Translator’s Note

Ovid’s Tristia 3.9 takes, as its protagonist, the sorceress Medea, who killed and dismembered her brother Absyrtus so that she and her lover Jason could run away together aboard Jason’s famous ship, the Argo. According to Ovid, Medea’s fratricide provided the name for the city of Tomis, from the Greek verb temnô (“to cut”) (Tr. 3.9.5-6). Through his retelling of this Greek myth, Ovid both reinforced the power of the empire that had sent him to the icy edges of the Roman world and questioned the violence enacted by Rome against its own citizens (Oliensis 1997, 189-190; Eccleston 2024, 81-83). Through his recentering of Rome, however, Ovid erased the indigenous placenames of the native Getae in favor of memorializing a formidable woman.

In his 1854 magnum opus Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him?” (1854, 343). Although Thoreau was referring to the displacement or dislocation of the soul, this “Franklin” whom he invoked was “lost” in a very literal sense: Sir John Franklin, an officer in the Royal Navy, had disappeared into the Arctic with two ships full of men in 1845. Sir John’s wife Jane had turned her formidable rhetoric to the task of enlisting a global fleet to find her husband. Brits, Americans, and one ill-fated Frenchman answered the call. But to Lady Franklin’s dismay, the searchers found only scattered bones that preserved evidence of cannibalism. Nevertheless, Lady Franklin’s perseverance made her a household name for American writers like Thoreau and Emily Dickinson (Morris 1997, 105). In her poem “When the Astronomer stops seeking,” for example, Dickinson includes “the lone British Lady” (Jane Franklin) in a list of three figures emblematic of faithfulness (Miller 2016, 444; J851, FR957):

When the Astronomer stops seeking

For his Pleiad’s Face —

When the lone British Lady

Forsakes the Arctic Race

When to his Covenant Needle
The Sailor doubting turns —
It will be amply early
To ask what treason means.

The two men whom Dickinson places before and after Lady Franklin—the Astronomer, and the Sailor with his “Covenant” or compass needle—can also be read as polar figures: during the nineteenth century, astronomy and terrestrial magnetism were two major branches of science advanced through polar exploration (Burn 2009 and Waring 2014; Gillin 2024, 133-166). Like these scientists who continually observed the natural world, Dickinson’s “Lady” is perpetually seeking her lost husband. When Dickinson refers to “treason” in the final line of her poem, however, she gestures toward the darker side of hope. Lady Franklin’s unwavering belief in her husband’s survival led to the deaths of numerous men who searched for him, and her quest to map the Northwest Passage contributed to the ongoing oppression  of the Inuit who lived there.

The fundamental harms of colonial polar exploration, both British and American, led Thoreau to summarize his own thoughts on polar exploration in very pessimistic terms, using a couplet by the Roman poet Claudian (20.21-22; Platnauer 1992, 196):

Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.

Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae.

Let another man wander, and let him examine the extreme Iberians.

Our man has more of life—the other man has more of the journey.

Thoreau’s own translation is less literal: 

Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.

I have more of God, they more of the road.

By replacing Iberians (Spaniards) with “Australians,” Thoreau relies on “the figurative idea of Australians being situated at the end of the world to reinforce his sense of opposing planetary spaces being brought into a theoretical continuum” (Giles 2016, 149). Beyond merely using the topos of Australia as a far-away place, Thoreau’s choice of Australia alluded also to Sir John and Lady Franklin, since Sir John had served as the colonial Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania in the 1830s and 1840s (Russell 1997, Dietrich 2009). During that time, Lady Franklin completed a voyage of her own, traveling on horseback across the breadth of Australia (Russell 2002, 1-23). Just as Lady Franklin’s indirect conquest of the Arctic—using British, American, and French polar explorers as her intermediaries—inscribed English and French names on Arctic maps, her more direct exploration of Oceania contributed to British repression of indigenous culture: political districts in both Canada and New Zealand once bore the name “Franklin” (Craciun 2018, 191; Currie 2011).

Inspired by Thoreau’s transposition of placenames within his quotations of Latin poetry, my translation of Ovid’s Tristia 3.9 centralizes a geographic feature located in the far northern regions of the American continent: a small inlet that the American explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane had named “Lady Franklin Bay,” and which, by the 1880s, had become the site of another disastrous polar expedition. Led by American army officer Adolphus Greely, the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881-1884 reached a new record for Farthest North, but only seven of the twenty-five men on the expedition returned home, and rumors of cannibalism haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives. I take, as my voice, one of Greely’s men, who speaks using phrases lifted from some of the many letters written by Lady Franklin during her quest to bring her husband home, including two famous and frequently-quoted letters addressed to President Zachary Taylor (text in red, above).

Through my adaption of Ovid’s Tristia 3.9, I hope to explore the relationship between nineteenth-century American sailors and the formidable Lady Franklin. Although Franklin succeeded in creating an immortal name for her husband, she did so at the expense of the indigenous peoples living in the regions that her search teams scoured for evidence. Debates over whether Sir John Franklin’s men had committed the unspeakable horror of cannibalism, for example, led Franklin’s friend Charles Dickens to publish vicious racial attacks against Inuit informants in the press (Marlow 1981, Stone 1987, Knopf 2013). As the letters that remained unpublished during her lifetime (text in purple, above) reveal, even Lady Franklin acknowledged that her quest could do little to aid the men who lay “lifeless & unburied on the shore” (Elce 2009, 122). The “lifeless & unburied” remains of Sir John Franklin’s men—which show incontrovertible evidence of survival cannibalism, in contradiction to Lady Franklin’s and Dickens’s stories (Keenleyside et al. 1997, Stenton et al. 2024)—reminded me vividly of the divulsa membra (“torn limbs”) of Medea’s brother Absyrtus. By rendering Ovid’s story of Medea’s violence through the words of Lady Franklin, I seek to highlight how the imprint of the Franklin name on the icy landscape of the north carries the weight of a violent imperial history.

Works Cited

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