Dr. Dorian Koçi*
Diplomat, Former Director of National Historical Museum of Albania
There is something unsettling about the image of Ovid sitting alone in a room, the green dial of a radio illuminating the darkness. He is far from Rome, far from the language in which he made himself immortal, and far from the world that once recognised his name. Outside, the streets belong to another country. Inside, a man writes letters.
The scene belongs to Anne Carson’s Short Talk on Ovid, a brief prose piece that contains within its few lines an entire philosophy of exile. Its power lies in the absence of explanation. We are not told in any detail what Ovid has lost. We see him return to his room, sit at a table, weep, and write. His sorrow has become a nightly ritual, something he puts on like a garment. In his spare time, he teaches himself the language of the people among whom he has been condemned to live. He intends to compose an epic in Getic, a language in which, Carson tells us, no one will ever read it.
It is this final gesture that makes the passage so difficult to forget. The poet continues to write even after the ordinary relationship between writing and its audience has been broken. He creates for readers who will not come. Perhaps, in doing so, he preserves something that the decree of an emperor cannot take away.
Ovid’s exile was ordered by Augustus in AD 8. The poet was sent to Tomis, on the western shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Romania. The reasons for his punishment remain uncertain. Ovid himself referred to carmen et error, a poem and a mistake, leaving posterity to speculate about the circumstances that transformed a celebrated Roman writer into an exile at the edge of the Empire. His fate carries a particular historical irony. Ovid had written about transformations, about bodies assuming new forms, about the instability of identities and the unpredictable movements of fortune. In the Metamorphoses, change is the governing principle of the world. Gods become animals, mortals become trees, and human suffering acquires another existence in the natural order. Yet the poet who had made transformation the subject of his art discovered that his own life could be changed by a political decision against which there was no appeal.
Rome had been the centre of his literary universe. Its language, audiences, friendships and cultural institutions had given his work its meaning. Tomis represented the opposite: geographical distance, unfamiliar speech, a different climate and the slow disappearance of the social world in which his identity had been formed. Exile did not destroy the poet’s memory of Rome. It made that memory the principal material of his writing.
In the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, Ovid repeatedly addresses the absent city, his wife, his friends and the emperor whose decision had altered his life. His poems are acts of communication, but they also record the difficulty of communicating across a political and geographical divide. Each letter attempts to restore a connection that distance continually threatens to dissolve.
Carson’s Ovid inhabits the same territory, although she reaches it through a different literary form. She does not reconstruct the circumstances of exile or explain its historical causes. Instead, she brings the poet into a room, places a radio on the floor, illuminates the darkness with its green dial and allows us to witness the private repetition of sorrow. History has become domestic. The fate of a Roman poet is measured by the hours he spends alone.
The most remarkable detail in Carson’s passage is Ovid’s decision to learn Getic, the local language of the region to which he has been exiled. He intends to write an epic in a language that, according to the passage, no one will ever read. This is an extraordinary image because it reverses the familiar relationship between the writer and his audience. Literature generally assumes the possibility of recognition. A writer addresses someone, even if that person remains unknown, unborn or separated by centuries. The act of writing establishes an expectation that language will eventually cross the distance between minds. Ovid’s imagined epic seems to abandon that expectation. He is learning the language of a world that has replaced his own, preparing to create a work that cannot fulfil the conventional purpose of literary communication. Yet he continues. His effort appears almost unreasonable, but it is precisely this apparent unreason that gives it its dignity. Perhaps the poem is not intended for an audience at all. Perhaps the act of composing it is sufficient to preserve the poet’s relationship with the world.
There is another possibility. In learning Getic, Ovid is doing more than adapting to the circumstances of exile. He is entering, however imperfectly, the language of the people among whom he must now live. The man who has lost his place in Roman society begins to acquire another means of understanding his surroundings. The new language cannot restore what has disappeared, but it offers a different way of inhabiting the present. This is where the historical imagination encounters a problem that remains relevant beyond the ancient world. Exile is often described through the loss of a homeland, the separation from familiar places and the rupture of political belonging. Less frequently do we consider the transformation of the exile’s relationship with language itself. A person may retain the memory of a homeland in its most intimate form, through the words in which childhood was experienced, family relationships established and the first understanding of the world acquired. To live elsewhere is sometimes to discover that the language one carries within oneself has become a place that can no longer be entered by others.
The acquisition of another language does not necessarily resolve this condition. It may deepen it, revealing the distance between what can be expressed and what can be understood. Ovid’s projected epic belongs to that uncertain territory. Its significance lies partly in the impossibility of knowing what it might have become. Carson leaves the poem unwritten, preserving it as a possibility suspended between intention and failure.
There is a sentence in Carson’s piece that seems to contain the entire psychology of exile: each night, Ovid puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. The image is precise. Sadness is neither an exceptional event nor a passing emotion. It has become part of the daily order of existence, something assumed at a particular hour and worn until the night is over. The poet does not overcome his grief. He learns to live within its repetition.
