The primary meaning of the verb translate is ‘To convert or render (a word, a work, an author, a language, etc.) into another language’.1 Thus, a translation is often understood as a (usually completed) work resembling that from which it is translated, often with the only difference between source and translation being the language. However, because the process of translating is dependent on the translator’s own reading of the primary text and their interests, aesthetic or otherwise, translations are rarely straightforward renderings of the original text and what often results is a change to the integrity of the source material. Another definition of translate, which denotes the conversion or adaptation of an idea ‘from one form, condition, system, or context into another’, bears striking resemblance to the definition of the noun metamorphosis, which is ‘the action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance’.2 Christopher Martin, writes, therefore, that translation ‘threatens to displace the text for which it substitutes’.3 Thus, through the necessity of change from one form to another, translation can be understood as another word for metamorphosis, which Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower exemplify in their respective poems The Legend of Good Women and Confessio Amantis, which feature translations of the stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from their Latin origins into Middle English.
Chaucer’s translation of the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela, titled ‘The Legend of Philomela’ exemplifies how translation can itself be understood as a type of metamorphosis. In stark contrast to Ovid’s version, the sisters Procne and Philomela do not avenge themselves by brutal infanticide, which removes the necessity for their transformations into birds at the end of the story. Sarah Brown in her article ‘Philomela’ rightly observes that in the original story, due to the common perception of infanticide by women as particularly heinous and unnatural, which originates from associations of womanhood and inherent maternal feeling, by plotting to kill Itys in the original tale, Philomela and Procne ‘forfeit their status as the story’s victims’, almost eclipsing Tereus’ villainy with their violence.4 Indeed, Ovid complicates the women’s victimhood by graphically detailing their slaughter and cooking of Itys, a complication which Chaucer entirely obliterates by omitting their response from his ending. In the Chaucer story, after Procne discovers Philomela’s mutilated body and weeps over it, the narrative ends with the narrator stating that ‘The remenaunt is no charge for to telle, | For this is al and som’.5 While Procne and Philomela’s actions are entirely heinous, they are also the result of a rage that comes from the violation and mutilation of body that Philomela experiences at the hands of her brother-in-law, and the knowledge of this on Procne’s part. Implicit in Chaucer’s removal of the women’s violence in its entirety from his tale is the suggestion that an exemplary womanhood is one void of violent emotion.
Alongside his removal of the sisters’ murder of Itys and feeding him to Tereus, the grotesqueness of which signifies their equal barbarity in the Ovid original (and paganism, in light of child cannibalism being put forth as a sign of God’s abandonment of the Israelites in Leviticus 26), Chaucer also positions Procne and Philomela as ‘Good Women’ through his exaggeration of their physical beauty. Because of the status of physiognomic morality in early medieval England, Chaucer’s emphasis on the sisters’ beauty can be read as signalling the faultlessness of their morality. Chaucer describes Procne as ‘King Pandione’s fayre doughter dere | … flour of hir cuntre’ (ll. 2247-48) and Philomela as of exceeding beauty and adornment that ‘there was non hire lyche’ (l. 2290), and in the entirety of his translation the two are never tainted in ways that would compromise this beauty. By contrast, in Ovid’s tale, Procne’s physical appearance is not described at all, and following her rape, Philomela tears out her hair and mauls her arms, and what remains of her hair is ‘besprinkled | with blood from the crazy carnage’ of Itys’ murder, the marring of her beauty symbolising the degradation of her moral character.6 That Chaucer’s women remain beautiful throughout the poem therefore underscores their status as paragons of female virtue, reinforced by his description of both sisters as ‘sely’ (l. 2339; l. 2346), meaning innocent, which emphasises his reimagining of them as purely victims.7 Thus, rather than being a literal translation of Ovid’s work, Chaucer’s translation transforms the original tale of barbarity from all parties into a tale of two wholly virtuous women wronged by a husband-and-brother-turned-brute.
