The book as a poet and the unconstrained poet: the playfulness of personae in Ovid’s Tristia

Abstract

This paper focuses on the fictional game of personae in Ovid’s Tristia from the investigation of the image built of the book/letter character throughout the work, especially in elegies III, 1 and V, 4, in which the book, anthropomorphized, becomes the speaker. Based on this, it was discussed the poetic-voice’s alternation between Naso, the exiled speaker who cannot return to Rome, and his book, that he sends to the Vrbs to speak on his behalf. Under a metapoetic perspective, we analyzed the relations between the book character and the author/poet character, the book’s anthropomorphizing process and the correspondences between book and author/poet. It was possible to see that this personae game introduces a true metamorphosis in the work: the author/poet character, through writing, becomes the own text and perpetuates himself through the literary work – this is the topos of continuity frequently found in literature.