Something to read first
The poem that would not stay in one shape
Imagine writing the longest poem of your age, and then being told that the emperor you once flattered no longer wants to see you in Rome. That happened to the man who gathered these stories. He was sent to the edge of the known world, a cold coast on the Black Sea where nobody spoke his language, and he spent his last years writing letters begging to come home. The poem he left behind is about exactly the thing that happened to him: a life that gets turned, without consent, into something else.
It begins before there are any people, with a mess of earth, sea and sky that had not yet decided which was which. Somebody sorts it out, and from that moment on the poem barely sits still for a page. Gods fall in love, mortals say the wrong thing, and someone is always running. The pattern is so regular that it becomes a kind of grammar. A god sees a girl. The girl does not want to be seen. She prays to be anything else, and the poem, with a slightly appalling generosity, grants it. The runner who outpaced a famous archer ends as a tree whose leaves would crown poets forever. Another who fled a goat-footed god ends as a bed of reeds, and the god, with nothing else to do, cuts them and breathes across the tops.
Not every change is a rescue. Some are punishments with a peculiarly literary cruelty. A woman who wove so well that she would not admit the goddess of weaving had taught her was matched against that goddess at the loom, and the goddess tore her flawless work to pieces. The punishment that followed was to spin for the rest of time. A hunter wandered into a glade at the wrong time and found himself in front of a goddess who had just taken off her clothes. He was given a new head, a new set of legs and a pack of hounds that no longer recognised him. A boy discovered a pool so clear that he forgot to eat, and a girl who had been cursed to finish other people's sentences wasted away until nothing was left of her but the sound.
The poem is just as interested in goodness as in disaster. There is a story about an old couple in a poor hut who, when two strangers knocked at their door in the middle of a storm, refused to turn them away. They tried to cook the one goose they owned, and when the wine in the jug kept refilling, they began to wonder who their guests were. In the morning the village was under water and only their little house was left, and when the time came for them to die, they asked to go together. The poem lets them. They grow side by side, two different trees whose branches braid. It is the most tender moment in a book that does not hurry to be tender.
Some people in the poem receive exactly what they ask for. A king who did a god a favour was offered a wish, and he asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. By dinner he was hungry. Later the same man, who judged a music contest the wrong way, was given a gift by the loser that he spent the rest of his life hiding under a cap. A barber who knew the secret could not keep it, whispered it into a hole in the ground, and watched as the reeds that grew from the hole repeated it to everyone who walked past in the wind.
The best stories sit in the places where change is not a magic trick but a form of grief. There is a mother whose children were killed in front of her, who turned to stone and kept weeping long after any normal person would have stopped. There is a king's wife, the mother of fifty sons, who lost every one of them and her home as well, and who finally lost her mind and started to bark. There is a kingfisher couple who found each other at sea. There is a young man who tried to drive his father's chariot across the sky for a single day, and whose sisters stood on the river bank until they put down roots.
It is tempting to read the poem as a catalogue of bad luck. The poet seems to have thought of it as something closer to a theory. Nothing in the world is stable, he says, and everything that appears to die is in fact being rearranged. A person who is turned into a flower has not been ended, only moved a few degrees along the dial. For a man writing from the edge of a frozen sea, that was probably the only comfort left.
Which may be why the poem outlived the empire that banished its author. The gods in it are cruel, vain and quick-tempered, but the idea underneath is gentler than any of them. We are not fixed. A creature that has been hurt can be something else, and sometimes something better, and the poem does not say it is easy. It only says that it happens, and that the world is full of evidence.