Ovid
Translated by Ted Hughes, 1997
The sculptor Pygmalion, sickened by the immorality of some of the women he has seen, resolves to carve his own out of ivory. He soon falls in love with her. This story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is sung by Orpheus (see Story 63). There are obvious parallels with the ancient myth of Pandora (see Story 9). The Pygmalion myth has also had a busy afterlife, inspiring a significant handful of operas, and informing works as diverse as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and George Bernard Shaw’s eponymous play (1912), which was later re-adapted as the musical My Fair Lady (1956). Ted Hughes’s translation is splendidly visual and very much in Ovid’s spirit.
If you could ask the region of Amathis
Where the mines are so rich
Whether it had wanted those women
The Propoetides,
You would be laughed at, as if you had asked
Whether it had wanted those men
Whose horned heads earned them the name Cerastae.
An altar to Zeus,
God of hospitality, stood at the doors
Of the Cerastae, soaked –
A stranger would assume – with the blood
Of the humbly sacrificed
Suckling calves and new lambs of Amathis.
Wrong. They butchered their guests.
Venus was so revolted to see offered
Such desecrated fare
She vowed to desert Ophiusa
And her favoured cities.
But she paused: ‘The cities,’ she reasoned,
‘And the places I love –
What crime have these innocents committed?
‘Why should I punish all
For a few? Let me pick out the guilty
And banish or kill them –
Or sentence them to some fate not quite either
But a dire part of both.
The fate for such, I think, is to become
Some vile thing not themselves.’
The horns of the Cerastae suggested
One quick solution for all –
Those men became bullocks. As for the others,
The Propoetides –
Fools who denied Venus divinity –
She stripped off their good names
And their undergarments, and made them whores.
As those women hardened,
Dulled by shame, delighting to make oaths
Before the gods in heaven
Of their every lie, their features hardened
Like their hearts. Soon they shrank
To the split-off, heartless, treacherous hardness
Of sharp shards of flint.
The spectacle of these cursed women sent
Pygmalion the sculptor slightly mad.
He adored woman, but he saw
The wickedness of these particular women
Transform, as by some occult connection,
Every woman’s uterus to a spider.
Her face, voice, gestures, hair became its web.
Her perfume was a floating horror. Her glance
Left a spider-bite. He couldn’t control it.
So he lived
In the solitary confinement
Of a phobia,
Shunning living women, wifeless.
Yet he still dreamed of woman.
He dreamed
Unbrokenly awake as asleep
The perfect body of a perfect woman –
Though this dream
Was not so much the dream of a perfect woman
As a spectre, sick of unbeing,
That had taken possession of his body
To find herself a life.
She moved into his hands,
She took possession of his fingers
And began to sculpt a perfect woman.
So he watched his hands shaping a woman
As if he were still asleep. Until
Life-size, ivory, as if alive
Her perfect figure lay in his studio.
So he had made a woman
Lovelier than any living woman.
And when he gazed at her
As if coming awake he fell in love.
His own art amazed him, she was so real.
She might have moved, he thought,
Only her modesty
Her sole garment – invisible,
Woven from the fabric of his dream –
Held her as if slightly ashamed
Of stepping into life.
Then his love
For this woman so palpably a woman
Became his life.
Incessantly now
He caressed her,
Searching for the warmth of living flesh,
His finger-tip whorls filtering out
Every feel of mere ivory.
He kissed her, closing his eyes
To divine an answering kiss of life
In her perfect lips.
And he would not believe
They were after all only ivory.
He spoke to her, he stroked her
Lightly to feel her living aura
Soft as down over her whiteness.
His fingers gripped her hard
To feel flesh yield under the pressure
That half wanted to bruise her
Into a proof of life, and half did not
Want to hurt or mar or least of all
Find her the solid ivory he had made her.
He flattered her.
He brought her love-gifts, knick-knacks,
Speckled shells, gem pebbles,
Little rainbow birds in pretty cages,
Flowers, pendants, drops of amber.
He dressed her
In the fashion of the moment,
Set costly rings on her gold fingers,
Hung pearls in her ears, coiled ropes of pearl
To drape her ivory breasts.
Did any of all this add to her beauty?
Gazing at her adorned, his head ached.
But then he stripped everything off her
And his brain swam, his eyes
Dazzled to contemplate
The greater beauty of her naked beauty.
He laid her on his couch,
Bedded her in pillows
And soft sumptuous weaves of Tyrian purple
As if she might delight in the luxury.
Then, lying beside her, he embraced her
And whispered in her ear every endearment.
The day came
For the festival of Venus – an uproar
Of processions through all Cyprus.
Snowy heifers, horns gilded, kneeled
Under the axe, at the altars.
Pygmalion had completed his offerings.
And now he prayed, watching the smoke
Of the incense hump shapelessly upwards.
He hardly dared to think
What he truly wanted
As he formed the words: ‘O Venus,
You gods have power
To give whatever you please. O Venus
Send me a wife. And let her resemble –’
He was afraid
To ask for his ivory woman’s very self –
‘Let her resemble
The woman I have carved in ivory.’
Venus was listening
To a million murmurs over the whole island.
She swirled in the uplift of incense
Like a great fish suddenly bulging
into a tide-freshened pool.
She heard every word
Pygmalion had not dared to pronounce.
She came near. She poised above him –
And the altar fires drank her assent
Like a richer fuel.
They flared up, three times,
Tossing horns of flame.
Pygmalion hurried away home
To his ivory obsession. He burst in,
Fevered with deprivation,
Fell on her, embraced her, and kissed her
Like one collapsing in a desert
To drink at a dribble from a rock.
But his hand sprang off her breast
As if stung.
He lowered it again, incredulous
At the softness, the warmth
Under his fingers. Warm
And soft as warm soft wax –
But alive
With the elastic of life.
He knew
Giddy as he was with longing and prayers
This must be hallucination.
He jerked himself back to his senses
And prodded the ivory. He squeezed it.
But it was no longer ivory.
Her pulse throbbed under his thumb.
Then Pygmalion’s legs gave beneath him.
On his knees
He sobbed his thanks to Venus. And there
Pressed his lips
On lips that were alive.
She woke to his kisses and blushed
To find herself kissing
One who kissed her,
And opened her eyes for the first time
To the light and her lover together.
Venus blessed the wedding
That she had so artfully arranged.
And after nine moons Pygmalion’s bride
Bore the child, Paphos,
Who gave his name to the whole island.