What is Ovid Trying to Tell us? Some Thoughts on 38 Remedies for Love in Contemporary Perspective

Name: What is Ovid Trying to Tell us? Some Thoughts on 38 Remedies for Love in Contemporary Perspective
Start: 2024-10-14T19:00:00+02:00
Location: Bibljoteka Nazzjonali National Library

Schedule

Mon Oct 14 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Bibljoteka Nazzjonali National Library | Valletta, MA

Our speaker for the Evening will be Prof. Michael Fontaine from Cornell University.
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In the year 1 CE, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE – 17 CE) published a short self-help poem titled Remedia Amoris, or Remedies for Love. The poem is both hilarious and practical, featuring a little wisdom and a lot of wit.
Although Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics all published self-help literature, Ovid’s is the only bona fide “how to get over a relationship” guide in all of the ancient world. In it, he offers us fully 38 strategies for coping with and getting over unrequited love.
In this talk, I will review some of Ovid’s recommendations and offer context, quotations, and modern parallel situations to illustrate what exactly Ovid means or is trying to say.
For example, Ovid lived and died 1,900 years before Sigmund Freud, so he could not have thought in the conceptual terms Freud did. Nevertheless, in one extended passage he intuitively seems to have grasped the concepts of projection, rationalization, and defense mechanisms. I will show how.
Elsewhere, Ovid attacks the idea of “psychics” and “love magic” (as opposed to the psychotherapy he recommends). Now, one might assume this question was settled centuries ago, when the Early Modern age of witch-burning came to an end. And yet even
today, “spiritual healing” is big business. Even university towns are crawling with purveyors of psychic readings, crystals, energy transfers, tarot cards, and astrology. This situation makes Ovid’s words of warning against the fraud and farce of “love magic” every bit as relevant today as they were in his own time.
In yet another passage, Ovid offers a recommendation that comes very close to the “Serenity Prayer” used by Alcoholics Anonymous and other addiction-recovery groups. Since that “prayer” ultimately goes back to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, it suggests that Ovid is borrowing from, or parodying, Stoic self-help literature.
If that is correct, then it suggests a good reason why many of Ovid’s 38 recommendations look so similar to contemporary therapeutic techniques offered by Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) – and that is because, as the psychologist Donald Robertson has pointed out, CBT is not just similar to Stoicism, it is Stoicism. I will elaborate on this.
Finally, I would like to spend some time discussing my translation choices. I translated the poem into English elegiac couplets (the same meter as the original), but I had them printed as ordinary prose so as not to scare readers who dislike poetry.
I would also like to discuss with the audience translation theory in general, and to suggest some good candidates to be translated into Maltese for contemporary readers. To do that, I will mention a recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey into Ladino (Jewish Spanish that was once spoken in Greece), and why it was such a brilliant and inspired choice to help preserve a minority language.