021
    CLA391-2000: Ancient Laughter: Comic Tradition in Greece and Rome Online Summer II 2021 Instructor: Rosemary C. Condella Email: [email protected] REQUIRED READING LIST • The books are listed here in the order in which we shall read them in the course. • Please make sure that you purchase the correct translation. o If you choose to purchase an alternate translation, I cannot guarantee that you will have the same set of readings/plays. o Beware of free online versions. These are almost always outdated translations – outdated by 100 years, sometimes. • ISBN numbers are included here to ensure that you acquire the correct text. 1. Aristophanes: The Complete Plays, The New Translations by Paul Roche. New American Library. 2005. • ISBN: 978-0-451-21409-6 2. Menander: The Plays and Fragments, translated by Maurice Balme. Oxford World’s Classics. 2008. • ISBN: 978-0-19-954073-0 3. Plautus: Four Comedies, translated by Erich Segal. Oxford’s World’s Classics. 2008. • ISBN: 978-0-19-954056-3 4. Terence: The Comedies, translated by Peter Brown. Oxford’s World’s Classics. 2009. • ISBN: 978-0-19-955603-8 5. Petronius: Satyricon, translated by Sarah Ruden. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2000. • ISBN: 978-0-87220-510-9 COURSE DESCRIPTION This course exams the nature and function of humor and comedy in the ancient world and today. We will cover ancient Greek and Roman dramatic comedies, the nature of humor and laughter in the ancient world, the ancient sources of modern comedy, and what is funny today and yesterday. In so doing, we will examine and learn to apply various theories of analysis.
    [Show full text]
  • "Does Victory in This Clash Mean So Much to You?" : Translating Power in Three Plays of Aeschylus
    Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2019 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2019 "Does Victory in This Clash Mean So Much to You?" : Translating Power in Three Plays of Aeschylus Stephen Patrick Dwyer Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019 Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Dwyer, Stephen Patrick, ""Does Victory in This Clash Mean So Much to You?" : Translating Power in Three Plays of Aeschylus" (2019). Senior Projects Spring 2019. 156. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2019/156 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Does Victory in This Clash Mean So Much to You? ​: Translating Power in Three Plays of Aeschylus Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Stephen Dwyer Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2019 Acknowledgments To Finn West, for all the midnights we’ve spent spiraling To all my friends and the crews at 89 Broadway, Mann House, 57 East Market, Stone Row, and Catskill, for making these past five years messy and extraordinary To Daniel Mendelsohn, for his insights and for convincing me I would make it this far To Wyatt Mason, for his gravity and wisdom To James Romm, for introducing me to the tangled world of Aeschylus To Shirin Hijab, for all the crazy years we’ve shared To Mom & Dad, for more than I can say To Rachel, my twin through it all Table of Contents I.
    [Show full text]