An Imaginary Life was published by Chatto & Windus in 1978. The novella reimagines the last years of Publius Ovidius Naso — the Roman poet banished by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 CE, where he lived among people whose language he could not speak and whose landscape bore no resemblance to the cultivated gardens of Rome.
Malouf’s Ovid is a poet of civilization — of metamorphosis, of the body’s pleasures, of sophisticated mythological play — exiled to a place where civilization does not exist. The Getic tribespeople among whom he lives are illiterate, close to nature, and indifferent to everything that made him who he was. Gradually, Ovid begins to change. He learns to see the harsh landscape, to hear the unfamiliar language, to attend to the natural world with a directness his poetry never achieved in Rome.
The turning point is his encounter with a feral child — a boy raised by animals on the steppe. Ovid’s attempt to teach the child language, to bring him into human community, becomes the central action of the novella. But the teaching goes both ways: as Ovid draws the child toward language and civilization, the child draws Ovid toward a wordless, pre-linguistic communion with the natural world.
The novella is written in a prose of extraordinary beauty — spare, luminous, attentive to physical sensation and the quality of light. It established the central concerns of Malouf’s career: the relationship between language and the world, the boundaries between civilization and nature, and the ways exile can become transformation.
Collecting An Imaginary Life
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80