OvidReviews

A casual compilation of ALL THE STORIES of transformation from Greek and Roman mythology (and tons of off-topic tales as well-- like an unexpected rant about why people should be vegetarians?). Please Ovid, save some myths for everyone else!

Rereading after decades.
Phew, mostly rape, murder, and incest. In ten-beat, unrhymed lines.
Then at the end he throws in Mr. Vegetarian, Pythagoras, and the deification of Julius Caesar. The metamorphoses in these are a bit of a stretch. Pythagoras saying that all things change into other things, and a man becoming a god to justify the deification of his son. Augustus is such a swell guy, his dad must be a god! Make it so, Mr. Crusher.
The remarkable things, one of which I noticed as a 14 year old, was the trans story. And it turns out there are two. Both trans-men, of course. And the dual-gender of Hermaphroditus. Neither of these very trans- or bi-friendly, but notable all the same.
The Story of Salmacis (dual gender, but the fountain waters thenceforth to weaken males)
The Story of Iphis and Ianthe (daughter passed off as a son set to marry another woman transformed on their wedding day)
The Story of Caeneus (woman tired of rape asking her rapist to no longer be a woman so to never suffer that again - rapist, as usual, was a god who could arrange this - and the trans-man then becomes a great warrior)
People turning into plants, animals, and stone eventually gets tiresome. But it's in the title.

Edición y traducción de Vicente López Soto

Oh my. Unbearable in Russian. Mostly due to its meter and language, probably imitating the original. With all due respect I thought what's the worth of trudging on? I'm not a PhD student in Ancient Literature after all and the plot is not gripping, unlike many other primary sources.

Good, fun reading, though the modern translation is just a bit over the top.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/metamorphoses-by-publius-ovidius-naso-translated....

Way way back 40 years ago, I studied Latin for what were then called O-levels, and one of the set texts was a Belfast-teenager-friendly translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I loved it. If you don’t know, it’s a narrative poem in fifteen books re-telling classical legends, concentrating in particular on those where there is a change of shape – usually humans turned into animals, vegetables or minerals, though with other variations too. It’s breezy, vivid and sometimes funny, and it’s been a store of easily accessible ancient lore for centuries.

I’d always meant to get back to it properly, and it finally popped up on my list of books that I owned but had not yet blogged here. However, my 40-year-old copy is safely in Northern Ireland, so I acquired both the latest Penguin translation, by Stephanie McCarter, and Ted Hughes’ selection of twenty-four choice chapters, and read them – I took the McCarter translation in sequence, and then jumped across to read the relevant sections if Hughes had translated them, though he put them in a different order.

I do find Ovid fascinating. In some ways he speaks to the present day reader very directly – a lot of the emotions in the Ars Amatoria could be expressed by lovers two thousand years later. But here he’s taking material that was already very well known, the Greek and Roman classical legendarium, and repackaging it for a sophisticated audience in the greatest city in the world. The book ends (McCarter’s translation):

Where Roman power spreads through conquered lands,
I will be read on people’s lips. My fame
will last across the centuries. If poets’
prophecies can hold any truth, I’ll live.

And he did. I have been particularly struck by Ovid’s popularity among the patrons of my favourite 17th-century stuccador, Jan Christiaan Hansche. A number of his most interesting ceilings feature stories from Ovid, some of them well known, some less so. Sixteen centuries after Ovid laid down his pen, his work was still part of the standard canon of literature known to all educated Western Europeans.

So. The two translations are different and serve different purposes. McCarter’s mandate was to translate the whole of the Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter in English. She is necessarily constrained to giving us an interpretation of Ovid’s text, with all of its limitations, and confining her own original thoughts to footnotes and other supporting material.

In a very interesting introduction, she is clear about the many scenes of rape in the story. But she also makes it clear that Ovid has a lot more active female characters than are in his sources, and they get more to do. She gives some telling examples of previous translators projecting later concepts of femininity onto Ovid’s fairly unambiguous original words.

Given the contemporary debate, it’s also interesting that Ovid has several examples of gender fluidity – not really presented as a standard part of everyday life, but nonetheless as a phenomenon that happens. For Ovid, we must simply accept that someone’s current gender may not be the one that they were born with.

Ted Hughes, on the other hand, was translating favourite bits of Ovid because he had reached the stage of his career where he could do what he wanted. He could leave out all the bits he found boring (I haven’t counted, but I think he translates about only 40% of Ovid’s text), and he could add his own flourishes at will. Inevitably this makes for a more satisfactory reading experience, though it is incomplete.

