“Ovid’s Old Age” is a sung poem written by the Polish poet and musician Jacek Kaczmarski which engages with the myth of Ovid’s exile. Kaczmarski’s works were heavily influenced both by classical culture and his experience of political emigration during the communist era. He was famed as an unofficial bard of the opposition movement, but is as yet little known to classical reception scholars. This paper presents Kaczmarski’s creative engagement with Ovid as both a deeply personal reflection on the nature (...) of exile and at the same time a universal commentary on poetry under authoritarian regimes. Our interpretation is based on a thematic analysis of the poem, including landscape, imperialism, displacement, “national” poets in exile, nostalgia, and the force of poetry. We set the reception in its social, political, and biographical context, with reference to several mediating receptions of the Ovidian exile. In Kaczmarski’s poem, the Ovidian voice helps the poet to express the trials of emigration and reveals their effect on his art. It shows how engagements with classical culture may flourish, even while the formal discipline of Classics has been undernourished. We provide a bilingual translation of “Ovid’s Old Age” to foster the understanding of migratory experiences in contemporary poetry and enrich international scholarship on the reception of Ovid with a response from communist Poland. (shrink)

The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. The international workshop in which the following articles were initially presented as papers was held online in October 2021. Hosted by the School of Classics, University of St. Andrews, and sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network, it aimed to explore further the conflicted and complex relationship between classics and communism, (...) using the prism of the ambiguous or polysemic concept of proletarianism. What, after all, is “a proletarian classics”? (shrink)