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Hi
I have just read my Penguin Classics edition of Metamorphoses to read where Philomela turns into a nightingale. However my edition says she just changed into a bird.
Please can you enlighten me? Which writer is responsible for for changing Philomela into a nightingale if Ovid did not?
Ovid on the author list for this site?
Happy New Year!
Karl
I am sure it is Ovid who changed Philomel to a nightingale. This is what TS Eliot believed when he wrote in Wasteland:
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
Try looking at another translation:
Across the fields, they seem to wing their course.
And now, on real wings themselves they raise,
And steer their airy flight by diff'rent ways;
One to the woodland's shady covert hies,
Around the smoaky roof the other flies;
Whose feathers yet the marks of murder stain,
Where stampt upon her breast, the crimson spots remain.
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.mb.txt
In Latin, Philomela literally means 'nightingale'.
Thank you Kafka's Crow
The Latin translation is helpful too. Well I never!
I rec'd a "thrift" edition of Metamorphosis for Christmas.
This edition,edited by Tom Crawford has a few lines from the Tereus and Philomela myth, but prefacing each one there is a short prose summary. In that precis, we are told that Tereus cut out Philomela's tongue to prevent her from betraying him, but she still let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by weaving the details of the crime in a tapestry. The summary also states that all four characters in the "woeful drama" were changed into birds, and specifically states that Philomela had become a nightingale,
satisfactorily perhaps, for as a human she lost her tongue,
but no bird sings more sweetly than the nightingale.
I am in the mood to pull out my huge biblical text of Ovid's Metamorphoses and try to remember my wonder and feeling of magic about the work. You can blame Amazon--who attempted to entice me to download it to kindle before I recalled my edition in storage, and mortalterror.
In a moment of whimsy I thought I'd take aim and strike for mutual interest.
Anyone game? I will cite my edition sometime in the next ten hours.
I kind of want to read it. But it'll take me another 1-4 weeks to finish the book I'm working on. Also, I'd probably read it slower than everyone else.
Don't exclude yourself for that bill; I must have close to 20 book marks now, but a little rereading of Ovid would fit. I would cite my edition but cannot pull it yet; it was, however, an expensive translation from my reader's subscription days, and I bought it hardback, too, but it still got damaged, which broke my heart, and why I loaded things I already own on the ereader.