A new translation of Ovid’s Amores 1.8

Abstract

This translation is part of a first review of a work presented in my Master’s thesis (SOUZA, 2016). The proposal was to translate Ovid’s elegiac couplets in a form that could echo the original rhythm of the Latin poem. To to that, I used Carlos Alberto Nunes’ metrical choices as a reference, the substitution of long syllables in princeps position for stressed syllables in Portuguese. However, in my translation, different from Nunes, I admitted an stressed syllable to be followed by only one unstressed, compounding a trochee, which can be performatively executed as spondee. In this way, the possibility of variation was maintained in the meter, but the dactiles remained fixed as such in the hexameter’s fifth foot and in the pentameter’s second hemistich. The mandatory caesura in the pentameter was executed by having two stressed syllables side by side, and emphasized by a mandatory graphic space, in order to compel the reader to restart the rhythm. To maintain the pace of the meter, I employed resources as artificially displacing the stress to the beginning of a word, elision between a vowel-end of an hexameter and a vowel-beginning of the pentameter, and elisions in general. This revised version shows improvements in the hexameters, which now are preferentially executed with their caesuras, even with feminine caesuras as result. In addition, the tone of the poem is lighter and more fluid, with the elimination of radical hyperbata and the reorganization of content within the elegiac couplet, which is the unity in the poem.