Translating the Pain of Love



Lyric poetry and politics
are thought like oil and water never mixed,
so too the English and the Latin tongues
that serve the senses: sight and touch and taste.
The one is elegy, abhorring haste;
the other guttural and bursts the lungs.
But Ovid's lines that Marlowe took apart
have shown me pain endures as works of art.
Frustrated by the clothes that verses wear,
Marlowe took these lines and stripped them bare,
and taught me how to show what exiles feel,
since both were dealt a hand by Fate made real --
an exile, left on foreign soil to die,
or victim by a dagger through the eye.

Royal Rhodes

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Royal Rhodes would be pleased to hear them.

You can read Marlowe's translations from Ovid here.