Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online Page A

will turn a poet who wanted to make everything omnipresent and near to hand, into an exile for ever, an inhabitant of a remote world.
    From the Orient (‘in some ancestor of
The Arabian Nights’
says Wilkinson) comes the romantic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (which one of the daughters of Minyas chooses from a list of others from the same mysterious source), with the hole providing access for whispered words but not kisses, with the night bathed in moonlight beneath the white mulberry tree, a tale which will transmit its echoes to a midsummer night in Elizabethan England.
    From the Orient via an Alexandrian romance Ovid derives the technique for expanding the space inside the work, through tales contained within other tales, which here heightens the impression of a packed, teeming, tangled space. Such is the forest in which a boar hunt brings together the destinies of several illustrious heroes (Book 8), not far from the whirlpool of Achelous, which blocks the path home of those returning from the hunt. They are then offered hospitality in the river-god’s dwelling, which thus is both their obstacle and refuge, a pause in the action, an opportunity for stories and reflection. Since one of the hunters there is Theseus, curious as always to find out the origin of everything he sees, as well as Pirithous the insolent unbeliever (‘deorum / spretor erat mentisque ferox’ (he was a spurner of the gods, and fiercely proud in spirit)), the river-god feels encouraged to tell tales of marvellous metamorphoses, and is then imitated by his guests. In this way new layers of stories continually join together in the
Metamorphoses
, like shells which eventually might produce a pearl: the pearl in this case being the humble idyll of Baucis and Philemon which contains a whole world of minute detail and a completely different rhythm.
    It has to be said that Ovid only rarely avails himself of these structural complexities: the passion which dominates his compositional skills is not systematic organisation but accumulation, and this has to be combined with variations in point of view, and changes in rhythm. This is why when Mercury starts to recount the metamorphosis of the nymph Syrinx into a clump of reeds, to put Argus to sleep whose hundred eyelids never all close together, his narration is partly given in direct speech, and partly shortened into a single sentence, because the rest of the story is left; in suspension; the god falls silent as soon as he sees that all the eyes of Argus have succumbed to sleep.
    The
Metamorphoses
is the poem of rapidity: each episode has to follow another in a relentless rhythm, to strike our imagination, each image must overlay another one, and thus acquire density before disappearing. It is the same principle as cinematography: each line like each photogram must be full of visual stimuli in continuous movement.
Horror vacui
dominates both the poem’s time and space. In page after page the verbs are all in the present; everything happening before our eyes; new events quickly follow on; all distance is abolished. And when Ovid feels the need to change rhythm, the first thing he does is not to change the tense but the person of the verb: he moves from third to second person, in other words he introduces the person of whom he is about to talk, by addressing him directly in the second person singular: ‘Te quoque mutatum torvo, Neptune, iuvenco’ (You too, Neptune, now changed into a fierce-looking ox). Not only is the present there in the verb tense, but the character’s actual presence is evoked in this way. Even when the verbs are in the past, the vocative effects a sudden sense of immediacy. This procedure is often adopted when several subjects carry out parallel actions, to avoid the monotony of lists. If he has spoken of Tityus in the third person, Tantalus and Sisyphus are addressed directly with the vocative ‘tu’. Even plants can be addressed in the second person (‘Vos quoque, flexipedes