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.