I talked a bit about the epic structure and the opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book I. The Homeric epics begin in medias res — with a quarrel in the Achaian camp in the ninth year of the war, or with Telemachus beset in Ithaca and setting out from news of his father, just weeks before Odyseeus’s eventual return. Ovid emphatically does not start his epic in the middle of anything — the unbroken song goes back to the very first beginnings of the orbis, and the very first taking of a form — the first forming of the world itself. Here’s the the next five lines in Metamorphoses, Book I (I.005-009), in their original Latin.^[1]

Mundi origo.

Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum
unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe,
quem dixere Chaos: rudis indigestaque moles
nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem
non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.

Like before, it’s tough to translate the Latin word-order directly into English. Here’s a word-for-word breakdown of the Latin:

In this case, a hyperliteral word-by-word translation stays a bit more intelligible. Still pretty awkward, though:

Before sea and lands and that which covers everything, sky
one was in all — nature’s appearance [was, that is] — the circle of the world
which [they] have named Chaos: rude, confused also, mass
nor anything whatever but for weight, idle — piled up, too, in the same place,
of the not-well-joined …^[7], — because of strife, — the seeds, of things.

Here’s a prosy sort of translation; for reasons of conventional English word-order it looks at grammatical agreement and uses it to join some of the phrases together that Ovid had put asunder.

I’ll have some more to say, and some attempts at a less prosy sort of translation, in a following post.

All the original translations that I post to this blog are freely available in the public domain.

1. ^[1]I got the text from P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses at the Perseus Digital Library; they transcribed the text from Hugo Magnus’s edition of 1892 (Gotha: Friedr. Andr. Perthes).↩
2. ^[2]Like a weaving or blanket; shelters, protects; hides, conceals.↩
3. ^[3]Appearance, expression; face.↩
4. ^[4]Circle, ring; the world, the earth, the universe.↩
5. ^[5]Syncopated form, for dixerunt↩
6. ^[6]Lit., if not↩
7. ^[7]Agrees with and describes things, at the end of the line.↩
8. ^[8]Rude, unformed.↩

Follow-Up to GT-2020-03-25: GiveDirectly has set up an emergency relief project to directly assist low-income families impacted by Covid-19 in the United States and GT 2020-04-09: GiveDirectly has begun its international Covid-19 emergency relief project in Nairobi. You can provide direct cash assistance to informal-sector workers affected by the pandemic and government disease control measures.

GiveDirectly is organizing a massive direct cash-relief project to assist low-income families affected by novel coronavirus disease and by emergency travel controls and economic restrictions. In addition to the general U.S. and international emergency relief response funds which I posted about over the past month, they are also now setting up regional response funds, to target relief to low-income families in 14 hard-hit metropolitan centers in the U.S. and to informal-sector workers living in extreme poverty around Nairobi, Kenya.

They accept credit cards, PayPal, checks, wire, stock transfers, or cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, ETH or XRP). I had some old bitcoin sitting around that’s appreciated quite a bit, so I’m using it to support these GiveDirectly funds:

• Detroit + Ann Arbor COVID-19 Fund
• Las Vegas COVID-19 Fund
• New York City COVID-19 Fund
• Kenya COVID-19 Fund

If you’re not familiar, here’s more information about GiveDirectly and an independent, measurable-output based evaluation of their programs.^[1] Updates about all their programs, Frequently Asked Questions about Covid-19 donations, operations, and Emergency Cash Response are available on the GiveDirectly page.

1. ^[1]Evidential Note: From November 2018. The evaluation does not, of course, speak to their new Covid-19 emergency relief programs. However, it does discuss the operations and effectiveness of several of their existing direct cash assistance programs, which have traditionally focused on relief of extreme poverty in the developing world.↩

Man, I don’t know about you, but I listen to a lot of NPR, and I sure am exhausted at living in a moment.

Or living in a series of Moments. I feel like someday someone will make a series of period pieces about the 2010s and early 2020s and the previews will all start with a booming Voice of God narrotor announcing: IN A MOMENT… where all our assumptions about daily life are turned upside-down…

Follow-up/What I’m Reading: Back in late March, I had a post on questions about Is epidemic Covid-19 much worse in New York and New Jersey than everywhere else? If so, why?. This is follow-up to that post based on a new paper that’s related to one of the questions I was wondering about: Could New York and New Jersey be more severely affected than the rest of the U.S. because of population differences? Well, maybe. … You might want to look not only at densities but at other features of how those populations go about and live their lives; for example, New York is unusual within the United States not only in having a very dense population but also in having extremely high levels of transit and subway usage within the inner city, unusually low rates of car ownership per household and per capita, etc.

