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The Golden Ass and the Golden Warrior
Sonia Sabnis
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738053.003.0007 Titel anhand dieser DOI in Citavi-Projekt übernehmen
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines the reception of Robert Graves’s translation of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and its relation to his friendship with T. E. Lawrence. A claim in its American publication—that Lawrence carried the Golden Ass with him in Arabia and later introduced it to Graves—turns out to be false, but nevertheless opens up a comparison between Lawrence and Graves as readers of Apuleius. Despite the limited success of Graves’s translation in academic circles, Lawrence’s and Graves’s respective approaches to the novel exemplify two major trends in its among English-speaking audiences since the appearance of Graves’s translation in 1950.
Keywords: Apuleius, Metamorphoses, Golden Ass, T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, translation, Penguin Classics, reception
Robert Graves’s translation of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass—published by Penguin Classics in the United Kingdom in 1950 and by Farrar, Straus & Young in the United States in 1951—remains widely available in English-speaking countries, both on the used-book market and in new printings. E. J. Kenney’s translation (1998) has supplanted it in the Penguin Classics series, but its American publisher—now Farrar, Straus & Giroux—has reissued it periodically through various imprints, most recently in 2009.1 In spite of the translation’s mixed reviews, it continues to be important in the reception history of Apuleius among English readers, and especially those outside the university. In this essay I focus on the American printings of this translation and their marketing in order to show how Graves’s literary celebrity and his connection to T. E. Lawrence contributed to the popular reception of Apuleius in the twentieth century. The continued importance of this translation is already bound up with Graves’s literary fame, but the marketing of Graves’s The Golden Ass in its American incarnation goes further in its evocation of twentieth-century celebrity. The blurb that appears on the inside dust-jacket (on the back of paperback editions) reads as follows:
(p.124) In all literature there are few books with the vitality of The Golden Ass. Boccaccio borrowed freely from it, and later it served both to amuse and instruct Cervantes, Fielding, and Smollett. T. E. Lawrence carried it, in its original Latin, in his saddlebags with him all through the Arab Revolt, and it was Lawrence who first introduced the book to his friend Robert Graves.
Mr. Graves has now freed the story from the archaic language with which it was encrusted, and at last the modern reader may, for the first time, appreciate for himself the lusty incident, curious adventure, and bawdy wit in which The Golden Ass abounds.
The story is about Lucius Apuleius, a young man of good birth, who, while disporting himself in the cities and along the roads of Thessaly, encountered many diverting and strange adventures. Not the least of these was that Apuleius offended a priestess of the White Goddess, and for his offense suffered the indignity of being turned into an ass. How Apuleius supported his misfortune and how he contrived at last to appease the Goddess and resume his human form make up the body of the tale.
Robert Graves has obviously enjoyed his labors on the story, for he writes: ‘It is not strictly speaking the first modern novel, because Petronius’ incomplete Satyricon antedates it by a century, but it is the most terrifying, and most sincere.’
To which the publishers can only add, in the words of both Robert Graves and Apuleius, ‘Now read on and enjoy yourselves.’
https://oxford-1universitypressscholars ... -chapter-7
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