Naso the Poet: The Loves and Crimes of Rome's Greatest Poet (The Notorious Roman Trilogy)

Rome’s greatest poet was sent into exile for life and his works were consigned to damnatio memoriae -- eternal forgetting. But they weren’t forgotten. Readers touched by their beauty preserved their precious volumes and copied them by hand so that the literature which had offended the government of Rome may yet live on forever. And it has.

But who was Ovid? And what crime did he commit to bring upon himself this punishment?

Part of the Notorious Roman Trilogy--perhaps the most important piece of literary writing to come out of Eastern Europe since World War II--Naso the Poet tells that tale.

This astonishing, innovative, beautiful novel presents the life of Ovid in a hilarious format: a kind of live variety show, hosted by the narrator in the role of the emcee. The show features light-hearted sexy bits based on Ovid's erotic poems (including a striptease by the emperor's granddaughter), stress poetry, Emperor Augustus' internal monologues, political commentary, and a police investigation ("What crime did Ovid commit?"). The investigation device allows the author to present several original ideas as to the possible causes of his exile. And all of this dazzling structural innovation is couched in movingly beautiful prose.

While the point isn't belabored, ultimately, like all of Bocheński's books, this too is a book about the individual's relationship to the ruling tyranny. The figure of Emperor Augustus looms large over the whole work. Because of its frank treatment of the topic of dictatorship, the book was submitted to thousands of cuts and revisions by the communist censors prior to publication and eventually banned by the communist regime anyway--along with all other writings by the Bocheński. This "exile" forced its author into a new role: that of a prominent political dissident.

Jacek Bocheński (b. 1926) is the leading literary figure of modern Poland, a prolific author, classicist scholar, former president of the Polish PEN Club, former president of the Polish Authors’ Society (SLP), former president of the Intellectual Property Association (ZAIKS), former member of The Citizen’s Committee serving the office of President Lech Wałęsa, a highly-regarded and much-decorated freedom fighter, banned by communist censorship, interned during the Martial Law in Poland (1981-1983), and today widely honored as the Nestor of Polish literature.

“It would be difficult to find a more brilliant fictional treatment of Ovid’s life than this hilariously serious entertainment"--Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns

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