Metamorphoses - Softcover

Ovid

4.09

71,187 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253200016 ISBN 13: 9780253200013

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1960

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"The Metamorphoses of Ovid offers to the modern world such a key to the literary and religious culture of the ancients that it becomes an important event when at last a good poet comes up with a translation into English verse." ―John Crowe Ransom

"... a charming and expert English version, which is right in tone for the Metamorphoses." ―Francis Fergusson

"This new Ovid, fresh and faithful, is right for our time and should help to restore a great reputation." ―Mark Van Doren

The first and still the best modern verse translation of the Metamorphoses, Humphries’ version of Ovid’s masterpiece captures its wit, merriment, and sophistication.

Everyone will enjoy this first modern translation by an American poet of Ovid’s great work, the major treasury of classical mythology, which has perennially stimulated the minds of men. In this lively rendering there are no stock props of the pastoral and no literary landscaping, but real food on the table and sometimes real blood on the ground.

Not only is Ovid’s Metamorphoses a collection of all the myths of the time of the Roman poet as he knew them, but the book presents at the same time a series of love poems―about the loves of men, women, and the gods. There are also poems of hate, to give the proper shading to the narrative. And pervading all is the writer’s love for this earth, its people, its phenomena.

Using ten-beat, unrhymed lines in his translation, Rolfe Humphries shows a definite kinship for Ovid’s swift and colloquial language and Humphries’ whole poetic manner is in tune with the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet.

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Book Description:

This volume presents the Latin text, with an Introduction and full commentary, of Book XIII of the Roman poet Ovid's long work Metamorphoses. It discusses in detail Ovid's treatment of his sources and sets out the ways in which he has adapted earlier literature as material for his novel enterprise. Guidance is offered on points of language and style, and the Introduction treats in general terms the themes of metamorphosis and the structure of the poem as a whole.

About the Author:

Publius Ovidius Naso, a Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid, wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature, Ovid was generally considered the greatest master of the elegiac couplet.

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