Prevod

Meanwhile the half-beast rejoiced in his pupil of divine descent, glad of the honor mingled with his charge. Now came the Centaur’s daughter, her shoulders cloaked in flame-red hair, whom the nymph Chariclo had once borne on the banks of a rushing river and named Ocyroe. Not content to have learned her father’s arts, she also sang the hidden secrets of the Fates. And so, when prophetic frenzy seized her mind and she burned with the god she held within her breast, she looked upon the infant. “Grow, child,” she said, “to bring healing to the whole world! Often mortal bodies will owe their lives to you; you will have leave to restore

departed souls. But once you dare this, to the gods’ outrage, your grandfather’s thunderbolt will bar you from doing so again, and from a god you will become a lifeless body, then a god again, though lately a body: twice you will change your fate. You too, dear father, now immortal, born by the law of your birth to endure through all the ages, will long to be able to die when you are tormented by a dreadful serpent’s blood coursing through your wounded limbs.

The gods will make you, once eternal, subject to death, and the three sister goddesses will unravel your thread.” There was more of fate to tell. She sighed from the depths of her breast, and welling tears ran down her cheeks. “The Fates forestall me,” she said. “I am forbidden to speak further, and the use of my voice is sealed away. My arts were not worth the price: they have brought divine wrath upon me. I wish I had not known the future.

Already I seem to be losing my human form; already grass appeals to me as food, already I yearn to race across broad plains. I am turning into a mare, a kindred shape. But why entirely? My father, after all, has a double form.” As she spoke, the last part of her lament could scarcely be understood: her words grew muddled. Soon the sound seemed neither words nor a mare’s voice, but that of someone imitating a mare; in a little while she gave unmistakable neighs and lowered her arms to the grass.

Then her fingers fused, and a smooth hoof bound all five nails within an unbroken sheath of horn. Her muzzle and neck grew longer; most of her flowing robe became a tail, and the loose hair that lay along her neck became a mane falling to the right. Together her voice and form were changed; the marvel gave her a new name too.