Authors Electric

Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There  was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts...

That's my boy there: Ovid. The dullest of all Roman writers, I thought. Two pages of The Metamorphoses could put me to sleep for two nights--and the terrible Penguin translation could knock me out for a week. Samples of my torment: J.J. Howard, 1807: From bodies various form'd, mutative shapes My Muse would sing:--Celestial powers give aid! A.D. Melville, 2009 Of bodies changed to other forms I tell; You Gods who have yourselves wrought every change... Arthur Golding, 1567: Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate, Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)... Iambic pentameters, rhymed and unrhymed...blank verse...prose--I never could get past the opening account of Creation--because I could not feel the once-living presence behind it. And because I had no sense of Latin as a once-living language. What the heck was the fuss about Ovid? Well, one day at Atlanta's Oxford Books, I chanced on a new translation by...