An Imaginary Life in Ovid's Metamorphoses and Further Metamorphoses

Oct 10, 2016 Lyn Elliott rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, australia, myth-and-folk-tale, prize-winners

Malouf's language is that of a poet, fitting for a book whose narrator is exiled Roman poet and writer, Ovid.

The obvious themes are exile and the isolation that comes from effectively losing your own language, surrounded by people whose language and culture are vastly different from your own. He finds their customs and speech barbarous.

'I am in exile here.
I have …been cast out into what is yet another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become f ...more

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Jul 02, 2018 Nora Barnacle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Lepo se dosetio Dejvid Maluf i fino realizovao svoju ideju.
Kad na sve dodamo posvećenost prevodioca Ivane Dutli, "Zamišljeni život" izlazi na prijatno čitanje, vredno pažnje i sa drugih razloga.
Zamisao počiva na činjenici da o Ovidijevoj smrti ne znamo ništa pouzdano, što je sasvim neočekivano, obzirom da je on i za života a i kroz potonju istoriju bio izuzetno popularan, i to toliko da mu na crtu čitanosti mogu izaći još možda Šekspir i Stari Zavet. Čak i kad imamo u vidu da je iz Rima bio pro Lepo se dosetio Dejvid Maluf i fino realizovao svoju ideju.
Kad na sve dodamo posvećenost prevodioca Ivane Dutli, "Zamišljeni život" izlazi na prijatno čitanje, vredno pažnje i sa drugih razloga.
Zamisao počiva na činjenici da o Ovidijevoj smrti ne znamo ništa pouzdano, što je sasvim neočekivano, obzirom da je on i za života a i kroz potonju istoriju bio izuzetno popularan, i to toliko da mu na crtu čitanosti mogu izaći još možda Šekspir i Stari Zavet. Čak i kad imamo u vidu da je iz Rima bio prognan u neku rumunsku zabit, bogu (i božanskom caru) iza leđa - opet je gotovo neverovatno da se i dan danji, dve hiljade godina nakon njegove smrti (da, to je baš ove godine :)) nagađa da li mu je grob negde oko Konstance ili, pak, u Mađarskoj ili na nekom sasvim petom mestu. Ili ga uopšte i nema.
Maluf u "Zamišljenom životu" nudi svoju verziju, sasvim fiktivnu, ali isto toliko moguću: kako je, uopšte, to moglo da se desi da se jednoj takvoj osobi izgubi svaki trag.
Kad bih sad napisala kako je to rešio, teško bih vas razuverila da nije ispatetisao - a nije, verujte. Pametno je pretpostavio da je Ovidije, sve vreme se krijući iza laprdanja, lascivnosti i neverovatnosti, vapio za sopstvenim preobražajem, ali da, ušuškan u carsko bonvivanstvo s jedne i zablenut u fantastičnu realnost života obične raje s druge strane, to ni samome sebi nije smeo da prizna. No, tom skrivanju od sebe dolazi kraj kad se nađe među varvarskim Getima čiju jednu jedinu reč ne razume, a kamoli običaje, a kamoli, tek, kad se njima desi nešto sasvim neuobičajeno. Neka to, recimo, bude krupan plan, ali nikako jedino što se na ovih sto pedesetak strana može naći.

Ako izuzmemo onomadašnje Fon Trirovo persona-non-gratiranje iz Kana i slične politikanske igrarije koje se uglavnom ispostave većom koristi nego štetom za prognanika, današnji čovek zaista teško može da zamisli šta je Grku ili Rimljaninu izgnanstvo značilo. Štaviše, u poređenju sa sibirskim kazamatima, koncentracionim logorima, giljotinama i alkatrazima, ne liči nam da je neka greda živ i zdrav se preseliti koju hiljadu kilometara od kuće. A nije zezanje, i to Maluf sasvim dobro rasvetljava, iz prvog lica, kroz Ovidijeva usta. Neka to, eto, bude neki drugi sloj.