Both translations bring to life Ovid’s vivid imagery, which really throws you into the narrative. For a compare and contrast passage, here is the beginning of their treatment of the story of Phaethon, the son of the Sun who crashed to disaster trying to drive his father’s chariot (a favourite topic for Hansche). I think that the differences speak for themselves:

McCarter:
The Sun’s child Phaethon equaled him in age
and mind. But Epaphus could not endure
his boasts, his smugness, and his arrogance
that Phoebus was his father and declared,
“You crazily trust all your mother says!
Your head is swollen by a phony father!”
Phaethon blushed as shame repressed his wrath.
He took these taunts to Clymene, his mother,
and told her, “Mother, to upset you more,
although I am free-spoken and quick-tempered,
I could not speak, ashamed these insults could
be uttered and that I could not refute them.
If I am truly born of holy stock,
give me a sign and claim me for the heavens!”
Wrapping his arms around his mother’s neck,
he begged—by his life, Merops’ life, his sisters’
weddings—that she give proof of his true father.

Hughes:
When Phaethon bragged about his father, Phoebus
The sun-god,
His friends mocked him.
‘Your mother must be crazy
Or you’re crazy to believe her.
How could the sun be anybody’s father?’
In a rage of humiliation
Phaethon came to his mother, Clymene.
‘They’re all laughing at me,
And I can’t answer. What can I say? It’s horrible.
I have to stand like a dumb fool and be laughed at.
‘If it’s true, Mother,’ he cried, ‘if the sun,
The high god Phoebus, if he is my father,
Give me proof.
Give me evidence that I belong to heaven.’
Then he embraced her. ‘I beg you,
‘On my life, on your husband Merops’ life,
And on the marriage hopes of my sisters,
Only give me proof that the sun is my father.’

I think I’d recommend that a reader unfamiliar with Ovid start with Hughes and then go on to McCarter to get the full story.

Forget agony aunts and tips on sex and love in glossy magazines - two millennia ago, Ovid had already been there and done that in his Ars Amatoria. Ostensibly a manual for would-be lovers, the Art of Love is also a witty and irreverent satire on a society obsessed with wealth and physical pleasure. In this amoral context, it is praiseworthy to be as promiscuous as possible, as long as you do not get caught out by any of your lovers, just as it is recommendable to seduce the maid to get to her mistress. Gifts are the surest way to a women's heart, Ovid cynically observes, and he suggests some presents which provide good value for money. All's fair in love and war, as long as one gets to enjoy the spoils.

Ovid's entertaining prose does tend to get bogged down in copious classical and mythological references, which is where translator Cesare Vivaldi's erudite notes come in handy. This edition presents the original Latin prose alongside an Italian translation.

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Leitura divertida, acho que se eu tivesse um filho leria para ele.½

This translation is, on occasion, a bit ridiculous.

I've been meaning to read Ovid for quite some time—since discovering Megan Kearney's online comic Beauty and the Beast, actually, which makes mention of him just often enough to prove enticing—but I had no idea he would be so much fun!

Granted, much of the credit for my enjoyment of the works included in this book is due to Julia Dyson Hejduk, whose translation, introduction, and notes strive to capture and convey the full extent of Ovid's wit, absurdity, and learnéd roguishness. I'm torn now between searching out further Ovid...and waiting until Hejduk publishes another translation so I can properly savor him.

A lovely and effortlessly readable translation, though I did miss having little notes from the translator on particularly tricky puns, idioms, turns of phrase as I found in Hejduk's The Offense of Love. Perhaps there aren't any in Metamorphoses? Certainly, none of the various translations I was able to compare online seemed to have any such footnotes.

And while I missed having the translator double as Ovid scholar, as Hejduk does, Johnson's introduction to the text proved helpful and insightful, especially given the vast gulf between Ovid's time and my own. Taken together with Lombardo's translation, it has only reinforced my interest in reading more of Ovid's work—and perhaps discovering more of Ovid, himself, in the process.

Some of the Single Letters:

Heroides I: Penelope to Ulysses
It has been ten years since the end of the Trojan War; Ulysses (Greek: Odysseus) has been through all the adventures recorded in the Odyssey and has almost battled his way home to Ithaca. Penelope, ignorant of her husband's imminent return, laments his long delay--and has a few sharp words to say about the possible reasons for it.

Heroides III: Briseis to Achilles
During the siege of Troy, Briseis is taken from Achilles by the leader of the Greek armies, Agamemnon. Achilles, incensed at the insult, refuses to fight for the Greeks any further. In an attempt to resolve the dispute, Agamemnon sends emissaries to Achilles, who offer to return Briseis and to give him lavish gifts in addition if he will return to the fighting. Achilles refuses--and Briseis writes to him, asking him why he will not take her back.

