A Few Notes on Metamorphoses 3.158
Ovid describes the cave dwelling of the hunter-goddess Diana as: arte laboratum nulla: simulauerat artem. Made by no art: mimicking art.
This is just one moment in the larger fable of Actaeon, the hunter who got eaten by his own dogs because he peeked at Diana while she was bathing. When you’re reading Ovid, it’s often the case that you’ve heard of this or that myth before. Just like Ovid’s ancient public you know—or know somewhat—what’s coming next, and your anticipation builds up and up up up and then here comes this line, and you sort of stumble across it, clueless, a bit like Actaeon, into the rest of the story. You reread it a couple times, because you think maybe you made a mistake, or the editor or translator did, or Ovid did. No! That’s really what the text says. And it has you thinking: what kind of cave is that? What kind of nature is it that, crafted by no art, can simulate artistry? Where does art begin, where does nature end and vice-versa?
You find hundreds of quotable, puzzling, wonder-packed lines like this in the Metamorphoses, and they’ve preoccupied me for the better part of a decade now, for school and poetry purposes, both. I read the poem first in translation (Allen Mandelbaum) and now am working on it in the super dense, super smooth Latin of the original. It’s a wonderful thing to read for the stories it contains, but if you’re a huge nerd like me you read it also for the million different ways it thinks about art. It makes you think about what you’re doing, too. How will you mimic this or that thing in art? How will you think about the mimicking? Will you follow in Ovid’s steps or do you turn away, like Actaeon should have, from his curious cave?
— James Dunnigan writer and editor from Montreal. He is author of five poetry chapbooks including, most recently, I Spurinna (Cactus Press, 2024). His work has appeared in Event, CV2, HA&L and Maisonneuve Magazine, among others. He is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Toronto.
You can find James Dunnigan's poetry in Issue 301 Autumn 2024. Order the issue now:
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