There is something recognisable here to anyone who has studied the lives of people displaced by political circumstances. Historical documents often preserve the decisive moment: the decree, the expulsion, the crossing of a frontier, the confiscation of property. They tell us less about the long succession of ordinary evenings that follows. Yet exile acquires its full meaning in these unrecorded hours, when the extraordinary event has become an ordinary condition.
The passage also suggests that writing can become a form of discipline. Ovid weeps, but he continues to work. He studies a language, plans an epic and writes letters. His sorrow does not prevent intellectual activity; it accompanies it. The poet’s labour becomes a means of imposing form upon a life that political authority has deprived of its former structure.
We should be careful not to turn this into an easy celebration of suffering. Exile does not automatically make a writer wiser, and grief is not a necessary condition of artistic achievement. What Carson captures is something more difficult: the capacity of intellectual life to persist without any guarantee of consolation. The work continues, even when the world that once gave it purpose has disappeared.
Anne Carson’s literary achievement lies partly in her ability to bring the classical tradition into a living dialogue with contemporary experience. Her engagement with antiquity is not an exercise in restoring the past to an imagined original condition. The ancient world becomes a place of encounter, where familiar figures and inherited texts can be approached through questions that earlier readers may not have asked.
This is one of the enduring functions of classical literature. Its survival depends neither upon an unchanging interpretation nor upon the authority of the institutions that preserve it. A text survives because successive generations discover something within it that speaks to circumstances its author could not have anticipated.
Ovid’s exile provides a particularly revealing example. His experience belongs to the political world of Augustan Rome, with its imperial power, cultural ambitions and restrictions on individual freedom. Yet the distance between that world and our own does not make his predicament less intelligible. The experience of being separated from one’s language, community and familiar landscape has recurred throughout history, under empires, nation-states and political regimes of very different kinds.
Carson does not make Ovid a modern refugee or turn his fate into a simple allegory of contemporary displacement. She allows the ancient poet to remain himself, in his room, in his sorrow, at his table. The historical distance is preserved, and it is precisely this distance that makes the encounter productive. We recognise something of our own world without pretending that the past was identical to it.
There is also a deeper irony in the scene. Ovid, who once wrote for the sophisticated audiences of Rome, has become a figure whose private anguish reaches us through the centuries. The epic he imagines composing in Getic remains beyond our knowledge. His letters and poems, by contrast, have survived. What he could not know was which parts of his literary life would endure, or which future readers would discover in his exile an experience worth revisiting.
Literature frequently escapes the intentions of its authors. A work may be forgotten by its first audience and recovered centuries later. A text composed for a particular political or social world may acquire meanings that its creator could not have foreseen. The writer cannot determine the future life of the words.
Ovid’s imagined epic is therefore more than a symbol of failure. It reminds us that the value of an act of creation cannot always be measured by its immediate reception. Some works disappear. Others wait for readers who do not yet exist. Still others survive in forms their authors could never have anticipated.
I return to Carson’s image of the green radio dial. It is a small detail, almost incidental, yet it gives the scene its particular atmosphere. The radio belongs to the world of communication, of voices travelling across distances and entering rooms where the speakers themselves are absent. Ovid sits beside it, surrounded by the possibility of communication, and writes letters of his own.
The radio does not explain the silence. It makes the silence more visible.
In this room, the poet’s situation is defined by a contradiction. He is surrounded by language and separated from the world in which his own language once possessed its natural audience. He continues to write, but he cannot know whether his words will find the readers for whom they are intended. He studies another language, but the epic he hopes to compose in it seems destined for oblivion. And still he writes. Perhaps this is the most enduring element of Carson’s short piece. Literature begins with an act of faith that is difficult to justify rationally. Someone writes a sentence without knowing who will read it, when it will be read, or whether it will be read at all. The work is addressed to the future, but the future has made no promise to answer.
For Ovid, writing becomes a way of remaining present in a world from which he has been politically excluded. For Carson, the act of imagining that lonely room allows an ancient figure to return, briefly, to the company of the living. And for us, the readers, the scene becomes a reminder that historical survival is rarely the simple continuation of what once existed. It is often a succession of unexpected encounters between the fragments of the past and the questions of the present.
Ovid could not have known that his poems would travel across the centuries, reaching readers in languages he never heard. He could not have known that a Canadian poet would one day imagine him in a room illuminated by the green dial of a radio, learning the language of exile and preparing to write an epic for no one. Perhaps the poem he imagined in Getic was never written. Perhaps it was written and lost. We have no way of knowing from Carson’s passage. Its absence is part of the story. What remains is the man at the table, putting on his sadness and continuing his work. The world has changed around him. His place in it has disappeared. The audience is uncertain, the future unknowable. But the sentence continues.
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*https://doriankoi.substack.com/
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