Heroides V: Oenone to Paris
The nymph Oenone has been abandoned by her lover, Paris, a younger son of King Priam of Troy. Following the famous "judgement," in which Paris selected Venus as the most beautiful of the goddesses on Olympus, Paris seized the opportunity to wed the beautiful Helen, daughter of Zeus and wife of Menelaus. Oenone complains of her lover's infidelity and sharply criticizes the virtue of his much-married bride, alluding as well to the havoc of the Trojan War which follows the abduction of Helen.

Heroides VI: Hypsipyle to Jason
Hypsipyle, the ruler of Lemnos, gave shelter to Jason and the Argonauts when they were on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Hypsipyle and Jason were married, and Jason promised to return when the quest was accomplished. Hypsipyle, now the mother of twins by Jason, has received news that he is safely home, and that he has brought with him a new wife--the sorceress, Medea. Hypsipyle writes to Jason, reproaching him for deserting her and questioning the character of Medea.

Heroides VII: Dido to Aeneas
Aeneas, a refugee from the fall of Troy and the future founder of Rome, was cast ashore on the coast of Africa and sought refuge in the city of Carthage. He stayed for quite some time and became romantically involved with the city's queen, Dido. Now he is about to sail from Carthage to pursue his own destiny in Italy. Dido upbraids him for leaving her, in this intriguing reprise of Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid.

Heroides X: Ariadne to Theseus
Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Theseus is the son of King Aegeus of Athens. Theseus came to Crete vowing to end the human tribute that Minos demanded of Athens each year--fourteen youths to be sent into the Labyrinth as food for the monstrous Minotaur. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and helped him complete his quest. The two of them fled together, but on the way back to Athens Ariadne was abandoned on the island of Naxos. Ariadne writes from Naxos, reproaching Theseus for deserting her.

HeroidesXII: Medea to Jason
Jason was the leader of the Argonauts, who brought the Golden Fleece back from Colchis. Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis, helped him capture the Fleece in exchange for his promise to marry her and take her back to Greece with him. Now Jason is abandoning Medea to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth; Medea is being exiled. Medea writes to Jason, reminding him of all that she has done for him, and foreshadowing the grisly revenge that she takes on him in Euripides' Medea.

Heroides XV: Sappho to Phaon
Sappho, one of the great lyric poets of the ancient world, has been abandoned by her lover, Phaon. Although she has had a number of romantic involvements with women in the past, Phaon was her only male lover. Now she remains behind, broken-hearted, on the island of Lesbos, while he has departed for Sicily. She upbraids him for his desertion of her and begs him to return; she imagines him wooing the young girls of Sicily while she remains behind. She also informs him of her plan to throw herself from the cliffs of Leucos if she cannot be with him.

Ovid's mythology classic begins so beautifully with Creation,
then delves into harrowing, mostly gruesome and horrifying details of bleeding entrails,
murders, rapes, revenge...
with only a few good tales woven in.

It also ends beautifully with the surprise of Pythagoras!

Read for Reading 1001, Quarterly Read 2022. A book of mythology, poetry, Roman. Did I enjoy it? Not so much. Time period covered from creation to the deification of Caesar. Influenced much literature to come.

Amazing and vast collection of mythology with linkages throughout.

Ovidio el poeta basado en sus experiencias personales y en su vision del mundo, usa una prosa bien hilvanada y ejemplos mitologicos e historicos de su epoca para hablar sobre muchos detalles de los cortejos y la vida de los enamorados, lo cual da un libro valiosisimo para ser examinado al detalle y muchas minucias para una buena charla.

Desconozco si el habla totalmente en modo subjetivo o esto puede tomarse como un pensamiento objetivo del siglo y lugar en donde el residia, sin embargo algunas cosas que dice mirando desde una perspectiva logica y quizas alejada de su contexto son demasiado polemicas con un claro enfoque hacia un machismo fuerte, tal vez la traduccion misma no sea buena, o el sentido de varias palabras que a mi no me gustan tengan otra connotacion o quizas exista un texto con deseos de ser satirico.

Forget agony aunts and tips on sex and love in glossy magazines - two millennia ago, Ovid had already been there and done that in his Ars Amatoria. Ostensibly a manual for would-be lovers, the Art of Love is also a witty and irreverent satire on a society obsessed with wealth and physical pleasure. In this amoral context, it is praiseworthy to be as promiscuous as possible, as long as you do not get caught out by any of your lovers, just as it is recommendable to seduce the maid to get to her mistress. Gifts are the surest way to a women's heart, Ovid cynically observes, and he suggests some presents which provide good value for money. All's fair in love and war, as long as one gets to enjoy the spoils.

Ovid's entertaining prose does tend to get bogged down in copious classical and mythological references, which is where translator Cesare Vivaldi's erudite notes come in handy. This edition presents the original Latin prose alongside an Italian translation.

