This is wonderful storytelling, like a poetic saga you might hear told at night by a fire. Gradually, Ovid comes to appreciate and respect the old people who keep the customs and traditions alive and who are kind to him while being very suspicious of his strangeness. “Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man's poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived?” Whether anyone ever reads it or not doesn’t matter. He waits anxiously for the next hunting season so he can search for the elusive boy. His memories and his dreams and his very different life change him.

When the villagers take him along on a hunt, he thinks he sees the boy of his imagination. I see myself - I might be three or four years old - playing under the olives at the edge of our farm, just within call of the goatherd, and I am talking to the child, whether for the first time or not I cannot tell at this distance.” “When I first saw the child I cannot say. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile.”Īs a boy, he had an imaginary friend, a boy, the child referred to in the opening quotation. “But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. Nobody understands him, and he understands nobody. The village called Tomis consists of a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud, with roofs of thatch and floors of beaten mud covered with rushes.”įor man with a love of words, this is severe punishment indeed. “I am describing a state of mind, no place. This is an imagined life of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished by Emperor Augustus to a village unlike anything he’d known.

My brother, who is a year older, does not see him, even when he moves close between us.” We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising.

An Imaginary Life by David Malouf