her. 12.31-36: a mini commentary

tunc ego te vidi, tunc coepi scire, quid esses;
illa fuit mentis prima ruina meae.
et vidi et perii; nec notis ignibus arsi,
ardet ut ad magnos pinea taeda deos.
et formosus eras, et me mea fata trahebant;
abstulerant oculi lumina nostra tui.

Then I saw you, then I began to perceive what you were;
that was the first downfall of my mind.
And I saw and I was undone; and I burned with fires unknown,
like a pine torch burns before the mighty gods.
And you were finely formed, and my fate was dragging me;
your eyes had robbed mine of light.

Translation mine. Text from the Loeb Classical Library edition, edited by Grant Showerman and revised by G. P. Goold, 1977.

notes

31. scire: the word has a core meaning of “to know” (it’s the same root you’re seeing in “science”) but it’s related to perception as well as understanding. Given the importance of Medea’s senses, and especially sight, in this passage, I wanted to keep the emphasis on the intake of information rather than the comprehension or retention of it. (Fun fact: scire can also mean “to know” in the biblical sense.)
quid: this is neuter, so it’s really “what” rather than “who.”

32. ruina: this word is related to ruere, “to fall with violence, rush down” and it’s occupying a semantic space similar to casus (“fall, downfall”) or lapsus (“glide; downslide”). So while it does have a sense of “destruction,” that’s proceeding from a core sense of a downward crash.

33. perii: you could render this as “I died;” it is a valid sense of pereo and it could work nicely with the wedding torch/funeral torch thing Ovid so enjoys (seriously, see like…all of book six of the Met.). I have no particular reason for not doing that except that I like the way “I was undone” works here.
nec…arsi: I reworked this a bit, moving the negation (“nor did I burn with known fires” -> “and I burned with fires unknown”) to make it flow a bit better with the next clause.

34. pinea taeda: this refers to a wedding torch specifically. Pinea is somewhat redundant, as a taeda is a pine torch by definition (in fact, its core meaning is just “pine tree” or “pine resin”). I don’t love the way “pine wedding-torch” sounds, because it feels a bit awkward and heavy; given that Ovid doubles down on the piney-ness and leaves the wedding bit more low-key, I dropped the “wedding” bit from the translation.

36. abstulerant…tui: lumina in a poetic context can mean “eyes,” and that’s really what’s happening here. But the sense of the line is something like “you blinded me” and I feel that “your eyes robbed my eyes” (apart from sounding a little silly) doesn’t actually mean anything. I think this way of rendering it, while a bit loose, does a better job of keeping some sort of meaning in the line.