apollo's sterilem amorem
Today in Ovidian things that I'll never be over: this clause from the story of Apollo and Daphne.
...et sterilem sperando nutrit amorem.
...and he fosters his sterile love with hope.
—O. Met. 1.496 (translation and emphasis mine)
Apollo's sterile love. Stephanie McCarter (<3<3<3) renders it thus (1.535 in her translation)[1] and I was like, well, what Latin word could "sterile" possibly represent.
Sterilis really is just "sterile." It's "unfruitful" or "useless" or "empty" or even "barren," a term associated with eunuchs of all people. It can mean "without children" or even "without people."
What a way to describe a disasterous, god-induced infatuation.
And now I'm thinking about sperando. Sperando is the gerund form of sperare and both McCarter and I rendered it "hope;" it would be slightly more literal to render it "hoping."
But what's getting me is that while sperare can mean "to hope," it can also mean "to trust" or, better yet, "to expect." So another valid way to render this line would be:
...and he feeds[2] his empty love with expectation.
I’m also a little in love with the way Apollo’s love is so closely tied to barrenness. Right before he, you know, literally calls it barren (sterilis), Ovid describes Apollo falling in love like this:
Like stubble burning at the end of harvest,
or like a hedge lit by a traveler’s torch
brought in too close or left at dawn—just so,
the god went up in flames. His whole heart burns.—O. Met. (1.492–96, trans. McCarter [1.531–34], emphasis mine)
The beginning of his love is the end of the productive season. This desire of Apollo’s never had a future; from the very start, it was always incompatible with new life.