But no one in Tomis speaks my tongue, and for nearly a year now I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. I communicate like a child with grunts and signs, I point, I raise my eyebrows, questioning, I burst into tears of joy if someone- a child even- understands what I am trying to say.
-An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
Corn polenta smothered in sour cream, feta, and butter would have made Ovid feel right at home. Some say that the word mămăligă originates from the Latin mamilla, nipple, so it was as close to his mother’s milk and tongue as one can get without pointing and unbuttoning her blouse. The Romanian etymologist Bogdan Hasdeu’s authoritative dictionary however gives the word a pre-Romance Dacian source, which makes sense because before New World maize was introduced to the Lower Danube, the Dacians were eating millet mămăligă long before the Emperor Trajan latinized them in the second century’s first years.
No mămăligă is seen being made or eaten in Trajan’s Column’s spiraled scenes depicting his victory in the Romanian Wars, but Ovid in his Black Sea Letters says that he wrote poems in the Dacian, or Getic as he called it, language- a lost Thracian tongue, so mămăligă , the word and the polenta both, were presumably on his lips during his ten years of exile.
We were walking around the outside of the National Museum in Constanţa, modern Tomis, and found a funerary stele memorializing a man named Lilis. He could not have been of my wife’s same family, for they arrived on the Euxine Sea only in the 20th Century, and not in Tomis but rather in another Greek colony, ancient Callatis.
This stele is not far from the main square’s statue of Ovid with his self-written epitaph- Be not severe, Lover, as you pass by, say “Easy may the bones of Ovid lie”- inscribed on the base, from Book III of the Tristia, which carries a bit of unintended embarrassment to the city, because its previous lines go like this…”How do you think I feel, lying here in a vile place among Getics and Sarmatians? I can’t stand the climate, I’m not used to the water, and the land itself, I don’t know why, displeases. There’s no house suitable for the sick, no food that’s any use…” Mămăligă , Vă Rog!
