The cruelest month: Femina sola superstes

For today’s National Poetry Month offering, we’ll enter the WABAC Machine and set the clock for…a long, long time ago. All the way to the cusp of the Common Era.

Give it up, folks, for Publius Ovidius Naso, one of the mainstays of the romantic poets. I met Ovid at UCLA, in my third-year Latin class. But we read Metamorphoses, not Amores or Ars Amatoria.

Metamorphoses is your basic ancient Greco-Roman mythology, writ large in dactylic hexameter. The part I’m sharing with you is about Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two humans left on earth after Zeus floods the place in one of his periodic snits.

Redditus orbis erat; quem postquam vidit

inanem et desolatas agere alta silentia terras,

Deucalion lacrimis ita Pyrrham adfatur obortis:

  ‘o soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes,

  quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo,

  deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt,

  terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus,

  nos duo turba sumus; possedit cetera pontus.

  haec quoque adhuc vitae non est fiducia nostrae

  certa satis; terrent etiamnum nubila mentem.

  quis tibi, si sine me fatis erepta fuisses,

  nunc animus, miseranda, foret? quo sola timorem

  ferre modo posses? quo consolante doleres!

  namque ego (crede mihi), si te quoque pontus haberet,

  te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.’

If you want an English translation, here you go:

When Deucalion saw that earth was empty

and observed the solemn silence over

devastated lands, with tears in his eyes

he spoke to Pyrrha:

                                 O sister, O wife,

  the only woman alive, linked to me

  by common race and family origin,

  then by marriage, and by these dangers now,

  we two are the total population

  of the entire world, every place spied out

  by the setting and rising sun. The sea

  has taken all the others. Even now,

  there is nothing secure about our lives,

  nothing to give us sufficient confidence.

  Those heavy clouds still terrify my mind.

  O you for whom I have so much compassion,

  how would you feel now, if you had been saved

  from death without me? How could you endure

  the fear all by yourself? Who would console

  your grief? For if the sea had taken you,

  dear wife, I would follow you, believe me,

  and the sea would have me, too.

And here’s my connection. I was a transfer student at UCLA, meaning I went in as a junior. And three of my four upper division courses were lectures with more than 75 students in each one of them. Latin was the exception—I think there were maybe eight of us in that class. And we were reading Metamorphoses.

One day the professor instructed us to read aloud the passage that begins with “O soror, O coniunx!” and read it with passion.

One after another of my classmates droned on like they were performing an autopsy phonetically. When my turn finally came up I gave it everything I’d have done if I were playing Tosca, which the material deserved. Last man and woman left on earth? Are you kidding me?

When I finished there was silence. The professor made some comment about that being the sort of delivery she’d been looking for. I let my fellow students off the hook by replying, “Well, my professor at my former college was Italian, so…”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh—Carmen Brunol?”

“Yep.”

Well, there you go.

Dr. Brunol had lived through the 30s and 40s in Italy. Her memories of the League of Nations’ sanctions were, uh, vivid.

Also, in comparing ancient Rome with Fascist Italy (a reference Mussolini was always making) she made a couple of points. We were discussing second person singular and plural (often thought of in various non-English languages as familiar and formal forms of address) she mentioned that all the caesars were addressed as “tu”. I asked if anyone ever called Il Duce by that form and she just howled with laughter.

She also commented on the differences between Roman and modern Italian engineering: “The allies would drop a bomb next to a Roman bridge and it would stand; ten miles away three Mussolini bridges would collapse.”

And you thought Latin was desiccated and boring? That’s just what we want you to think.