Acteon’s death (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3. 143-252)

Abstract

I present the translation of the 109 dactylic hexameters of the episode about the death of Actaeon, torn apart by his dogs, in an equal number of verses, a characteristic that I call “isosticheia”. For this purpose, given that the hexameter is a long verse and of variable tempo according to the caesuras, I used the dodecasyllable, which is the second longest of the most common verses in the Portuguese language and endowed with great variety, since it can have three tempos: 1) with main stress on the sixth syllable with synalepha, that is, the Alexandrian verse; 2) with main stress on the sixth syllable without synalepha; 3) with accents rarely incident on the fourth and eighth syllable. The episode, unlike what usually occurs in the Metamorphoses, is not etiological, and not being so contributes to it being pathetic, a condition that in this case is corroborated by the strangeness caused by the long and ostensible series of the Greek names of the dogs. The translation of these names is not obvious, but it is necessary to decide: to keep them in their Portuguese form, as I did (“Melampo” for Melampus, for instance), or in fact to translate them into Portuguese (“Negras-Patas” / “Black-Paws”, for Melampus comes from μέλας, “black”, + πούς, “paw”), as I exemplify with the translation that Jaa Torrano made of the names of the Muses in Hesiod’s Theogony? The decision, in turn, presupposes an analysis of the poem and theoretical reflection on the implication of each possibility.