Old Myths Made New

OVID'S METAMORPHOSES (401 pp.)--freinstated by Rolfe Humphries--Indiana University ($3.95; paperback, $1.75).

The general rule with classics is--time mutes, translators mutilate. Poet Rolfe Humphries' rendition of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a glowing exception. A skillful poet himself (Forbid Thy Ravens, The Wind of Time), Humphries, 60, soaked up a love of Latin from his teacher father, who once played baseball for the New York Giants. Four years ago, when his translation of Virgil's Aeneid appeared, critics hailed it as the best since Dryden's. This is only the second time in the last hundred years that the Metamorphoses has been done in English verse, and there has not been one as readable as the Humphries version since the 18th century edition, for which Pope, Addison, Congreve, Dryden and lesser lights pooled poetic forces.

Publius Ovidius Naso was born just a year and a few days after Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March. 44 B.C.

His rich, landowner father had no use for poetry, and wanted his son to train for the law. Ovid obediently did, but he was far fonder of Rome's artist colony and social whirl. His love lyrics were popular with all but the Emperor Augustus, a dour Cromwellian sort, who found Ovid's lively spirit immoral and subversive. In A.D. 8, he banished the poet to lifelong exile in a Black Sea village, but not before Ovid had capped his fame with a masterpiece which never saw more than first-draft form, the Metamorphoses, or the Stories of Changing Forms, a compendium of the ancient world's mythology.

Centaurs & Bacon. To this day every literate soul in the Western world knows the stories Ovid told, more or less in the way he told them. The titles evoke the tales: Daedalus and I cants, The Story of Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, The

Story of Midas, Baucis and Philemon, The Invasion of Troy and dozens of others. The "something extra" that Ovid brings to each saga is the saving detail of homely human interest, and Translator Humphries helps bring it out with homely colloquial touches of his own. As Daedalus fashions feathers into wings for the fateful flight from Crete, his playful son Icarus

. . . stuck his .thumb into the yellow

wax, Fooling around, the way a boy will,

always, Whenever a father tries to get some

work done.

The loving old couple, Baucis and Philemon, serve their unexpected guests-in-disguise, Jupiter and Mercury, a humble supper of cabbage and bacon, but first,

Baucis, her skirts tucked up, was setting the table

With trembling hands. One table-leg was wobbly; A piece of shell fixed that.

By contrast, Dryden translated these lines:

The good old housewife, tucking up her gown, The table sets; th'invited gods lie down.

The trivet-table of a foot was lame, A blot which prudent Baucis overcame, Who thrust beneath the limping leg a sherd.

Anyone who takes Ovid for a gentle poet of the hearth will do a double take when he comes to the sadistic eye-gouging battles of the centaurs. One centaur swings a chandelier like an axe and fells another:

Smashing his face so that no man would know it.

His eyes bulged from their sockets, and his cheekbones Splintered, and what had been his nose was driven Into his palate.

Divine Delinquents. Ovid rarely paints a passage purple, but once in a while he slips into what might be called senatorial rhetoric, and even Poet Humphries cannot salvage it ("0 winds, O little breezes, O streams, O mountains, O lakes . . .")-The gods with their king-sized personalities and jester-sized consciences dominate the Metamorphoses. Ovid accepted the Greek notion that the gods were created in man's image: lusting, brawling, conniving, cruel, with offhand streaks of decency --a prize parcel of divine delinquents.

Jove is an ageless lecher, a kind of zoological Don Juan who seduces girls in the guise of a bull, eagle, swan or snake. Juno is a screeching termagant who never gets even with her errant spouse, but always squares accounts with his latest girl.

These Stories of Changing Forms, however brutal, point the moral of Ovid's poem. Mankind is punished for the great sin which the Greeks called hubris--overweening pride. "I am too great for Fortune's power to injure," says arrogant Niobe, proud mother of seven sons and seven daughters. The boast is scarcely uttered, when Apollo looses 14 fatal arrows from his bow. "She would have been happiest of all mothers," comments Ovid, "had she only not thought herself the happiest." Over and above the turn of Fortune's wheel, there is an inexorable change--the passage of time and the certainty of death. Like his contemporary, Horace ("I have reared a monument more enduring than bronze"), Ovid was himself a hubristic father to his poems. He was content to die, but not to be forgotten, and proudly he hurls a parting challenge:

Now I have done my work. It will endure, I trust, beyond Jove's anger, fire and sword, Beyond Time's hunger . . .

/ shall be read, and through all centuries, If prophecies of bards are ever truthful, I shall be living, always.

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