Ovid’s tales of metamorphoses are beautiful and terrifying. My introduction to Ovid was this tale, of Daphne and Apollo, in Latin. I was fascinated by the language swirling around Daphne’s metamorphosis into a tree while simultaneously horrified by the descriptions of Apollo’s advance. However, reading English translations, I was surprised by a glossing over of the terror Ovid’s transformed feel. One example is the translation of figura in line 547. Cassell’s lists possible translations as form, shape, figure, and size. But it is often translated as beauty.[1] Why is this, of all possible definitions, chosen? As we learn later, it is not Daphne’s beauty that is destroyed, but her body and her humanity; she becomes a splendid tree. Beauty implies a simple makeover, not a desperate cry for divine transformation into anything that will not attract rape.

This passage of Daphne’s tale works as a stand-alone poem. I selected two short sections (italics) that I translated three times each—from what I felt was the lightest possible English construction of the Latin to the harshest. Each provides a different intensity of experience—does Apollo say no to rest in his negat? Or deny rest?[2] Or both? None of the translations contradict each other, but they do tell different stories about the assault Daphne experienced at the hands of Apollo—an experience still relevant in our culture, today.

[1] Frank Justus Miller, trans., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, rev. ed. Loeb Classical Library 48 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 41 and Charles Martin, trans., Ovid’s Metamorphoses (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 37, for both an old and recent example of figura translated as beauty.

[2] Miller translated requiem negat as “gave her no time to rest,” (41) Martin as “giving her no pause” (37).