In her essay ‘The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours’ Patricia Klindienst notes that often unappreciated in criticism of Ovid’s ‘Tereus, Procne and Philomela’ is the fact that Procne and Philomela serve as ‘objects of exchange’ between Pandion and Tereus.8 One way this is evident is in the fact that in the Ovid tale, Procne is given to Tereus by Pandion in exchange for peace between Thrace and Athens, a peace which is ironically undermined by that very union. Chaucer, however, translates Pandion’s giving of Procne to Tereus to ‘[Tereus] wedded hadde he… Progne’ (ll. 2246-48), presenting the marriage as a partnership between Tereus and Procne rather than an exchange between men. By removing the patriarchal overtones of the original story, Chaucer both romanticises what is an otherwise political match and, in a framework where love is conceived of as superior to cold pragmatism, subtly constructs Tereus as civilised in contrast to the barbarism associated with his Thracian heritage in the Ovid version. Additionally, while Ovid positions both men as kings, Chaucer changes Tereus’ status from king to lord, writing ‘of Trace was he lord’ (l. 2244) while he maintains Pandions’ kingship, which slightly undermines the political nature of the men’s relationship by diminishing Tereus’ power. Although Chaucer describes Tereus as ‘kyn to Marte, | The crewel god that stant with blody dart’ (ll. 2244-245), signalling Tereus’ military background, he nevertheless eliminates the latent threat of male violence that Tereus poses to Philomela from the outset in the Ovid version of the tale, which Ovid demonstrates through the motif of war in association with Tereus. For example, while ogling Philomela, Tereus envisions her as ‘his target’ (l. 461), considers having to ‘fight for his prize in a fierce | campaign’ (ll. 462-63), and once Philomela is aboard the ship back to Thrace with him, he exclaims ‘I have won!’ (l. 510). The absence of this patriarchal objectification and violence from the outset in Chaucer’s translation of the story humanises Tereus, making his extreme violence and objectification of Philomela later on more shocking. By changing Tereus’ violence from immediately present to gradually apparent, Chaucer illustrates the capacity for a translation to be a complete change in form from its original source.
Perhaps the most striking difference between Ovid and Chaucer’s versions of the tale is Chaucer’s addition of Tereus’ gallantry towards Philomela after his rape and mutilation of her, which is a complete narrative fabrication. Chaucer notes that once Tereus has stored Philomela away for his future pleasure, he provides generously for her in the castle he keeps her:
sothly for to seyne, she hadde hire fille Of mete and drynk, and clothynge at hire wille. (ll. 2352-55)
This image, the phrase ‘at hir wille’ in particular with its gesture towards intense attentiveness, evokes the chivalric romance tradition, depicting Tereus as a kind of noble hero. This is emphasised by the fact that he keeps her in a castle, which maintains her original status, rather than a hut as Ovid’s Tereus does, degrading her. While Tereus’ gesture betrays a perverted understanding of chivalry (as he inverts typical courting tradition by taking her virginity (by force) first, and lavishing her with luxuries after), by giving Tereus a semblance of honour through this attempt at kindness, however disturbed, Chaucer further humanises him. However, Tereus is not at all absolved of his crime by this kindness; rather, through the incongruity of this moment with the rest of Tereus’ actions, Chaucer represents the rupture in Tereus’ personality, being simultaneously savage as he is in Ovid’s story, and a semi-romantic hero. To highlight this, where Chaucer removes the objectification of women as patriarchal goods, he compounds the incestuous nature of Tereus’ crime. In his version of the tale, Chaucer has Pandion address Tereus as ‘sone’ (l. 2296) when instructing him to take care of ‘my yonge doughter here’ (l. 2297) and before her rape, Philomela asks ‘Where is my sister, brother Tereus?’ (l. 2315). The proximity of the relations in both sentences highlights that Tereus is as good as blood relative to Philomela and Pandion, which underscores the perverse nature of his transgressions. By associating Tereus with both savagery and courtly civility, Chaucer constructs a more complex villain than Ovid’s, demonstrating how translation itself can be understood as metamorphosis.
