The Heroides, or Heroines, is a Latin text written somewhere between 25 and 16 BC in which the women of Greek and Roman myth, via a series of letters addressed to men, tell their side of the story. As Dido writes to Aeneas or Ariadne to Theseus, the women who are so often left behind and out of the story expose many of the supposed ‘heroes’ as irresponsible, hypocritical, nasty or shallow. Rather than passive objects to be won or lost, the speakers show themselves to be intelligent, brave and politically agile, as well as potentially violent. Here women are shown as sexual beings, as in Phaedra’s fevered letter to Hippolytus:

You wore white. Your hair was full of flowers.
Shy, a blush tinged your tanned cheek,
and what others have called hard
in Phaedra’s eye was strong.
Away from me with girlish men –
male beauty can’t be striven for.
Your hardness suits, your artless fall
of fringe, dirt on your face.
Whether you steer your horse’s neck
to make it step tight circles,
or you hurl the lance’s shaft
and I gaze on your gallant arm,
or you grasp the hunting spear,
(I’ll stop) my eyes Love all of you.

Their position as mothers is also explored, with the horror of child mortality expressed in Canace’s desperate suicide note:

O my boy, my grief, prey of ravenous beasts,
born to be torn into pieces.
Sad pledge of my unhallowed love,
this was your first and last day.
I cannot keen or shave my hair,
I cannot cull a kiss from your cold lips.

A few years ago I stumbled on this text, and found it had been neglected for many years, mainly because critics wrote off its ‘grating and carping women’ and saw it as domesticating great legends. Realising how amazing it was, I decided to try my hand at a new translation, in which these strong women’s voices could once again speak across the centuries. Obviously, this was a feminist project.

Except, not quite: there’s one thing that mars this narrative. The text was written by Ovid – a man. It’s an act of literary transvestism. And this situates it in a whole history of men speaking in abandoned women’s voices that makes things much more complex. Some of our oldest Anglo-Saxon poems such as ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ and ‘The Wife’s Lament’ bear strong similarities to the Heroides, and are believed to be written by men. Then there is the German tradition of the frauenlied – the woman’s song – beginning in the 12th century, where the ‘I’ is a noble lady longing for her love (the most famous writer of these was called ‘Reinmar the Old Man’). Or what about the gui-yuan practiced by Chinese poets, with gui meaning inner chamber or boudoir? In these a female persona expresses grievances about war, loneliness or departure. ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’, from Ezra Pound’s book Cathay, is a famous version of Rihaku’s 8th century poem in which a young girl writes:

At fourteen I married My Lord You.
I never laughed, being bashful.

This is a man impersonating a man impersonating a woman (and the first man, Pound, is one considered such a masculine writer that his friend Gaudier-Brzeska sculpted his head as an enormous phallus). The poem is clearly a male fantasy, although I’m inclined not to be too judgmental, due to the delicacy with which the girl’s voice is rendered. It foregrounds the question of why, actually, men decided to ventriloquize women. After all, Plato warned against the dangers of such a subversive act in The Republic, asserting that:

‘imitating a woman, young or old, maybe abusing her husband, or competing with the gods and boasting about her good fortune, or in the grip of disaster or grief or mourning, will not be a legitimate activity for the people we say we are interested in – the ones we want to grow up into the right sort of men. They are, after all, men. And still less do we want them imitating a woman who is ill, or in love, or in childbirth.’

Yet it is precisely women in grief or love who speak in early poetries.

Well, there are many theories as to why Plato was so thoroughly defied. Men away on hunts or at war might have found comfort in imagining women missing them at home. It could be argued that, as dramatic monologues necessarily involve taking on the persona of an ‘other’, writing as a woman made this otherness very clear and displayed wit and invention. It could also be seen as a way to vent – men got to express sadness and loneliness and bitterness without looking unmanly, or admitting to these feelings themselves. Perhaps powerful men also got off on pretending to be powerless women, much as a politician might enjoy being whipped or wearing a nappy.

