How Ovid Rewrote Greek Mythology Forever | Stephanie McCarter

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In this episode of Solomon & Smith, Jack and Milo speak with classicist and translator Stephanie McCarter about her acclaimed translation of one of the most influential works in Western literature, Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Ovid retold Greek myths of transformation, and in so doing transformed Greek mythology. We talk about why Roman writers saw translation as an act of cultural conquest, and about what is gained and lost when Latin poetry is brought across into modern English. McCarter discusses her approach to translating Ovid, her decision to render sexual violence explicitly rather than euphemistically, and why she believes no translation can ever be faithful.

We discuss Roman attitudes toward Greece, the philosophy of transformation, the poetic differences between Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, the politics of translation, and why Ovid remains one of the most modern voices from the ancient world.

Topics include:

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ancient Greek mythology

Roman literature

Classical studies

Translation theory

"To translate is to conquer"

Stephanie McCarter's Penguin translation

The history of Rome and Greece

Mythological retellings

Poetry and meter

Horace, Virgil, and Catullus

The politics of storytelling

Women in classical literature

Sexual violence in ancient texts

The philosophy of change and transformation

00:00:00 Translation as conquest

00:01:28 Introduction

00:05:00 Flux, Rome, and McCarter’s translation

00:10:07 Stephanie McCarter arrives

00:13:04 Poetic epigraph

00:14:34 English poetry, Dickinson, Byron, and Chaucer

00:16:45 Horace and the magic of Latin

00:21:51 Ovid in Latin: speed, play, and rhetoric

00:25:27 Virgil, allusion, and Ovidian style

00:30:30 Epic, epyllion, and the structure of the *Metamorphoses*

00:38:08 Greece, Rome, and translation as conquest

00:42:35 Translating Ovid: negotiation, constraint, and compensation

00:53:38 McCarter vs Mandelbaum: architecture and line

01:00:16 Apollo, Daphne, archaism, and poetic style

01:06:06 Puns, wordplay, Catullus, and the “fuckathon”

01:09:12 Sexual violence, legal language, and Roman readers

01:14:54 Arachne, power, Augustus, and exile

01:20:14 Ovid’s immortality and the final metamorphosis

01:21:27 Nature, flux, Lucretius, and the minded cosmos

01:29:58 Ovid, Shakespeare, and negative capability

01:36:30 First Encounters and Farewells