Ovid Void presents a limit case for what we mean by translation. The World Poetry chapbook contains twenty of Eugene Ostashevsky's versions based on new Russian versions of Ovid's poems of exile by Ostashevsky's Russian contemporary Maria Stepanova, who based hers on the Soviet Academy of Sciences translations of the Latin originals. Thus, Ovid Void's English poems are three times removed from the original Latin. Further, they are embedded in a multilayered cultural context that offers a study in translation's multiply refractory possibilities.

As Ostashevsky explains in his incisive afterword, the poems Ovid wrote from the outpost of the Roman empire to which he was banished at the end of his life have been touchstones for generations of Russian poets, including Pushkin, Mandelstam and Brodsky. The story of Ovid's banishment by Caesar Augustus, ostensibly for some literary overstep, has struck a deep chord for these writers living with or in the shadow of similar political punishment. Brodsky’s impact, Ostashevsky writes, was especially outsized: no Russian poet of his and Stepanova's generation generation reading Ovid can escape the echoes of Brodsky, who repurposed Ovid to write about his own lifelong exile. Ostashevsky is also transparent about his process of working freely with Stepanova's free work with another set of translations, such as making more explicit the conversation Stepanova has with Brodsky in her versions. Her Russian texts are printed facing Ostashevsky's, confronting the reader with a fact of some kind of translation, however much it leans away from the idea of a faithfully rendered original text towards one of an independent text in dialogue with others.

Looking at other translations of Ovid's original poems of exile, I find none of the sympathy which inheres in collective exiles played out on an historical scale, such those of the Jews of Spain or the Armenians of Turkey. Ovid's poems occupy a narrow, personal stage; they can feel petty, vindictive, riddled with self-pity. Ostashevsky's tone gets this pitch-perfect: his Ovid is tirelessly clever, bitchy and endearing. Here is a section of the collection's eighth poem:

I wouldn't then be thinking this shameful bullshit

Of how my books are doing, books,

You ruined my life, is anyone reading you,

My poor lovely hysterical books. Who is reading you, Get out of my head, refugees,

Hobble away on your so-called feet, one dactylic,

The other trochaic, beg for asylum

At the Modern Library, see if they take you,

I had your tongue in my cheek, but I bit it off

And spat it out. (VIII)

Along with tone, the section showcases what Ostashevsky does with Ovid's relationship to an adopted language: he makes himself at home in it. As in the pun on poetic/corporeal “feet,” or the play on “tongue in cheek,” this Ovid revels in verbal pyrotechnics. The lines brim with puns, extravagant internal rhymes, riffs on idioms:

Wintering here is like being interned...

It's not like I'll offer resistance, for resistance

Is only left justified, waving my 'sword',

Which the pen is said to be mightier than,

But only by those holding the pen, holding it in

A penal colony, especially. (X)

And he deftly references contemporary poetic catch-phrases: “Say I quit poetry, it makes nothing happen anyway/ Except getting the po of the poet into a Tiber of trouble…”(IV)

Ostashevsky further claims a home for Ovid in English via a gritty, vernacular register tending strongly toward the Anglo-Saxon. The poems' conversant, fluent voice devours the “foreign” language, inhabits it entirely, enacting an embrace of the local as an exile's survival strategy. On occasion that strategy and its underlying anxieties are made explicit:

Soon, soon my replacement will come, another other,

A quicker picker-upper of local phonetics,

Better at cleaning the porch from the snow drift,

Better at pulling on trousers and going clubbing. (X)

Against their firm anchoring in English, the poems work on many levels of dislocation. Location and era blur: sometimes the speaker is in the ice-bound Slavic hinterland of Ovid's historical exile, and sometimes in a kind of global, contemporary city. “Somewhere far away: lands, cities, the City, you/ Can't sleep, staring at the TV blaring in the thalamus.”(XVII) Pop songs, sewing machines, and modern apparatuses of state repression occur side by side with togas and sailing ships. The collection progresses along a fault line between at-homeness in words and these dislocations. The speaker becomes increasingly disassociated, from homeland, “mother tongue,” body, self. By the final poems the process is total, with a placeless, bodiless speaker:

You see, I'm not anywhere: Not at the baths, not the bookstores, not at the market, Not even my name is anywhere....

Hello. Is it me you're looking for. Because I'm dead, I'm not anywhere anymore,

I go wherever I like now, like steam from an espresso,

While you're still settling scores with somebody who's gone. (XIX)

Ovid Void ends with the speaking “self” of the poems dissolving into a mere text: “I am the letter of a sender... Off to a population center where he is not admitted among the numbered.” (XX) Exile has reduced the garrulous, hyper-articulate, and well-known poet to a state of abject, anonymous humility, who asks only to be included in silence. “Please permit the one who is tired of being conveyed past many peoples and over many seas/ To sit at your table without saying a word.” (XX)

Ovid Void leaves me with a multidimensional, moving experience of a fiercely expressive mind struggling with the impacts of dislocation and exile. At the same time the collection challenges the possibilities of translation; with its implied sublimating of the writing self to that of a prior writer's, a picture emerges of a self powerfully resisting the erasures of exile and grieving the ways it must succumb to them:

Like, ubi ego, ibi Roma, and snow is, like, poor man's marble,

And my homeland is my language, and my language

Is my homeland. My homeland is a motherfucking Greek tragedy. (XI)