Paolo de Matteis, 9 February 1662 – 26 January 1728, Italian painter.
Praise for Tales from Ovid:
‘A breathtaking book…To compare his versions with the Latin is to be awestruck again and again by the range and ingenuity of his poetic intelligence…He rescues the old gods and goddesses from the classical dictionaries and gives them back their terror. There should be a copy of his book in every school’. John Carey Sunday Times
Taken from Tales from Ovid, 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses, published by Faber and Faber Ltd 1997. Copyright Ted Hughes, 1930 -1998
Among those demi-gods, those perfect girls
Who sport about the bright source and live in it,
The beauty of Salmacis, the water-nymph,
Was perfect,
As among damselflies a damselfly’s
As among vipers the elegance
Of a viper, or a swan’s grace among swans.
She was bending to gather lilies for a garland
When she spied Hermaphroditus.
At that first glimpse she knew she had to have him.
She felt she trod on prickles until she could touch him.
She held back only a moment,
Checked her girdle, the swing of her hem, her
clevage,
Let her lust flood hot and startled
Into her cheek, eyes, lips – and made her whole face
Open as a flower that offers itself,
Wet with nectar. Then she spoke:
‘Do you mind if I say – you are beautiful ?
Seen from where I stand, you could be a god.
Are you a god? If you are human,
What a lucky sister! As for the mother
Who held you, and pushed her nipple between your lips,
I am already sick with envy of her.
I dare not think of a naked wife in your bed.
If she exists, I dare not think of her bliss.
Let me beg a taste, one little sip
Of her huge happiness. A secret between us.
But if you are unmarried – here I am.
Let us lie down and make our own
Bridal bed, where we can love each other
To sleep. And awaken each other’.
The boy blushed – he had no idea
What she was talking about.
Her heart lurched again when she saw
How his blush bewildered his beauty.
Like the red side of an apple against a sunset,
Or the ominus dusky flush
That goes over the cold moon
When the eclipse grips its edge
And begins to swallow it inch by inch
In spite of all the drums and pans and gongs
Beaten on earth beneath to protect it.
Then the nymph slid her arms
Around his neck, and asked for a kiss,
One kiss, one brotherly kiss –
‘Get away’ he cried ‘Let me go,
Or I’m off. And you can sit here
On your basket of tricks all by yourself!’
That sacred Salmacis, she thought he really might go.
‘Oh no, forgive me!’ she sobbed. ‘Forgive me!
I couldn’t help it. I’m going. Oh, I’m spoiling
This lovely place for you. I’m going. I’m going’.
So, lingering her glances, she goes,
And truly she seems to have gone.
In fact, she has ducked behind a bush.
There she kneels, motionless, head lifted –
Her eye fixed, like the eye of a leopard.
He plays, careless as a child,
Roams about happily
Thinking he’s utterly alone.
He paddles into the pool’s edge, goes deeper.
The cool pulse of the spring, warping the clarity,
Massages his knees, delicious.
He peels off his tunic and the air
Makes free with all that had been hidden,
Freshens his nudity. Under the leaves
Salmais groaned softly
And began to tremble.
As the sun
Catches a twisting mirror surface
With a splinter of glare
Her own gaze flamed and hurt her. She was already
Up and leaping towards him,
She had grabbed him with all her strength –
Yet she still crouched where she was
Shaking all over, letting this go through her
Like a dreadful cramp. She watched him
Slap his pale shoulders, hugging himself,
And slap his belly to prepare it
For the plunge – then plunge forward.
And suddenly he was swimming, a head bobbing,
Chin surging through the buildof a bow-wave,
Shoulders liquefied,
Legs as if at home in the frog’s grotto,
Within a heave of lustre limpid as air,
Like a man of ivory glossed in glass
Or a lily in a bulb of crystal.
‘I’ve won!’ shrieked Salmacis ‘He’s mine!’
She could not help herself.
‘He’s mine!’ she laughed, and with a couple of bounds
Hit the pool stark naked
In a rocking crash and thump of water –
The slips of her raiment settling wherever
They happened to fall. The out of the upheaval
Her arms reach and wind around him,
And slippery as the roots of big lilies
But far stronger, her legs below wind round him.
He flounders and goes under. All his strength
Fighting to get back up through a cloud of bubbles
Leaving him helpless to her burrowing kisses.
Burning for air, he can do nothing
As her hands hunt over him, and as her body
Knots itself every way around him
Like a sinewy otter
Hunting some kind of fish
That flees hither and thither inside him,
And as she flings and locks her coils
Around him like a snake
Around the neck and legs and wings of an eagle
That is trying to fly off with it,
And like ivy which first binds the branches
In its meshes, then pulls the whole tree down,
And as the octopus –
A tangle of constrictors, nippled with suckers,
That drag towards a maw –
Embraces its prey.
But still Hermaphroditus kicks to be free
And will not surrender
Or yield her the least kindness
Of the pleasure she longs for,
And rages for, and pleads for
As she crushes her breasts and face against him
And clings to him as with every inch of her surface.
‘It’s no good struggling’ she hisses.
‘You can strain, wrestle, squirm, but cannot
Ever get away from me now.
The gods are listening to me.
The gods have agreed we never, never
Shall be seperated, you and me’.
The gods heard her frenzy – and smiled.
And there in the giddy boil the two bodies
Melted into a single body
Seamless as the water.
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