5/21/2023 0 Comments The Erotic Poems by OvidThey are the ultimate riposte to a degrading and debilitating "presentism." (19) Their poems are imbued with human passion, suffering, wonder, and excitement, and they constitute a priceless record of how the very finest literary artists of the past dealt with the most intensely human subjects. Len Krisak thinks differently in his Translator's Preface.Įverything that really matters to us mattered to them. Before capitalism atomized us into separate producing and consuming beings, promoting illusions of individuality that were constructed by reading Montaigne and Bacon and other early harbingers of the liberal subject, humans were more like coral organisms than lone wolves. That's a fairly standard view of premodern identity. Even the poets we might not call erotic but pornographic had no actual ability to set themselves apart from society (9) There tended to be no clean delineation between an individual's inner sense of self and a sense of the self's outward endowments obtained from education, clan, religion, culture, and nationality, and traditional stories inhered in all of these. In her Introduction, Sarah Ruden asserts that the ancients didn't think of the self in the same way we do: There's an unusual tension between claims in two prefaces to a new translation of Ovid. Lection home authors titles dates links about
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |