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Wine in New Bottles: The Transformations Database
By Elise Ann Earthman
Elise Ann Earthman
is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Humanities
at San Francisco State University.
A
Statue [Pygmalion] carves, so graceful in each part,
As
woman never equaled it: he stands
Affected
by the fabric of his hands,
It
seemed a virgin, full of living flame;
That
would have moved, if not withheld by shame.
--Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tr. George Sandys
my
perfection isn’t mine
you invented it
I
am only the mirror
in
which you preen yourself
and
for that very reason
I
despise you.
--Claribel Alegría, “Galatea Before the Mirror”
In
her transformation of the Pygmalion and Galatea story, Salvadoran poet
Claribel Alegría gives voice to a woman from classical mythology
who, in the original story, had nothing to say -- indeed, she didn’t even
have a name, for the familiar “Galatea” doesn’t appear until some time
after the Classical Age. In Ovid’s tale, the statue seems all too
happy to have been created, to have been brought to life and to have discovered
her own true love all in one thrilling moment. We read in Ted Hughes’
recent translation,
She woke to his kisses and blushed
To find herself kissing
One who kissed her,
And opened her eyes for the first time,
To the light and her lover together.
Besides the subsequent “happily
ever after” ending, that’s all we learn about the feelings of this statue-made-flesh.
It has been left to contemporary writers to fill in the blanks of the Pygmalion
story, and that is what Alegría and other writers have done; some
who have taken on the challenge are John Updike (Pygmalion), Indian
writer Suniti Namjoshi (Feminist Fables), Jeri Theriault (Galatea
Waking), and Katherine Solomon (Galatea). Beyond this,
the Pygmalion story has been retold on film any number of times, including
not only My Fair Lady, but also She’s All That, Educating
Rita, Pretty Woman, and even such cult favorites as The Rocky Horror
Picture Show and Frankenhooker.
Clearly, the old stories
still capture our imaginations. Contemporary writers transform myths
and other traditional texts for a variety of reasons: to give voice
to the voiceless, to create an imaginative answer to “. . . and then what
happened?”, to muse about how the age-old stories would play themselves
out in a modern setting. A number of years ago, I set out on a quest
to collect such contemporary rewritings of very traditional texts, because
I thought they would be useful in my teaching. As my collection grew,
I began to feel that I could offer to teachers and other interested readers
a wonderful resource; thus, the Transformations database was born.
Transformations is a searchable
database that contains contemporary texts that transform traditional texts
of several types: classical myth, Shakespeare, fairy tales, and stories
from the Bible. A visitor to the site (which can be found at http://humanities.sfsu.edu/~transformations)
can enter a variety of search terms, from Category (e.g. myth, Shakespeare)
to Genre (e.g. poem, story, young adult novel, film), to Subject (e.g.
Hercules, Beauty and the Beast, Othello), and the database will respond
with a list of modern texts, with full publishing information on each.
Some of the entries include my comments and notations on whether a text
contains adult subject matter or language, of interest to secondary school
teachers. Individual entries also offer visitors an opportunity to
add comments of their own; I hope that over time, teachers’ and readers’
comments will prove useful to future visitors to the database.
At this moment, Summer 2003,
the database is skewed toward texts that transform classical myth, since
that has been the focus of my teaching for some time. However, we
have made progress in the area of fairy tales this summer, and work is
ongoing; I am eager to have visitors suggest to me additional texts to
add to the database.
I hope readers of Mythic
Passages will also visit the Transformations database, and I look forward
to receiving your feedback and suggestions. I can be reached at earthman@sfsu.edu.
References:
Alegría, Claribel,
“Galatea Before the Mirror.” In Fugues, tr. D.J. Flakoll.
Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1993, pp. 84-85.
Hughes,
Ted, “Pygmalion.” In Tales from Ovid. New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997, pp. 133-139.
Namjoshi,
Suniti, Feminist Fables. N. Melbourne, Aus.: Spinifex
Press, 1993.
Sandys,
George. Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ed. Karl K. Hulley and
Stanley T. Vandersall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
Solomon,
Katherine, “Galatea.” In Orpheus and Company, ed. Deborah
DeNicola. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999,
p. 303.
Theriault,
Jerri, “Galatea Waking.” In Orpheus and Company, ed. Deborah
DeNicola. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999,
p. 308.
Updike,
John, “Pygmalion.” In Trust Me. New York: Knopf,
1987, pp. 90-92.
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Well-Favored
Links
In each issue of Mythic Passages,
we'll share a few of our favorite links on the World Wide Web. We hope
these resources help you with your own Mythic Journey.
Here's an online treasure trove of
ancient
sources of European bardic tales, including Welsh, Irish, German, and
more. Explore some of the earliest versions of the Arthurian legends, Celtic
and Nordic myth, and more.
Learn more about some of the newest
exciting Mythic Journeys guest speakers:
Logo artist John Bridges sent us
this
link with an excellent article about a “new” goddess discovered in
Britain.
Richard Smoley let us know that the
September issue of The Sun magazine published an interview with
him about his book Inner Christianity. That issues is now
available on newsstands, but you read
the article online.
Rambles
online magazine, a great source for information about folk and traditional
music, speculative fiction, folklore, movies and more, is helping spread
the good news about Mythic Journeys.
Journey
Into Wholeness is a community committed to individual and
collective transformation through an exploration of the relationship
between modern spirituality and the psychology of Carl Jung.
We offer an opportunity to explore this relationship through
conferences, seminars, and workshops.
If
you'd like to suggest a link, please
let us know.
“I
have this dread that afflicts me… it is that, somehow, we have lost the
power to generate new mythologies for a technological age. We are withdrawing
into another age's mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler,
clearly defined, and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called
something like Durththane. We have created a comfortable, sanitized, pseudo
feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted
women in scanty armour and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host
of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation
in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Columbian
drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction
of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales,
and the desecration of the rain forests. Where is the mythic archetype
who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt? Where
are the Sagas and Eddas of the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and
Rolands and Arthurs? Why do we turn back to these simplistic heroes of
simplistic days, when black was black and white biological washing-powder
white? Where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our
hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?”
-Ian
MacDonald
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