The grotesque characteristically involves miscegenation and miscegenated bodies, often marked by a strong (and polymorphous) eroticism. In this case we have not only the cow-woman Io, but a hybrid narrative that self-consciously mixes genres (epic, tragedy, bucolic, love elegy). When Mercury, at Jupiter's behest, descends to earth to slay Argus, he steps out of the Aeneid into the Eclogues, his wand duly made to serve as a shepherd's crook. Dryden handles the discursive slide with relaxed insouciance and in the manner of his translation of the Eclogues:
Up hither drive thy goats, and play by me:
This hill has browse for them and shade for thee.
Such miscegenation can be experienced as unsettling(since it puts in question fixed categories) or uncanny; it can produce excitement or disgust. According to Ruskin, the grotesque arises from healthful but irrational play of the imagination in times of rest, from irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things, or (and for Ruskin this is the noblest form) from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp' (in that sense resembling some versions of the sublime). And he notes that in its mocking or playful moods it is apt to jest, sometimes bitterly, with under -current of sternest pathos, sometimes waywardly... with death and sin'. Paul Barlow explains well:
For Ruskin, the grotesque at its truest was a sign of a conscious recognition of the failure of the imagination in the contemplation of a world both more terrible and more complex than can be fully understood. Whereas the sublime recognizes the impossibility of symbolization, marking the collapse of legibility, the grotesque generates a disordered, alien iconography. It reveals a confusion: a disconnection of representation from the real. Its relation to comedy lies in the fact that represented conditions tend to be read as absurd in the face of this knowledge of failure.
For the unsympathetic the grotesque, which involves 'horror within amusement' as well as the surreal or hyper-real, registers as tasteless or silly, and Ovid has indeed often been so dismissed. But Dryden approaches such qualities with undisguised relish.
Pedagogy is never about the aesthetic alone. But students of literature should not be offered knowledge or morality only, they should be invited to share in fresh possessions of beauty. If I am teaching Ovid in English, Dryden's is the only translation that enables me to bring out many of the points I most want to make, and to communicate the particular quality of pleasure I experience in reading the Metamorphoses. This is not, or not only, because Dryden's reception of Ovid has influenced my own, nor is it simply because Dryden (as interpreted by me) 'has Ovid right' (although this is how I may experience the matter). Rather there are innumerable factors in the reception, not all of which can be brought to consciousness, including a powerfully enabling critical discourse of 'postmodern' criticism centrally concerned with the self-conscious play of language, which help me to find the Ovid-in-Dryden and Dryden-in-Ovid that I do. In this association neither Ovid nor Dryden is simply inert, or already fully known; rather the relationship is reciprocal, as each helps to disclose the other. The Kantian judgement of taste' does not mean that aesthetic experience is unmediated. And the mediations that we find most powerful may be said to have (for us) classic status.
On the aesthetic model I am advancing, Dryden's Ovid might be deemed a classic text, if, standing alone, it were judged to display outstanding aesthetic quality, for example along the lines I have sketched above. It might further be regarded as a classic translation, if, when set alongside the Latin text of Ovid, it were to prompt a lively play of the mental faculties of the reader, giving her an enriched experience of Ovid (something much less likely to happen with a purely functional translation such as a Loeb). As we have seen, the aesthetic welcomes proliferation; after Dryden's translation (say) you have (potentially)
two classics instead of one. It is often assumed that a translation primarily serves to reinforce an original; it may give that original greater power, but it depends on its authority. But within the aesthetic, there is no problem in letting the various works stand free. For example, the story of Cupid and Psyche works one way in Apuleius' Golden Ass, differently when translated by Pater in his novel Marius the Epicurean-there is no requirement for one to be dependent on the other. A functional or instrumental translation, including most of those used in Classical Civilization courses today, can thus be figured as distinct from an aesthetic translation, a translation for its own sake. An analysis attentive only to the ideological may fail to differentiate the two, assigning to all translations a definite end. But it was in no such spirit, but to release in dialogue with them a free play of his mental powers, a free play with unpredicted and unpredictable outcomes, that Dryden turned to Ovid and to the other ancient authors he so loved.
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