Najviše me je ipak obradovao stil i jezik: piščev ali i prevodiočev. Ne samo što je Ovidije Malufov narator, nego i priča onako kako je pisao - laganim stilom, više opažajno nego osećajno, precizno ali nesvakidašnjim rečima, gotovo razgovorno, a opet poetski, i nema nikakve sumnje da je pisac dobar poznavalac pesnikovog opusa. Ništa manje potkovana nije ni Ivana Dutli, koja je neretko uspevala da postigne ritmičnost heksametra i da me oduševi izborom reči (šestati, snatriti, njucati, lejka, šobot, ptilica).
Sve i da baš ništa ne znate o Ovidiju, ne mari. I ako nikad niste čitali antičke pesnike, ni to ne mari. Samo će vam isprva biti malo čudna interpunkcija, glagolska vremena, raspored reči u rečenici, namerno izbegavanje sinonima i slična poigravanja, ali ništa strašno i ni blizu fazona: "paljaše inoča zublje, hotijaše sprečit' predepsu" (izmislila sam da ilustrujem prevode kakve je sasvim normalno zafrljačiti, ne znači ništa... smisleno).

Koliko vidim, drugi naslovi Dejvida Malufa nisu prevođeni. Šteta - zanimljive su mu teme i fino piše. ...more

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May 08, 2016 Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography-fiction, greece-rome

Tristia and Metamorphosis

In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life—a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his Tristia (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gra Tristia and Metamorphosis

In 8 CE, the Latin poet Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea (the present-day Constanta in Romania) where he lived out the remainder of his life—a life that David Malouf has reinterpreted in his extraordinary novel. I have a strong recollection from school of the pervasive melancholy of the poems he wrote there, his Tristia (sorrows), and Malouf has perfectly captured the mood of a bleak existence among a barbarian people. But that is only how the book starts; gradually the novel takes the poet from sad despair to another state of mind entirely. Malouf calls upon the spirit of Ovid's most famous work, the Metamorphoses. And not the flamboyant transformations such as the various disguises of amorous Jupiter that so appealed to us as eighth-graders, but the gentler changes such as that of the elderly couple Philemon and Baucis who take root as trees growing in their beloved countryside. In Malouf's telling, a concept that meant nothing to me as a boy now moves me almost to tears as an older man.

"We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives us on to what we must finally become." The theme of metamorphosis is introduced early, with a magnificent evocation of spring, all starting from a single poppy. "Scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off-childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind." Malouf, like the poet, is a magician with words. But words can also get in the way: "my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky" [emphasis mine]. Prevents him being part of the world of "wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them."

Malouf's greatest stroke of genius is to introduce a wild boy: a human child, raised among deer and wolves, a naked figure occasionally spotted on hunting trips, eventually captured and brought into the village. Ovid makes him his special charge, teaching him the rudiments of speech, but also learning from him his non-verbal understanding of the land and its creatures. Although Ovid has the support of the village headman, there are forces ranged against his protégé who regard him as a predatory spirit from the alien world, and when illness strikes the village the tensions rise unbearably. Eventually the old poet and young boy set off on a journey into an unknown that he finds has been known ever since childhood. The Child's transformation at the end of the book is every bit as beautiful as Thomas Mann's shimmering vision of the boy Tadziu at the close of Death in Venice.

I came upon Malouf some years ago, trying to get a better knowledge of Australian literature. I was fascinated by The Great World and Fly Away Peter, but held off from this book as having nothing to do with the Australian experience. How wrong I was! For the experience of coming to a strange land in punishment as an exile is exactly that of most of the original settlers. So is the encounter with a less "civilized" people; even this rough frontier community has to erect battlements against the predations of still more barbarous peoples beyond the walls—a colonial experience reflected in books like Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (albeit writing from South Africa at this point). But tentative connections can still be made; the sequence of teaching the Child to speak, for example, is very similar to what Kate Grenville would later describe with aboriginals in The Lieutenant. And what is Ovid's exodus in the final part of the book but a journey into the outback such as that of the title character of Patrick White's Voss, the greatest of all Australian novels?

I keep a list of the two dozen best novels I have ever read in my life. I don't care what has to bumped to make room—even Malouf's more recent classical retelling, Ransom —but An Imaginary Life will certainly be on it. ...more

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