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So let’s look back at the beginning of the epic narrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I.005-009), and make some attempts to translate the lines into English. Here’s the original Latin again, together with my prosy sort of translation from the earlier post.

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.

World’s Beginning Before the sea and lands and the sky that covers all, the appearance of nature was one in all the globe, which they (people) have named Chaos: a crude,[1] unorganized heap, nor anything at all except a senseless weight, and also — piled up together, all in the same place — the seeds of things not well-joined due to discord.

See the earlier post for a detailed breakdown of the vocabulary and grammar in these lines. I’ve been struggling with how to fit the ablative singular discordia grammatically into the description of seeds of things not-well-joined in the final line; I’ve ended up taking it as an ablative of instrument, connected with the passive participle (non bene) iuncatrum, i.e. specifying that which causes the things to be not-well-joined. The word order here would turn out awkwardly in some places, unintelligibly in others, if you tried to make a hyperliteral word-for-word translation into English. Modifiers aren’t nearly as interspersed, or as far separated from the nouns they modify, as they were in the opening invocation, but they still break across some gaps, especially in the second line and the last couplet:

World’s Origin

Before the sea, and the lands, and — that which covers everything — the sky
One^[2] (it) was
— in all —
nature’s appearance^[3] (was, that is)
— in the globe^[4] —
which (they) have named Chaos:
an unformed, disorganized heap
nor anything at all except a senseless weight
and also, piled up together in the same place
the not-well-joined — due to discord — seeds of things.

There are a few notes, and a couple of significant decisions to make here on the vocabulary. Caelum is Sky or Heaven or the Heavens. In a Latin vocabulary, and a pagan worldview, this has some of the suggestions of divinity that Heaven does, but hardly any of the suggestion of the afterlife, and the association with gods is not as strong as what’s suggested by modern English and Christian Heaven. When it’s grouped here with the sea and the dry lands, it seems like a more ordinary reference to the physical sky. Unus is the number one (1). It also is used to indicate unity, uniqueness, uniformity, as in it’s all one, it’s just one, it’s singular, etc. toto . . . in orbe means in the whole globe, in the whole world, in the entire universe (literally, orbis is a circle or sphere, i.e., the circle of the world). Moles could be a mass, a pile or a heap; mass would go well with the reference to dumb weight (pondus) below it, but piles and heaps seem to fit nicely with the adjectives for disorganization, confusion and congestion below it. Rudis (cognate: rude) is a very ordinary term for the crude, unrefined, raw, unshaped or formless. indigesta (unarranged, disorganized, confused) and congesta (piled up, congested) pair nicely with each other in the Latin lines but there may not be a great way to keep this internal rhyme with English translations.

The word (or the name, or the act of naming) at the center of these lines is the Latin term Chaos. We are told that an unnamed They (folks, people) have given this term^[5] Of course, that name is the origin of our ordinary English word chaos, meaning disorder, structurelessness, conflict, confusion or apparent randomness. So you could translate the line just using the cognate English word:

Or you could translate it into English synonyms:

But on the other hand, the English meanings of the term chaos derive from poetic descriptions of primordial Chaos in later epic poems like this one. In a way, you run the risk of making the meaning of the line shallowly circular — of course they call chaos chaos; what else would they call it? In earlier epics, Chaos is always described as a primordial being or as a primordial state, before the formation of the world and the birth of the eldest gods. But it isn’t necessarily described as particularly chaotic, in our sense: Ovid’s decision to depict the Before-the-World-or-Gods as undifferentiated, confused mass is a later elaboration, and an artistic or philosophical choice, that isn’t required by his sources or by the origins of the term. The fashion now is for translators to go to some lengths to try to avoid conflations of our modern meanings with the use of the term in ancient epics, either by writing around it with alternate translations or by tacking on footnotes. If that’s your inclination, you might want to go to Ovid’s sources to find a more etymologically literal translation for Chaos, to avoid the too-quick association. But then the problem is that Ovid’s word Chaos is not a word that he got from Latin roots. Like Metamorphoses, it’s a learned loan-word that he got from ancient Greek poets. The exact etymology of Ancient Greek Χάος is uncertain, but its literal meaning outside of epic poems seems to have been something like Yawning Gap or Abyss; in any case, descriptions in ancient poetry seem to bear out a range of meanings having to do with empty space or with vast drops.^[6] So you might go for a literalistic rendering in terms of the Greek etymology:

But I think that diving from the over-modern, post-Ovid reading of The Mess down to the archaic, pre-Ovid reading of The Abyss makes the passage less tautological only at the expense of making it less intelligible. What Ovid describes isn’t aptly describable as an Abyss or a Chasm or a dark gulf far beneath the earth. And I think the difficulty here is that you need a way to indicate what Ovid is doing when he chooses to take over a Greek term from ancient, foreign lore (by then, Hesiod was almost three quarters of a millennium old) and put it as-is into his own modern epic in his own native language. I think Ovid uses Chaos here essentially as a mythological reference — it’s a name, taken from a foreign tongue, much like the allusive references to a Titan light-bearer and to Phoebe in subsequent lines to refer to the Sun and the Moon, and in this case I think the element essential to the reference that he gets from sources like Hesiod is the idea of primordiality, of a cosmic state before the earth or the heavens or the gods themselves. There may not be much to do about it except to do what you can to make sure that Chaos comes out as a proper name with mythic reference.

So, here’s my pass at a verse translation.

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]Rude, unformed.↩
2. ^[2]Singular, alone, all the same.↩
3. ^[3]Look, face, visage↩
4. ^[4]The universe, the circle of the world.↩
5. ^[5]dixere, syncopated form for 3rd person plural perfect dixerunt, with the primary meaning they said, they have spoken, they have told, but also commonly with a double accusative object complement, they have called D.O. O.C., they have named D.O. (as) O.C., also they have appointed D.O. (as) O.C. (to an office).↩
6. ^[6]Ovid’s go-to source for many of his cosmogonic myths is Hesiod, and the Theogony lists Chaos first, before any of the elementals or Titans or Olympian gods. But Hesiod’s Chaos is described as (1) the very first that came to be, before Earth itself; (2) the progenitor of Erebos and Night, both of them associated with darkness (below the earth and above it); and (3) as gloomy or dusky. (4) In the War of the Gods and Titans, when Zeus puts forth his full power, the astounding heat is said to seize (even) Chaos, as well as everything in the earth and the heavens far above it. (5) After the War, the defeated Titans are banished to dwell far beneath the earth, in a locked chamber utterly remote from the gods and the inhabited world, which is described as being as far beneath the earth as the earth is beneath the sky, and beyond gloomy Chaos. The descriptions of Chaos, where we get them, do not mention disorder or confusion, but emphasize its primordial age, elemental darkness, extreme remoteness, depth below, and division from the worlds of men and gods.↩

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.)↩