Translation is the most intimate practice of reading I have known. Some thirteen years ago, while a graduate student at the University of Victoria, I took a Latin course where we translated passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At the time, I was most struck by the story of Philomela, who is raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law Tereus, and comes to be liberated by her sister Procne. The detailed nature of Ovid’s poetry and the deliberate pace at which I translated this story made for a completely overwhelming experience, at once visceral and enlightening. 

In years since, I have turned to Ovid and specifically his Metamorphoses for a companion to my own poetry. Transcribing and translating lines from the Metamorphoses as epigraphs for the poems in my third full-length collection, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), and now for my suite-in-progress, hem, are integral activities in my process. I am drawn in particular to many of the women in Ovid, who are often literally silent (or almost) in the text, though written with great nuance. In this poem, I imagine Eurydice in the moments after the separation from her husband Orpheus, and I enter the text of the Metamorphoses where Ovid left a door open. 

—Annick MacAskill 

 

The snake bites they sting, yes, but are not, strictly speaking, the worst part of this

supremumque “vale,” quod iam vix auribus ille
acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. ¹

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, ll. 62-63 

 

not my silken farewell
or the blush pinpricks so
faint the world could hear or
see through shade & fog me
like a token blotted
the end of it & I
slipping asked so faint too
his frame now & that lyre
almost but don’t fade those
songs mere aftershocks tin
-ny in my heart’s widest
hollows & his heat was
once fat finger-like &
heavy against my breast
[& where did I come in?]
-bone he did not follow
me now he the size of
my thumbprint useless! w/
what music could he dream
to fake the world I so
loved w/ its green air &
lilting weeds the way they’d
skirt my ankles I’d’ve
sunk & mind & looked &
so he like a dandy
-lion’s fluff floated up
tale-telling & alone

 

1. “And the last ‘farewell,’ which reached his ears, but barely, / she spoke, and turned back to the same place.” (My translation)

 

 

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Annick MacAskill (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), won the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. She lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq.