Pushkin poem about Ovid...!?

Question

At my college, we're going to celebrate 2000 years from Ovid's exile and we thought about including poetry dedicated to him... The professor came up with a few poems dedicated to Ovid by poets from our country (Romania), but including some international poetry would definitely be great...

So I just found out that there's a poem written by Pushkin and named "To Ovid". Does anyone know a website where I could read the poem in an English translation? Or other poems about Ovid.... I searched but found nothing! :(

And does anyone know of any plans to celebrate Ovid in 2008?

Answer 1

try the website poemhunter, and in particular this page: http://www.poemhunter.com/search/?q=ovid&Submit=Find&w=title

if the link won't work, select search by poem title (not author), and just type ovid as a keyword. many poems will appear. it seems he is a popular choice of subject!

like you i searched high & low for the pushkin poem, which i confess i'd not heard of before. it doesn;t appear to be translated anywhere online. apparently pushkin also mentions ovid in his poem the gypsies.

don't know about celebrations of ovid, but there are plans to stage adaptations of his metamorphoses in stockholm and theatres in london in the new year.

Answer 2

Try here:
http://www.answers.com/topic/ovid
and
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft158004q8&doc.view=content&chunk.id=d0e6963&toc.depth=1&anchor.id=0&brand=eschol

Read this short article too:

The Joy of Nostalgia: Reception of Ovid in Russian Poetry
by Zara TORLONE

The question of the reception of antiquity in Russian literature has never produced any theoretical
or conceptual unanimity; there was no direct archeological or linguistic heritage that would tie Russian
culture to Greek or Roman civilizations and thus produce a consistent reception of antiquity. However,
the classical legacy in Russia exerted a great influence on the formation of national literature (Knabe
2000). Reception studies focus on the difference between Rezeption (“reception”) when the work of art is
absorbed by a general audience and Wirkung (“response”) when it evokes reactions of some elite cultural
agency (Holub, 1984, xi).
My talk focuses on the latter and offers an interpretation of one such reaction to classical
antiquity by two Russian poets: Alexandr Pushkin and Osip Mandelshtam. Both poets offer a “response”
to Ovidian exile from Rome and subsequently “edit” it. That “response” serves as an example of how the
history of reception of ancient texts and ideas is intermingled with and to some extent shaped by the
artistic forms and cultural politics of the receiving tradition (Hardwick, 2003, 32).
In 1820 Pushkin is exiled to Bessarabia (current Moldova) by the Emperor Alexander (Gasparov,
1985). While traveling there Pushkin evokes Ovid in several of his letters and poems. The most
noteworthy poem is “To Ovid” in which Pushkin, while comparing his exile to Ovid’s, gently but firmly
criticizes the Roman poet’s inconsolable sadness in his exile poems. In his poem Pushkin depicts the
Ovidian plight as joyous and restorative. He chides Ovid for his failure to foresee that his poetry will
survive every sovereign and all the vicissitudes of life. Pushkin rejects Ovid’s “sad poems” and offers a
view of exile and nostalgia as inspiring not debilitating states. That perception of banishment must be
viewed in the context of Pushkin’s preoccupation at that time with the figure of the Russian exile Petr
Chaadaev and with Pushkin’s own concern for poetic legacy (Terras 1966, 257; Struve 1962, 606).
With Mandelshtam, we move into an even more self-conscious world. The poet’s evocation of
Ovid’s poetry of exile, reveals a radical attempt to recenter and reinterpret the present through the past. In
one of these poems the feeling of joy and rebirth familiar from Pushkin appears again as Mandelshtam
imagines himself (in the first person) to be the exiled Roman poet. This poem must be viewed in the
context of Mandelshtam’s relationship with his beloved city of St. Petersburg. Mandelshtam, although not
physically exiled, views himself as an “inner” exile in the city, which in the havoc of the surging
revolution he no longer comprehends or accepts. Ovidian exile is seen as a coveted lot, a rebirth of sorts.
The finest irony of Mandelshtam’s mythology of St. Petersburg is a contrast he draws between the dark,
northern capital and the world of sunlight, associated with the Crimea and the Black Sea. The Black Sea,
however, is precisely the region Ovid portrays as a bare northern wasteland. Thus there is at play here a
double displacement. Mandelshtam sees Ovid’s physical separation from the city as an enviable fate
preferring the sweetness of fantasy to the heartbreak of living in the city bound for degradation.


good luck