The follow-up here is that Jeffrey Harris, at MIT, thinks that the effect in New York City may be due to transmissions of infection within the subway system. Here’s an NBER Working Paper draft of a paper by which argues that The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City. It’s very new (written in mid-April 2020), and it’s an NBER Working Paper off-print, so it has not been peer reviewed. The paper is an observational study, which is based on observed correlations among subway ridership, subway line locations within New York City, and hotspots for detected coronavirus cases within New York City. Well, maybe. Anyway, here’s the abstract:

ABSTRACT

New York City's multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator – if not the principal transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020. The near shutoff of subway ridership in Manhattan – down by over 90 percent at the end of March – correlates strongly with the substantial increase in the doubling time of new cases in this borough. Maps of subway station turnstile entries, superimposed upon zipcode-level maps of reported coronavirus incidence, are strongly consistent with subway-facilitated disease propagation. Local train lines appear to have a higher propensity to transmit infection than express lines. Reciprocal seeding of infection appears to be the best explanation for the emergence of a single hotspot in Midtown West in Manhattan. Bus hubs may have served as secondary transmission routes out to the periphery of the city.

Jeffrey E. Harris
Department of Economics, E52-422
MIT

To be fair, the paper does not make much attempt to test whether subway lines explain disease transmission more than any other lines of pedestrian or vehicle traffic through the city, but for robustness he does also draw on some indications, drawn from press reports, that the prevalence of detected Covid-19 infections among MTA subway workers may be extremely, disproportionately high.^[1]

If Harris is correct, it would help to explain the situation within the greater New York City MTA network, although of course it leaves to be explained the situation in the rest of New York State and New Jersey. The sections on unintended consequences (discussed as ironies of policy responses, e.g. on pp. 15ff) and on possible suggestions for, so to speak, removing the pump handle within the subway system as restrictions ease and ridership begins to tick back up, are both interesting and suggestive.

(Reference to the paper thanks to Chris Sciabarra (2020/04/23).)

1. ^[1]Harris claims in this section that It is hard to imagine any plausible explanation for these workers' losses except that their place of work was the principal source of their coronavirus infections and that the high prevalence of detected Covid-19 among MTA workers turns out to be the clincher that transportsus from correlation to causation; I think it’s a really interesting and suggestive paper, but these claims are surely far too strong. You don’t have to be too imaginative to dream that MTA workers might be more likely to get tested than other people in New York City; they might be more likely to get infected simply because they have been continuing to work in public places, not because they’ve been working in the subway in particular, etc. You would need to compare MTA workers not to zipcodes but to other groups of essential-business workers who have been continuing to work in public places over the last month, and to gather some kind of information about any differences in rates of testing, etc.)↩

To-day in the world of Greek and Roman Myths, stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses are usually carried off, willy-nilly,^[1] and dropped into mythologickal source-books to be read as stand-alone tales. Or they are redeployed as background stories for building the world of modern fantasy novels. So it goes, and there are plenty of instances in which this is done well and we’re all the richer for it. But the Metamorphoses itself is written as a single epic poem — or a sort of one, anyway. The Iliad sings the rage of Achilles over a few weeks of the ninth year of the Trojan War; the Odyssey and the Aeneid tell or sing of a man and his wandering over the course of years. Metamorphoses promises to tell of the theme (altered forms, new bodies) in unbroken song from creation of the universe to the narrator’s own times in the days of Caesar Augustus.

Here are the opening four lines of Metamorphosis, Book I in their original Latin.^[2]

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

The opening is hard to translate directly into English. Latin is a highly inflected language: grammatical roles within a sentence are determined mainly by word-endings, not by word-order (as in English or modern Romance languages). So you can arrange the same words into all kinds of different orders without losing the meaning of the parts.^[3] Latin poetry exploits unusual, inverted, infixed or interspersed word orders much more than Latin prose does, and Ovid especially loves to do this in the Metamorphoses, whether for rhetorical effect, or just for the hell of it. Here’s a word-by-word breakdown of the Latin:

The word order makes it impossible to translate word-for-word into grammatical English — the first two words, In nova… agree with the last word of the opening clause, corpora, and wrap around the rest of the sentence;^[7] fert animus… dicere (a mind carries me off to tell) is interspersed with, or shuffled into, mutatas… formas (altered forms). A word-for-word translation would be gibberish:

Into new– it carries (me) off, a mind does, of altered things, to tell– forms–
Bodies! …

Here’s a prosy sort of translation, going clause by clause, that tries to get the literal meaning into grammatical English:

In my prosy translation we lead off with a mind, a mood, my soul, at the very start, but in the Latin poem animus is right in the middle of the line. To keep up with English grammar, the easiest thing to do is to sacrifice Latin word-order. But the word order in the Latin is important. Classical epics have a topic, a subject that they tell or sing, often introduced in the first word or the opening few words of the poem.^[9] The topic of the Metamorphoses is In nova… (corpora) that is, Into new (bodies)! — or if we grant the effects of the long break (down to the next line) before we find out that the nova are in fact corpora, you might think of it as Into something new… This won’t make for a fluent sort of poem, but if we try to translate poetically into units that preserve something like the order in which the opening introduces its themes, word by word, at the cost of some grammatically necessary repetition, we’d get something more like this:

Into something new —
a mind carries me off to tell —
of shapes so changed into new bodies;
o Gods, these things I’ve begun–
for You have changed Yourselves, and others too–
Breathe upon my works–
and from the first beginning of the world,
to my own times
lead out an unbroken song.

