Arthur Golding - Translation of Ovid

Translation of Ovid

Golding is remembered chiefly for his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It was the first translated directly from Latin into English. Many other translations followed, including George Sandys' (1621) and Samuel Garth’s (1717). Golding’s translation, however, being read by Shakespeare and Spenser, "conveys a spirited Ovid with all his range of emotion and diversity of plot." Golding represents the stories he translates in a much different way, "delivering every twist and turn in as whole-hearted a manner as possible." His translations are clear, faithful and fluent as seen in this excerpt where Ovid compares blood gushing from Pyramus’ wound to water bursting from a pipe. Golding’s translation is something to be reckoned with:

And when he had bewept and kist the garment which he knew,
Receyve thou my bloud too (quoth he) and therewithal he drew
His sworde, the which among his guttes he thurst, and by and by
Did draw it from the bleeding wound beginning for to die,
And cast himself upon his backe, the bloud did spin on hie
As when a Conduite pipe is crackt, the water bursting out
Doth shote it selfe a great way off and pierce the Ayre about. (4.143-9)

Written in rhyming couplets of iambic heptameter (fourteeners), the book's full title was, The Fyrst Fower Bookes of P. Ovidius Nasos worke, entitled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into Englishe meter (1565). In 1567 Golding completed all fifteen books of Ovid’s poem. The influence of this book and ultimately its translation did not go unnoticed and was influential to many great writers. Its influence has been detected in Spenser’s Faerie Queen, in John Studley’s translations of Seneca, in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II, and many more. Even William Shakespeare knew of Golding’s Ovid and recalls it in a number of his plays. However, Shakespeare did have knowledge of versions other than Golding’s. A passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest seems to have a closer resemblance to the original Latin text than to Golding’s English version. Golding’s translation though, is without any question the most influential version to Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s use of it has become an important part of the history of the translation itself. As a man of strong Puritan sympathies, he intended the work to be read as a moral allegory, and a verse on the title page cautioned the reader that:

With skill heede and judgment thys work must bee red
For else to the reader it stands in small stead.

He prefixed a long metrical explanation of his reasons for considering it a work of edification in which he asked his readers to look past the heretical content of the pagan poem and set forth the moral which he supposes underlies the stories and attempts to show how the pagan machinery may be brought into line with Christian thought.

It was from Golding's pages that many of the Elizabethans drew their knowledge of classical mythology. The poet Ezra Pound characterized it as "Though it is the most beautiful book in the English language, I am not citing it for its decorative purposes but its narrative quality"