Ovid’s motives seem to me to be broadly positive. He loved the company of women and had many female friends, although we have to be clear that he was also a man of his time (in The Art of Love he jokes that rape is a good reward for soldiers: ‘for that I’ll enlist myself, with a sword!’) Some women in the Heroides are seen as cruel, or dumb or sluttish (Helen for example, of whom Oenone observes: ‘Someone stolen so often’s asking for it’), but on the whole men come off far worse. As Penelope notes of Ulysses’ prolonged absence:

I blame the dangers of islands and seas
When, for all my silly fears,
You might just be snared by some exotic tart –
You’re male, after all.

Ovid was undoubtedly showing off – displaying the skill with which he could subvert and freshen existing myths; his ability to do uncanny impersonations of the female voice. He also just enjoyed shocking and being subversive, and might well have seen Plato’s disapproval as an invitation. There is definitely a tongue-in-cheek awareness of the criticism he might attract in the letter from Deianara to her husband, Hercules, after she has become aware of rumours that, enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, he was forced to dress up in women’s clothes: ‘modelling the Lydian belt, / like Miss Playful’. She demands:

Could you tell anecdotes in a fashionable gown?
Did cross-dressing not affect your voice?

And it is hard not to hear those accusations thrown at the poet himself.

But I also feel the poems come out of a genuine empathy for women, and the limitations society places on them. His sympathy with their frustration is palpable. Rarely does he tone down his rhetorical or poetical brilliance, and whilst some have seen this as Ovid’s voice showing through, to me it is a positive – his heroines are just as smart as he is.

And after all, how does a woman speak? I have always been interested in the distinction between biological sex and gender – a set of cultural traits by which men and women are identified. I am very comfortable with my sex, but have always felt fairly uncomfortable with the limitations of gender, and the assumptions society makes about how women behave. As a speaker, many of my traits would probably be identified as ‘masculine’ – I like banter, jokes and intellectual arguments and have a bad habit after a few drinks of talking over people. I was very close to my father, and most of my closest friends have been male – as a teenager I always felt happier in male company. And yet I have never been one of the lads, exactly. I’m always intrigued by Anne Carson’s positioning of herself as a gay man, and identify with Virginia Woolf’s idea of the creative mind as androgynous. Perhaps I loved translating the Heroides because it felt quite natural to be a woman being a man being a woman.

At the same time, literary transvestism always contains a kind of structural irony. There is a clear distance between the poet and persona, that makes it easy for us to read things as sardonic – particularly today, when our culture is steeped in sarcasm. And because I am a woman, I’m aware that in translating the Heroides I’ve caused that irony to partially collapse. In the last year I’ve performed Phaedra’s monologue, in which she wishes childbirth had split her body, with a visible baby-bump of my own or my newborn son mewling in the background. I enable the reader to hear the strong women, and temporarily forget the man in the way – it is easier for people to hear the genuine passion without automatically seeing inverted commas. Does this mean they get closer to the original intention or further from it? The truth is that over two millennia, it can be hard to read tone of voice, or catch the glint in Ovid’s eye, and my translation involves a kind of dragging up as much as his does. I enjoy sporting his swagger and gravitas.

In these days of political sensitivity and check-your-privilege, we often feel we can’t write of what we haven’t experienced – that we don’t have permission to take on perspectives different from our own. That’s particularly the case when you have historically enjoyed more power than the people you wish to write about – though I have taken on male voices in my poetry (Caravaggio, Joseph, a father about to kill his children) without attracting comment, it’s hard to imagine a male poet today writing a book like the Heroides. But equality can only happen when we treat each-other generously, and encourage rather than shut down attempts at understanding. Of course Ovid’s dramatic monologues aren’t feminist – there wasn’t even a concept of feminism in 25BC – but nor are they a colonization of women’s’ voices by the patriarchy, as some critics would have us believe. They are more complicated than either of these things. Ovid’s is a flawed but brave attempt to get under the skin of those ‘other’ to himself, and I, in turn, have attempted to repay the effort.

Clare Pollard is a poet. Her new translation of Ovid’s Heroides is published by Bloodaxe