Like Chaucer’s translation of the story of Tereus, Procne and Philomela differs from Ovid’s narrative, Gower’s version of the myth of Diana and Actaeon also tells a story different from the one in the Metamorphoses. That Gower’s version of the tale is intended to illustrate sinful looking necessitates his portrayal of Actaeon as explicitly predatory, which in itself is a transfiguration of Actaeon in Ovid’s story. Consequently, Gower emphasises Actaeon’s power and minimises Diana’s, transforming the tale from a mere description, albeit narrative, of the misfortunes of stumbling upon something one shouldn’t, to the just punishment of improper behaviour. Gower opens his version of the tale thus:
This Acteon, as he wel myhte, Above alle othre caste his chiere, And used it fro yer to yere, With houndes and with grete hornes Among the wodes and the thornes To make his hunting and his chace: Where him best thoghte in every place To finde gamen in his weie, Ther rod he for to hunte and pleie.9
Through the active verbs ‘caste’ and ‘make’, which demonstrate Actaeon’s agency, Gower portrays Actaeon as having uninhibited power over the hunt, emphasised by the absence of other humans in the scene. Whereas in the opening of Ovid’s version, the presence of Actaeon’s hunting party is made explicit by the phrase ‘A band of huntsmen were strolling along through the glade’ (l. 146), through the repetition of personal pronouns, Gower stresses Actaeon’s centrality in hunting and the totality of his authority. Further, by pairing ‘hunt’ and ‘pleie’ in the final line, which emphasises that Actaeon’s mirth is at the expense of other beings, Gower portrays Actaeon as monstrous, exacerbated by the violent imagery of the ‘houndes’ and ‘great hornes’ he commands. The sexual connotations of ‘gamen’ and ‘pleie’ also begin to suggest something indecent on Actaeon’s part by conflating his enjoyment of the hunt with erotic pleasure, which compounds the threat he poses to Diana later. While Ovid also depicts Actaeon’s bloodlust, he tempers this through the description of him as ‘young’, which creates a sense of boyish excitement towards the sport of hunting that thus conveys a certain level of harmlessness to Actaeon. 10 In contrast, by omitting Actaeon’s youth, describing him only as a ‘worthi lord’ (l. 336), and introducing him as a dominant, solitary figure, Gower highlights Actaeon’s untrammelled power, which constructs his gaze upon Diana as menacing rather than innocent like it is in Ovid’s version. Although Actaeon is powerful in the Ovid version, Gower capitalises on this power to invent an unsavoury motive for Actaeon’s later behaviour, transforming the original story completely.
The motif of sight is present in both Ovid’s and Gower’s versions but while in Ovid’s tale, Actaeon finds himself looking at the naked Diana by accident, in Gower’s version, Actaeon actively gazes at her nakedness, as the phrase ‘he caste his yhe’ (l. 360) denotes. In Ovid’s version, Actaeon’s sight of Diana is never actually described; rather, Diana’s nymphs see him as the narrator describes how ‘At the sight of a man they struck their bosoms in horror’ (l. 179-181) and Ovid simply narrates that Diana’s neck and shoulders ‘were visible’ (l. 183) over her nymphs’ heads. By ascribing the act of looking to the nymphs instead of Actaeon himself, paired with the description of the woodland as ‘unfamiliar’ (l.176) to Actaeon, Ovid foregrounds Actaeon’s innocence to demonstrate that he lacks power in relation to the goddess Diana. In contrast, Gower’s translation deliberately creates ambiguity regarding Actaeon’s relationship to the area he finds Diana in, simply stating that ‘In a forest alone he was’ (l. 351). Given the emphasis Gower places on Actaeon’s might over his surroundings and love for play in the opening of his version of the tale, where Ovid makes it clear Actaeon has stumbled upon Diana, Gower introduces the possibility that Actaeon may have known that the dale was Diana’s haunt, making his encounter with her less innocent. Crucially, Gower describes how once seeing that Diana was naked, ‘he his yhe awey ne swerveth | For hire which was naked al’ (l. 366-67). The negative construction ‘ne sweverth’, presents Actaeon’s inaction as an act of moral failing, likely arising from the indecency hinted at by his eroticisation of the hunt at the beginning. By presenting Actaeon’s gaze as calculated, Gower’s translation transforms Actaeon from bystander to implied sexual predator, which radically changes how we read Diana’s response to his slight.
