The Metamorphoses of Ovid / Edition 1

by David R. Slavitt, David R. (Translator) Slavitt, Ovid

Overview

Written between A.D. 2 and 8, Ovid's long poem the Metamorphoses gave to a great number of Greek and Roman myths the form in which they are known today. Now David Slavitt, translator of the widely acclaimed Ovid's Poetry of Exile, has fashioned a splendid new English verse translation of what is perhaps the best-known work of one of western civilization's major's poets. In Slavitt's freely inventive but emotionally accurate renderings, the voice of Ovid speaks again to a new generation of readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801847981
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1994
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	638,401
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	NP (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David R. Slavitt, poet, novelist, critic, and journalist, has published more than fifty books. His translations include the Metamorphoses of Ovid, The Fables of Avianus, the "Eclogues" and "Georgics" of Virgil, and Seneca: The Tragedies, Vols. 1 and 2, all available from Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
	Acknowledgments	xxv
	A Note on this Translation	3
Book I	The Shaping of Changes	13
Book II	Of Mortal Children and Immortal Lusts	49
Book III	The Wrath of Juno	89
Book IV	Spinning Yarns and Weaving Tales	121
Book V	Contests of Arms and Song	157
Book VI	Of Praise and Punishment	187
Book VII	Of the Ties That Bind	221
Book VIII	Impious Acts and Exemplary Lives	261
Book IX	Desire, Deceit, and Difficult Deliveries	301
Book X	The Songs of Orpheus	339
Book XI	Rome Begins at Troy	367
Book XII	Around and About the Iliad	405
Book XIII	Spoils of War and Pangs of Love	435
Book XIV	Around and about with Aeneas	479
Book XV	Prophetic Acts and Visionary Dreams	519
	Notes	555
	Persons, Places, and Personifications in the Metamorphoses	577

What People are Saying About This

Charles Segal

Simpson conveys the rapid flow of Ovid's wonderful mythological, epic-style poem in clear, accessible, and straightforward prose. The running commentary that accompanies the translation offers interesting and sometimes challenging interpretations, informed by recent scholarship and a concern with the meaning of the poem for a wide audience.

William S. Anderson

This translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a welcome surprise amid the many translations that have appeared in the past twenty years. It makes no strained effort to find a metrical scheme and pose as the modern equivalent to Ovid's poetic form. Instead, it seeks — and achieves with remarkable success — to render the flowing elegance of Ovid's narrative style with a sensitivity that captures the versatility of the Latin and of the stories that Ovid chose to tell. This is an especially effective text for studying Ovid.

Karl Galinsky

This is by far the best prose translation of Ovid's masterpiece. It fully captures the verve, nuance, and entertainment of Ovid's narration. The extensive and up-to-date notes are an additional bonus.

Editorial Reviews

The best version of Ovid's Metamorphoses available in English today . . . It is readable, alive, at times slangy, and actually catches Ovid's tone.
--Philadelphia Inquirer

No one can deny the merits of Slavitt's version. His English hexameter is a great success--a supple, fluid, and versatile medium that does Ovid's loosening of the Virgilian line full justice. And at his best he is very good indeed.
--Bernard Knox, New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

The best version of Ovid's Metamorphoses available in English today . . . It is readable, alive, at times slangy, and actually catches Ovid's tone.

Philadelphia Inquirer

No one can deny the merits of Slavitt's version. His English hexameter is a great success—a supple, fluid, and versatile medium that does Ovid's loosening of the Virgilian line full justice. And at his best he is very good indeed.

New York Review of Books - Bernard Knox

No one can deny the merits of Slavitt's version. His English hexameter is a great success—a supple, fluid, and versatile medium that does Ovid's loosening of the Virgilian line full justice. And at his best he is very good indeed.

— Bernard Knox

New York Review of Books

It is staggering how literary developments of the era we call "postmodern" force us to read Ovid today with a familiarity missing, perhaps, for 2,000 years. Maybe that is why Christoph Ransmayr reframed the master's "Metamorphoses" a few years ago in his cunning, beautiful, and apocalyptic novel, "The Last World" (1990). At any rate, we can see now that the techniques of postmodernism have less to do with invention than with a nostalgia for faith and values in an age that forbids them: postmodernism is pretending irony when no irony is felt at all and hoping no one else feels the irony either. So it is that Ovid, in an age when a spot of atheism had begun to touch every thinking person's heart, decided to retell the myths of old. In such an atmosphere, plain telling of the ancient Greek myths would have made him seem a kindly buffoon, so by a series of devices, Ovid draws attention to the "act" of telling, switching abruptly from hymn to burlesque, forcing events to rhyme, enfolding tales within tales (even interrupting the teller), harping on motifs (like that of doubling), and in short, doing everything he can to let his audience say, "Didn't he tell that part well?"--and so believe and then unbelieve the moment the tale is over. And how could the respectable Augustine believe in these gods who rape, mock chastity, mock marriage, and bumble their way through disaster after disaster? Reading Mandelbaum's extraordinary translation, one imagines Ovid in his darkest moods with the heart of Baudelaire. Lines like these (much more circumspect in Humphries' famous translation) are brutal and black, particularly when they follow so hard on a passage of burlesque: "Then with a veil of heavy fog, the god / concealed a vast expanse of land; Jove stopped / her flight; he raped chaste Io." Mandelbaum's translation is brilliant. It throws off the stiff and mild homogeneity of former translations and exposes the vivid colors of mockery, laughter, and poison woven so beautifully by the master. Mandelbaum is not always the greatest poet, but he is the most extraordinary of translators, and this translation cannot be recommended more highly. We need Ovid. He is our brother. He is our face in the mirror.

Stuart Whitwell