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Looking through some Ovid translations, I'm noting yet another example of really problematic translation of rape. There are a lot, but this one is really galling. CW: sexual assault.
In Book 11, both Mercury and Apollo rape a 14-year girl named Chione. Mercury is first. He makes her fall asleep with his wand, then rapes her while she's sleeping. (Apollo comes disguised into her bedroom later.) It's horrible and gruesome.
Ovid doesn't mince words but says it as clearly as possible: tactu iacet illa potenti / vimque dei patitur. To translate literally (and not in my iambic pent. translation): As she lies (sleeping) from its mighty touch, she endures the rape/force/violence of the god."
Here are some published translations, all of which give her agency she DOES NOT HAVE or blunt the presence of rape. Mandelbaum: "She submits, / in deep sleep, to his godly violence." (How is this possible?)
Humphries: "Under his touch she lay, and felt his power."
Lombardo: She "lay passively beneath the powerful god."
Raeburn: "She yielded at once to its magic, and so he was able to rape her." (Because rapists can't rape unless their victims yield?)
Martin: "It influence/ made her lie down at once beneath the god / and bear his thrusts."
Horace Gregory: "As she fell sleeping in his arms he took her."
I'm trying not to tweet about it whenever I spot a translation that handles rape irresponsibly. But in a world in which rapists all too often render their victims unconscious, this might be a good time to underscore rather than hide the hideous violence of this act.