Whereas Ovid emphasises Diana’s power and her cruelty by describing Actaeon’s suffering at her hands very viscerally, Gower disempowers Diana in order to highlight Actaeon’s role as transgressor. Describing Diana’s transformation of Actaeon, the Confessor narrates that ‘… the likeness | Sche made him taken of an hert’ (ll. 370-71), culminating in Actaeon’s end, plainly described as ‘This hert his oghne houndes slowhe | And him for vengance al todrowhe’ (ll. 377-78). While Gower makes Actaeon’s dehumanisation clear by referring to Actaeon as ‘This hert’, he understates Diana’s role in this by using the passive form in ‘Sche made him taken’, which distances her from the violence that is, in actuality, the result of her power. Ovid, on the other hand, describes how after Diana splashed Actaeon with water, he
sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; last, she injected panic. (ll. 192-201) By describing Actaeon’s change gradually and in bodily terms, Ovid provides a vivid illustration of Actaeon’s disembodiment by Diana, which emphasises her power. The description is reminiscent of the medieval effictio typically reserved for female objects, which simultaneously objectifies and emasculates Actaeon, while the punctuation and enjambment fragments the passage, mimicking the disintegration of Actaeon’s physical humanity. Ovid’s use of enjambment also emphasises this physical transformation and the loss of Actaeon’s power it signifies through the necessity it creates of the reader’s slowing down to make sense of the description, which casts the reader as voyeur in the way Actaeon was voyeur to Diana’s nudity. Further, Ovid describes how Actaeon’s dogs ‘buried their noses inside | his flesh’ (ll. 247-48), and how Actaeon’s life was ‘destroyed in a welter of wounds’ (l. 251). By depicting the gore of the scene and evoking the grotesque image of Actaeon’s body being inhabited by his dogs, Ovid emphasises Actaeon’s utter degradation from master of the hunt to the hunted, displaying Diana’s supremacy over the hunt in comparison to the futility of Actaeon’s own power. Through his sanitisation of Diana’s violence in his version of the tale, Gower exonerates her, and in so doing, he locates all of the tale’s immorality in Actaeon’s gaze, simultaneously destroying all the interpretative possibilities regarding monstrosity that the original story opens up by portraying both Actaeon’s and Diana’s brutality. By illustrating the transformative power of translation, Chaucer and Gower’s translations of two stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses emphasise translation’s own unstable nature. In erasing the infanticide scene of the tale of ‘Tereus, Procne and Philomela’ in order to confer the title of ‘good women’ onto the two sisters, Chaucer also erases negative female emotions, transforming the full image of womanhood that Ovid provides — one that depicts the equal capacity of women to birth horrors through those negative emotions — into a neat, comfortable, uncomplicated womanhood in which the only office occupiable by woman is victim only. Similarly, through his diminishment of Diana’s role and his added vilification of Actaeon, Gower’s translation of the story of Diana and Actaeon negates the importance that perspective plays in understanding monstrosity, something Ovid’s version illuminates. That this change is done to highlight the perils of sinful looking, as Gower makes clear in the preface to his story, demonstrates the relationship between a translated work’s meaning and the desires of its translator, and the distance that can be created between a translated work and its source material as a result. Rather than being straightforward transfers from Latin to Middle English that the word translation denotes, Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Philomel’ and Gower’s ‘Tale of Actaeon’ can therefore more accurately be read as adaptations of Ovid’s stories rather than translations because of the major differences between them and their original forms in the Metamorphoses. Further, the way in which both tales depict the process of change from one form to another in and of themselves through various devices such as the renaming, framing devices, and the linguistic choices made by both authors, translation itself is revealed to not be as far removed from adaptation as one might first assume.
- Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘translate (v.)’ 1.a.
↩︎ - OED, s.v. ‘translate (v.)’ 3.a.; s.v. ‘metamorphosis (n.)’ 1.a.
↩︎ - Christopher Martin, ‘Translating Ovid’ in A Companion to Ovid, ed. by Peter E. Knox, (Malden, MA; Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 469.
↩︎ - Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Philomela’, Translation and Literature, 13 (2004), 205.
↩︎ - Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Legend of Philomela’, from Legend of Good Women in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ll. 2383-84. All subsequent references to this edition will be made in parentheses.
↩︎ - Ovid, ‘Tereus, Procne and Philomela’ in Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. by David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), ll. 659-660. All subsequent references to this edition will be made in parentheses.
↩︎ - MED, s.v. ‘seli (adj.)’ 2.(a).
↩︎ - Patricia Klindienst, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours’ in Rape and Representation, ed. by Lynn A. Higgins, Brenda R. Silver, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. 40.
↩︎ - John Gower, ‘The Tale of Actaeon’ in Confessio Amantis, ed. by Russell A. Peck, trans. by Andrew Galloway, TEAMS Medieval Texts Series, Book 1: Love, ll. 340-49. Text available at <https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/peck-gower-confessio-amantis-book-1> . All subsequent references to this edition will be made in parentheses. ↩︎
- Ovid, ‘Actaeon’ in Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. by David Raeburn (London: Penguin, 2004), l. 148. All subsequent references to this edition will be made in parentheses.
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