Enjoyable stuff, though Frazer's rendition is kinda florid. I actually more enjoyed his longish "Appendix", where he explicates some of the more recondite deities mentioned in the text, and does so in a rather Golden Bough-ish manner.

Modern educators now issue more trigger warnings for this epic poem than Cupid has arrows, but it's an essential part of classical mythology in a superb verse translation. A considerable influence on both Chaucer and Shakespeare. Likely to be controversial at a college campus near you, but such are the sadly politically correct times we live in today. "In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas."

Also read in October 1986.

Myths are definitely one of my favorite aspects in studying history. The mystique of it, and the magic around them despite our modern explanations for many of the things myths explain. The myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses were no exception, with the inclusion of well known and not so known myths. I highly recommend this as a read.

If anyone wants to know where I go to get "stuff" for my books, and to what art I hopelessly measure up my "stuff," let me save you an interview. It's this book and very few others beside it.

Various myths and legends are strung together, with the common theme of physical transformations.

3/4 (Good).

I loved this book, and yet was also frequently bored. There are some bad stories, some great, and everything in between. When it's at its best, it's an unforgettable, etched-in-my-brain great. But even if they were all good stories, telling them in a single, giant poem, while impressive, is not helpful.½

Metamorphoses is a poem in fifteen books by the Augustan Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose myth-based historical framework. It is often called a mock-epic, as it is written in dactylic hexameter (the form of the great epic poems of the ancient tradition, such as “The Iliad”, “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid”), unlike Ovid's other works. But, rather than following and extolling the deeds of a great hero like the traditional epics, Ovid’s work leaps from story to story, often with little or no connection other than that they all involve transformations of one sort or another. Sometimes, a character from one story is used as a (more or less tenuous) connection to the next story, and sometimes the mythical characters themselves are used as the story-tellers of “stories within stories”.

Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature. The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is that of love (and especially the trans-formative power of love), whether it be personal love or love personified in the figure of Cupid, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to a hero. Unlike the predominantly romantic notions of love that were "invented" in the Middle Ages, however, Ovid viewed love more as a dangerous, destabilizing force than a positive one, and demonstrates how love has power over everyone, mortals and gods alike.

It is notable that the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated and made to appear ridiculous by fate and by Cupid in the stories. This is particularly true of Apollo, the god of pure reason, who is often confounded by irrational love. The poem inverts the accepted order to a large extent, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods (and their own somewhat petty desires and conquests) the objects of low humor, often portraying the gods as self-absorbed and vengeful. Perhaps because of the continuing power of Greek culture there remains the shadow of the power of the gods as a distinct recurrent theme throughout the poem.

Revenge is another common theme, and it is often the motivation for whatever transformation the stories are explaining, as the gods avenge themselves and change mortals into birds or beasts to prove their own superiority. Violence, and often rape, occurs in almost every story in the collection, and women are generally portrayed negatively, either as virginal girls running from the gods who want to rape them, or alternatively as malicious and vengeful.

As do all the major Greek and Roman epics, “Metamorphoses” emphasizes that hubris (overly prideful behavior) is a fatal flaw which inevitably leads to a character's downfall. Hubris always attracts the notice and punishment of the gods, who disdain all human beings who attempt to compare themselves to divinity. Some, especially women like Arachne and Niobe, actively challenge the gods and goddesses to defend their prowess, while others display hubris in ignoring their own mortality. Like love, hubris is seen by Ovid as a universal equalizer.

Ovid's “Metamorphoses” was an immediate success in its day, its popularity threatening even that of Virgil's “Aeneid”. One can even imagine it being used as a teaching tool for Roman children, from which they could learn important stories that explain their world, as well as learn about their glorious emperor and his ancestors. Particularly towards the end, the poem can be seen to deliberately emphasize the greatness of Rome and its rulers.

Not unlike many works of classical literature this poem has been a rich cultural resource ever since its inception, influencing authors from Chaucer and Shakespeare to, more recently, Ted Hughes, and composers from Gluck and Offenbach to Britten.

I'll confess to being skeptical when picking this book up. I knew the Heroides had a low reputation (unfairly, I now realise) and I hadn't rated Pollard's own work that highly before.

However this turned out to be a great discovery. The Heroides deserve to be much better known, as they once were - and it seems clear that only misogyny has hampered their reputation in recent centuries.

Pollard herself does a fine job with the translation. Personally I found some of the decisions a little *too* anachronistic - e.g. the use of the word 'slag': which took me back to my schooldays, but doesn't achieve the Read-this-by-the-Trevi-Fountain magic that was aimed for. Beyond this, Pollard's direct style works perfectly: putting the emotion front-and-centre rather than cluttering it up with fussy syntax.

Glad to have been introduced to this.