“For a good time, read Ovid; for a very good time, read Slavitt’s Ovid.” – Michael Dirda
For your very good time, the 14th poem of the first book of Ovid’s Amores, from Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid, a new volume of translations by David R. Slavitt:
How many times did I tell you to leave your hair alone?
Well, look at you now. There’s nothing left to dye.
All you had to do was nothing at all, and now
you’d still have hair, wonderful, fine in texture,
long enough to reach down to your waist. Chinese
silkworms don’t make anything quite like it.
Spiders, spinning their webs that hang from beams and branches,
would have to defer to it for sheer beauty.
It was neither black as jet nor blonde like flax, but mixed,
rather like what you might find on Ida
where, on the slopes, there are handsome cedars of just that shade.
Aside from the color, your hair was easy to manage,
and you could find a hundred different ways to wear it.
It gave way to the teeth of the finest comb,
and it held a hairpin in place. Your hairdressers loved their labor.
I often watched as they hovered over you
and saw them grin in delight at how well their work was going.
And early, when you hadn’t arisen from bed
and lay supine with your hair streaming out on the pillow,
you had a Bacchante’s beauty—or what I imagine
as those mad dancers dropped down on the grass in exhaustion.
But for all their docile beauty, what pains did they endure,
what tortures did you impose, what patience did they exhibit?
The hot curlers for ringlets burnt them. I saw
the smoke that would arise, and I cried out against it
and asked you to spare your hair, not out of kindness
but vanity because it was beautiful as it was.
O iron-hearted girl. Your natural curls
could have taught the curlers to what their art aspired.
And now, your tresses, your beautiful tresses are gone.
