Cupid's wings
Jun 22, 2013 9:49:02 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Jun 22, 2013 9:49:02 GMT -5
R. Jenkyns is Emeritus Professor of the Classical Tradition at Oxford, where he is also Public Orator. This week he has written in especially to alert us about the existence of a difference. The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, from Apuleius's Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, is Professor Jenkyns reminds us a charming and poignant love story, an allegory of the union of bodily desire (cupido) and the soul (psyche), and at its most marvellous moment unexpectedly religious.
"Psyche is visited at night by an unseen lover and commanded not to try and find out what he looks like; we know him to be the god Cupid. Tempted, she breaks the command, and at the moment when she brings the candlelight to her lover, Apuleius becomes sublime. If only two sentences of Latin prose could survive, one might perhaps wish them to be these," Professor Jenkyns rejoices. "The glory of this passage," he goes on, "is that it is inebriated with its own loveliness, but also a moment of epiphany, sacred and indeed sacramental, for the physical objects that meet Psyche's enraptured gaze - a curl of hair, the down on a wing's edge - are at once intensely themselves and a transcendent realm made manifest." What a good word "transcendent" is do members not think?
Professor Jenkyns quotes two translations, the first done by a northern american lady:
and the second by Walter Pater, who in fact in 1885 translated the whole Tale and inserted it into the fifth chapter of his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean:
The american lady, notes Professor Jenkyns, "has caught the precision - just the very edge of the down - which Pater has lost. In Apuleius," he continues, "the 'dewy wings white-shine with sparkling flower.' So in fact neither translator preserves the metaphor within a metaphor, the feathers like dew, the dew like blossom," he in the end admits.
"Psyche is visited at night by an unseen lover and commanded not to try and find out what he looks like; we know him to be the god Cupid. Tempted, she breaks the command, and at the moment when she brings the candlelight to her lover, Apuleius becomes sublime. If only two sentences of Latin prose could survive, one might perhaps wish them to be these," Professor Jenkyns rejoices. "The glory of this passage," he goes on, "is that it is inebriated with its own loveliness, but also a moment of epiphany, sacred and indeed sacramental, for the physical objects that meet Psyche's enraptured gaze - a curl of hair, the down on a wing's edge - are at once intensely themselves and a transcendent realm made manifest." What a good word "transcendent" is do members not think?
Professor Jenkyns quotes two translations, the first done by a northern american lady:
She saw the full head of exuberant golden locks, drunk with ambrosia, the neck the colour of milk, the purple cheeks with orbs of hair straying around them, gracefully looped up, some hanging in front and some behind - and such was their far-flashing splendour that the flame from the lamp actually reeled back. On the flying deity's shoulders were dewy wings with a sparkling white lustre; their outermost down, delicate and evanescent, danced tremulously and tirelessly gambolled, although the wings' sinews were asleep.
and the second by Walter Pater, who in fact in 1885 translated the whole Tale and inserted it into the fifth chapter of his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean:
At sight of him the very flame of the lamp kindled more gladly! She sees the locks of that golden head, pleasant with the unction of the gods, shed down in graceful entanglement behind and before, about the ruddy cheeks and white throat. The pinions of the winged god, yet fresh with the dew, are spotless upon his shoulders, the delicate plumage wavering over them as they lie at rest.
The american lady, notes Professor Jenkyns, "has caught the precision - just the very edge of the down - which Pater has lost. In Apuleius," he continues, "the 'dewy wings white-shine with sparkling flower.' So in fact neither translator preserves the metaphor within a metaphor, the feathers like dew, the dew like blossom," he in the end admits.
