Metamorphoses: “Erysichthon” by Ovid and “Erysichthon’s Seed” by Shanta Lee

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is among the most frequently translated and interpreted works in the poetry canon. The year 2022 ushered in only the second female translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses since Mary Innes’s translation in 1958. This new translation by Stephanie McCarter highlights nuances that have been erased in other translations, including regarding gender. For example, instead of using the word abduction in her translation of the myth of Persephone and Hades, McCarter chooses the word rape.

There is a continuum of interpretation inherent in translating any text: there are translations that try to remain faithful to the original language of a text, translations that meld with creative liberties to surface meaning, and other approaches where translation is an interpretative tool and the author maintains full creative license—though, technically, it can be argued that each translator and interpreter always brings not only their own spin but also a unique perspective. Through comparing different English Ovids, we see many of these priorities and interests come to light.

Here is the tale of “Erysichthon” as presented by two poets—Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) and Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023) by myself, Shanta Lee—against the original backdrop of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2004). These different approaches raise questions about the original meaning of the cautionary tale and also show how different contexts and generations bring different concerns about power and identity into rereading canonical texts.

What’s in a Name?

In both the Hughes and Penguin Classics editions of Metamorphoses, the man Erysichthon is destructive with no concern for nature. Hughes describes Erysichthon’s actions,

Without a qualm he cut down every tree

In the sacred grove of Ceres—

An ancient wood that had never, before that day,

Jumped to the axe’s stroke.

Erysichthon continues, either ignoring or remaining numb to nature’s feelings as “He assesses the volume of its timber, Then orders his men to fell it.” Erysichthon only cares about two things: ensuring nature knows his power and feeding his greed and what he wants at this moment.

As in Hughes’s translation and the meaning of Erysichthon’s name in Latin—“tearing up the earth”—my poem titled “Erysichthon’s Seed” also embodies destruction. Early in the poem we see

Erysichthon pulled Hunger

out of his bowels figurin,

If I can’t soothe her, I’ll marry her 

We can eat the world together.

Here, I move away from a literal translation from the Latin and take creative license to bring the audience into an imagined space that asks, what happens when Erysichthon’s hunger, unchecked and forever unsatiated, enters the realm of legacy through the creation of offspring? “Erysichthon’s Seed” is a play upon words that refers to the seed implanted in Hunger’s womb that produces children who inherit the ability to tear up the earth and cause wreckage across several landscapes: across countries, bodies, and cultures.

In this way, I brought another, more contemporary level of meaning to Ovid’s text that intersects race and history: enslavement. In Hughes’s translation and interpretation, enslavement is particular to Erysichthon’s daughter, whom Erysichthon sells for food, but in the opening of my poem, the myth is made to speak about the Black bodies impacted by the horrors of enslavement.

Shapeshifting: By Choice, by Force or Punishment, or as Survival

The text of Metamorphoses includes shapeshifting that falls into a few categories: shapeshifting by choice to escape danger (Daphne and Apollo); shapeshifting as punishment (Scylla and Medusa); and shapeshifting as reward (Baucis and Philemon). Erysichthon’s daughter is transformed to escape danger, but we might also say that Erysichthon himself is punished with transformation.

In the opening lines of Hughes’s “Erysichthon,” we learn that

Some are transformed just once

And live their whole lives after in that shape.

Others have a facility

For changing themselves as they please.

At first glance, we may presume a brassy tone in the statement “changing themselves as they please.” As we read the poem closely in the Hughes translation in reference to Erysichthon’s daughter, we learn that, for her, constant shapeshifting is not so much a choice but an escape from rape:

But she was far too spirited

To stay as a bought slave.

Stretching her arms towards the sea, she cried:

“You who ravished my maidenhead, save me.”

Neptune knew the voice of his pretty victim

And granted the prayer.

What was called “ravished” was nonconsensual and rape. Neptune grants her request. 

The ways that Erysichthon refuses to control his hunger, even selling his own daughter over and over again because she can shift form, takes on another interpretation in Black Metamorphoses. The verse from Hughes, “their whole lives after in that shape,” is situated in the historical landscape of white hunger and greed and translates into a Black body forced into enslavement that, as a result, must transform. Hunger transforms the one who is unsatiated and that which they are devouring. Both translations of Erysichthon imply that oppression—racial, gendered, class, and power like that of Ovid’s deities—inevitably forces transformation.

Another reading of the opening verses with “their whole lives after in that shape” might include the children and families created as a result of rape and destruction. My poem asks us, in what ways has this kind of hunger created a “shape” for all time still evident in American society? We see the echoes of white hunger in everything from accounting practices that came out of enslavement to the fact that at one time 14 percent of all farms were Black owned, yet Black Americans currently own less than 1 percent of rural land. In the piece, “My Body is a Monument,” writer and poet Caroline Randall Williams names the imprint destruction has left by stating, “I have rape-colored skin.” If clay has a memory that never forgets its original form, can we say that a body that has encountered this level of damage and is forced into a shape because of that damage—whether we are talking about Erysichthon’s daughter being sold repeatedly to support her father’s hunger in the way that women were treated as tradable objects for the acquisition of resources, or the way that the Black body has been used to gain everything from labor to intellectual knowledge—never forgets the sculptor? 

In thinking about how both Hughes and I engage with Erysichthon’s hunger and the concept of metamorphosis, we must ask: Who stays in their shape? Is staying in one’s shape a privilege depending on the context? Who can control and shift and transform at will? Who is changed by choice or will? Additionally, in Black Metamorphoses, being forced into transformation against the backdrop of enslavement and oppression raises the question, transform into what, exactly?  

Within Black Metamorphoses, which I often describe as an interrogation, interpretation, and conversation, there is both an explicit and implicit truth described that, historically, those who stay within their shape are part of white hunger and greed, while the Black body that has been forced into enslavement shapeshifts for survival, leading to a transcendence of time, place, and station as and beyond the enslaved body.

The Nature of Violence, Access to Power, and Hunger

In certain parts of Black Metamorphoses and particularly within the poem “Erysichthon’s Seed,” the Black Body morphs due to the atrocities of enslavement,

Terra stretched across the New World  
rivaling her brothers and sisters  
Necks, knuckles, limbs of all kinds 
Skin, scalps, skulls, blood. Most preferred? 
A Feast of Flayed Men  
that rivaled Aztec tradition  
Skin as shoes 
Skin as money purse 
Skin, the inheritance given to White children

Terra is one of the many offspring produced by Hunger and Erysichthon in my reimagining. The kind of shapeshifting illustrated in the above verses is not about an individual’s will to survive, but about the other ways that the Black body became due to violence. 

Additionally, the intersections between violence and commerce in the shadow of Erysichthon’s unstoppable hunger is clear in both poems. Within Hughes’s poem, when Erysichthon becomes aware of his daughter’s ability to shapeshift, he realizes he has an endless resource in the form of her body:

The buyer had to believe her. He went off, baffled.

The girl took one step and was back

In her own shape. Next thing,

She was telling her father. And he,

Elated, saw business. After that

On every market he sold her in some new shape.

In my interpretation, there are lines such as “We can dine on Black bodies for generations,” which speaks to the social cannibalism of Black bodies and the realization that white enslavers had regarding the different financial benefits of enslavement. The Black body becomes everything from a keepsake long after death (I’ve got a leather purse made of Black skin) to commodification that comes from taking bodies and the theft of resources (Something bout diamonds, rubber, cocoa), benefits from insurance claims from destroyed cargo, as explored in M. Nourbese Philip’s 2011 poetry collection Zong!, and the countless medical advancements as a result of nonconsensual experimentation on Black and other bodies of color. Hunger is a metaphorical and literal way to express that Black bodies filled not only white bellies but built an American empire through forced labor. In the Hughes translation of Ovid’s poem, it is Mestra’s body that maintains her father’s empire.

What are we to make of the way that both poems reference hunger that is never satisfied, never fully fed, even by violence? In the Hughes version, we read,

Whatever its diameter can manage

Through every waking moment,

Spares a mouthful

Only to shout for more.

This voracity, this bottomless belly

While Hughes’s translation makes the violence evident and stark through his choices, I explore this violent, insatiable appetite by reimagining that Erysichthon weds Hunger, knowing he cannot satisfy her, for his own benefit. They not only devour together, but also birth children—“Ark of Agony/ Ocean, Hunger, Terra… Balm”—who continue the destruction. 

Neither poem offers a resolution other than Erysichthon’s inevitable self-destruction, implying the self-destruction of all empires. Hughes’s antagonist eats himself, ignoring the eventuality of self-destruction. In my version, the children continue to roam while their parents continue to glut themselves on anything in their paths. I flip the power dynamic by presenting a Black body that refuses to be digested quietly and brashly asks, “You got room for         in your belly?” 

If one resides within a body or a culture or hails from a continent that is always being eaten—in literal and figurative ways—how can one flip the power dynamic? Can one threaten to destroy the offender from the inside out? Or, as in the case of Hughes’s translation, does the one who is continuing to ravish have no choice but to succumb to self-destruction?

Imperial Bodies: Other Implications of Erysichthon

In thinking about how these poems end in addition to how both Hughes and I present our interpretations of Erysichthon, can we tie together the “bodies” being presented, the eaters and the eaten?

During Ovid’s time, Augustus ruled and expanded the Roman empire. Britain’s rule over India ended 17 years after Ted Hughes was born, and it still occupied many countries within its colonization portfolio. If we turn to America, the style of empiring is hybrid. Empire comes in the guise of “helping” when we involve ourselves in global conflict, or it hides in the narrative unzipped by what historian Daniel Immerwahr calls the “Greater United States.” Empire also includes internalized colonization that’s not limited to stolen land and hundreds of broken treaties with Indigenous peoples and the destruction of Black communities prior to and after the Tulsa race massacre. Regardless of their shape or style, the Roman, British, and American empires find a shared cognate in the story of Erysichthon and his insatiable hunger.

I will conclude by suggesting we read these Erysichthon poems as connections to a larger, imperial body. The works discussed in this guide can’t be separated from the bodies that created them that reside within the imperialistic body and belly that has hungrily sought to rule, ravish, and expand. How do we read all of these interpretations as a larger commentary about the endless hunger and desire of the empires that are Rome, Britain, and America? 

If we pay close attention, we discover a cautionary tale that ends with self-devouring.