To what extent have I translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

One’s answer to that question depends almost entirely on one’s definition of "translate," which, appropriately, comes from the Latin "trans," meaning "across," and "latum," meaning "brought" or "carried."

This etymology leaves a lot unresolved. What exactly must be carried? Whither? Whence?

Let me be clear about one thing. I did not write any of the English text that tells the story of Arachne and Minerva - here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here - or any of the English text in which Ovid (through an intermediary) proclaims his immortality (although I took a few creative liberties with the line breaks). The people whose work I borrowed - John Dyden and A.S. Kline, among others - performed the commonsensical version of translation by converting Ovid's Latin into English. Of this, I had no part.

However, a broader definition of "translate" changes things.

According to this definition, much more begins to fall under the category of "translation." We can now consider as translations all of the images I uploaded - here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here (a miniscule fraction of the images I could have used) - as well as numerous statues, musical compositions, and plays. By no means strict textual renditions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, these works all represent some quality or qualities inherent in the original work.

The question now is: to what extent does my work capture something essential to Ovid's?

I decided to use "the scintillating grid" as my primary interface because I feel that it brings further into play a few of Ovid's themes. His poem unifies itself around the idea of continually changing forms. In Pallas' Tapestry, she turns hubristic humans into animals, and in Arachne's Tapestry, gods turn themselves into animals to rape mortal women. At the end of this particular story, Pallas turns Arachne into a spider. The scintillating grid, as you have noticed, also seems to change. The circles that you focus on appear white, while the others appear black.

Through use of the grid, I also call attention to the idea of a tapestry, a single piece composed of many threads. This should remind you of both Arachne's tapestry and Pallas' tapestry, and it also describes Ovid's Metamorphoses as a whole. Many critics have talked about the Metamorphoses as a woven poem, and with good reason. Ovid takes up many disparate stories from Greek and Roman mythology and weaves them into one. I sought to replicate that structure in my version of Ovid, by interlacing blocks of text and image from a wide variety of sources.

Discussion of the tapestry leads logically to discussion of the database. Lev Manovich calls the database a correlate of the computer age, but I have attempted to show that database logic far precedes the first computer. Pallas' tapestry and particularly Arachne's tapestry provide good examples. In Ovid's account of the weaving, he gives no priority to any image. Each has the same significance as any other. We can once again imagine Ovid using these tapestries as analogies to his Metamorphoses as a whole. Although the poem certainly has a beginning and an end, many critics have recognized the essential lack of order exhibited by the tales within. In this respect, my work more closely resembles Arachne's in that it adheres very closely to database logic. Users can enter at any point and from there proceed to any adjacent point. They can also exit and re-enter elsewhere if they are so inclined.

(A brief word about the particulars of the linking structure: I got cute here. Because the story of Arachne fundamentally concerns spiders, the reader can travel in eight directions from most nodes, by clicking on arrows consisting of digital spider legs. In a happy coincidence, the scintillating grid also happens to be eight lines tall and eight lines wide.)

In another happy occurrence (I hesitate to call it a "coincidence"), discussion of the database brings back to where we started: translation. In order to assemble a database from pre-existing pieces, one often must translate those pieces into a new form. When Arachne weaves her tapestry, she turns primarily oral myth into image. When Ovid wrote his poem, he similarly brought into writing – "carried across " – many stories that existed mostly in spoken word. In both of these instances, the new form necessarily changes – metamorphoses – the content of the original. Just as a translator of Latin to English cannot exactly replicate his source, a weaver cannot depict a myth exactly as it occurs orally.

My larger project of rendering Ovid in a hypertextual form can be construed in a similar light. I could have been more "faithful" to the original by simply copying the entirety of the Latin onto a webpage, but, in doing so, I would have forgotten the purpose of translation: to make accessible the inaccessible. To translate successfully, we must bring important ideas from distant shores to ours.

However, my work differs from Ovid's and Arachne's in a significant way. Whereas they translated every element of their respective tapestries, I assembled much of mine from ready-made parts. All of the images I used I copied, usually from copies of copies. Once someone digitizes a Velazquez painting, it can be copied over and over very easily. All of the text that I transcribed from print now shares the same fate. Media theorists often worry about the consequences of such easy replication. Instead of continual metamorphosis from one media to the next – poets writing down oral myths in which peasant girls weave images of other oral myths – we will instead have only the medium of numbers. We will be stuck inside an endless loop.

Although many parts of my website do have perfect doubles on the internet, I must point out that the context in which an image or a block of text appears still affects the way in which it is understood. This spider here means something completely different from this spider here. I suspect that, in time, today’s critics of new media may be placed alongside the earlier opponents of writing and printing.

I fear I have already said too much. I intended this project, in part, as an experiment in argument. I've written innumerable papers in which I drew upon different authors to articulate something myself. I used, for the most part, my own words, save for judicious use of quotation here and there. With this project, with my "Metamorphoses," I wondered whether I could do the same thing by using only the work of other people. Could I articulate something about new media – about media in general – without any of my words? By extension: is Manovich wrong about the deleterious effects of "art as selection"?

I believe that I have succeeded in expressing something of myself by selecting, compositing, and interlinking found texts and images – but explaining my argument in the form of an essay won't help that.

Please: go explore.