Resumen de Translating Lives: Ovid and the Seventeenth-Century Modernes
This essay argues that during the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns in late seventeenth-century Paris, the life of the ancient Roman poet, Ovid, held a particular appeal for the ‘Moderns’. Tracing the historiography of Ovid's life from his autobiographical Tristia through the Renaissance vitae Ovidii to the prefatory vies d'Ovide of the seventeenth century reveals that lives were synecdochic for ideological stances towards the representation and translation of the ancient world; and that there was a specific identification between the narration of Ovid's Life and ‘Modern’ approaches to such representation. It suggests that this was because Ovid had already inscribed the interpretation and appropriation of tradition that underpinned the Moderns' attitude towards classical culture into his own version of his life, hence his ‘translation’ into a proto-Moderne, a figure heralding paradigmatic change.