Let’s try to put some of all that together into a roughly line-by-line verse translation. I’ve tried to keep some indication of places where the poet uses word order for an effect.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got in my notebook. What do you think? How would you handle these lines?

All the original translations that I post to this blog are freely available in the public domain.

1. ^[1]And often first edited to taste, or to bring them into conformity with details taken from other stories that the re-teller knows from Homer, or Vergil, or Bulfinch’s.↩
2. ^[2]I got the text from P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses at the Perseus Digital Library; they transcribed the text from Hugo Magnus’s edition of 1892 (Gotha: Friedr. Andr. Perthes).↩
3. ^[3]puella amat puerum and puerum amat puella both mean the same thing, but the girl loves the boy and the boy loves the girl do not. Puella is in the nominative case, so it must be the subject of the verb whether it comes before or after. Puerum is in the accusative, which in this sentence indicates that it is the direct object of the verb, even if it comes before.↩
4. ^[4]Or moved, mutated, different, successive.↩
5. ^[5]Syncopated form, short for mutavistis.↩
6. ^[6]Often said of the gods or of winds or sea, to indicate favor or providential encouragement.↩
7. ^[7]You can tell nova is intended to modify corpora because they agree in case, number and gender (neuter, plural, accusative). Corpora is in the accusative because it is governed by the preposition In, which means located in, within on with an ablative object, and into, onto with an accusative object.↩
8. ^[8]Some notes on grammatical and semantic issues in making the translation: In nova… corpora: neuter accusative plural, together with mutatas… formas, forms altered into new bodies. In the accusative because they are the object of preposition in, i.e., suggesting motion into or onto. Translators pretty uniformly translate this according to one possible meaning, the human form, figure or body. I’ve done the same. But it could also used to mean appearances or beauty. animus, a mind — Classical Latin doesn’t have or need definite or indefinite articles, so a mind, the mind, mind, Mind are all possible here. Could be translated as mind, thought, intelligence, spirit, soul, life-force, character, will, emotion, mood or temper. The interesting thing here, compared to the tradition of ancient Greek epic, is that the poet says *he* is moved to tell. He asks the gods to aid what he’s undertaken, but he, not they, has undertaken the project. In Homer, the invocation asks the goddess or the muse to sing through the poet. Vergil, like Ovid, begins Of arms and the man I sing. Fert… dicere: bears (me) off, carries (me) away to tell. Fert is a standard word for carrying or bearing a burden, also often used to mean take, take away, carry away or carry off. (When used of a person, it can mean to capture, abduct or rape — a common theme throughout the tales in the poem.) di: vocative plural, calling out to some gods or all the gods. coeptis… meis: lit. my things begun or undertaken; it took me forever to figure out how these fit together with the clause, but these are in the dative here, because they are a dative object for the intransitive form of adspirate See notes on transitive and intransitive forms in Wiktionary: aspiro. nam vos mutastis et illas: this is highly condensed, but vos could be either nominative or accusative according to the form of the word; mutastis is a contraction or syncopated form, shortened from mutavistis. In context, y’all (that is, di, the gods) would be an appropriate subject for the 2nd person plural mutastis, but I think the fem. acc. pl. et illas, lit. and those, and those (others), suggests vos is supposed to be a direct object paired together with the others (other shapes, besides their own), that the gods have transformed into new bodies. Primaque ab origine: The -que suffix (too, also) breaks off the word in front of it from the previous clause; ablative feminine prima, first, agrees with origine, origin or beginning. ad mea… tempora, perpetuum… carmen: to my times, unending or nonstop song. Again, agreement determines which adjective goes with which noun, despite the shuffled word-order. deducite: Literally, lead out (y’all); it can mean to draw out or spin, as a thread, to stretch out or extend, to pull out, as a ship from harbor. It could also mean escort or accompany, if you think that the poet also here wants to emphasize his own role in composing the poem, and is asking the gods to accompany the unceasing song not to spin it out themselves.↩
9. ^[9]The Iliad 1.1: menin — RAGE; the Iliad is the song of the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles. The Odyssey 1.1: andra — the man; the Odyssey tells us the man of many ways. Aeneid 1.1: arma virumque; the Aeneid sings arms and the man, who first….↩