Il mito di Apollo e Pan nelle Metamorfosi di Albrecht von Halberstadt

Abstract

THE MYTH OF APOLLO AND PAN IN ALBRECHT VON HALBERSTADT’S METAMORPHOSES’. Tracing back the history of Ovid’s reception in the Middle Ages cannot disregard the German medieval literary tradition. Ovidian traces can be found in several Middle High German works, mostly in the form of allusions, images, and references. Germany also has produced the first presumably complete translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was composed at the time of the Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia by a Saxon cleric, Albrecht von Halberstadt.
Except for some fragments belonging to an Oldenburg 13th-century manuscript, we can read Albrecht’s Metamorphoses only thanks to Jörg Wickram’s Early Modern German adaptation (1545). This analysis will focus on the myth of the music contest between Apollo and Pan and the metamorphosis of king Midas, who was condemned to have donkey’s ears as a punishment for having questioned Tmolus’s verdict. The narration is handed down in fragment B (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, mgf 831) and offers a good test-bed for analysing Albrecht’s choices in dealing with a subject which, by content, does not offer any easy handhold for cultural adaptation. Some examples of Albrecht’s translation strategies will help understand the relationship between the source text, the German translation, and the receiving culture.