This impressive relic of antiquity spans a wide panoply of themes, characters and situations. It's simply magnificent. Scholars have noted an opaque style in Metamorphoses, and someone reading commentary like this might believe this multifaceted poem is vacuous...ornamentation and little else. However, as I read A. D. Melville's glorious, if abstruse and demanding, translation, I feel I'm experiencing a wellspring of William Shakespeare--the material is that colorful and full of life. And of course I am, because when the Bard set off to write plays for his highly successful acting company, he grabbed Ovid's Metamorphoses; as many Shakespeare fans know, it had been assigned reading during his grammar school years.
Ovid's scenes are beautifully woven: the rhetorics and structures, usually borrowed from existing stories, are clever, and the characters live and breathe. Although the effects of the many cross-currents among god and mortal, creature and nature, etcetera are, at least superficially, those of wild fantasy and myth, examples of the poet's subtle-yet-overriding Logoi can be found in passages like Narcissus and Echo, Tiresias and Pyramus and Thisbe, where the action seems as much fated and rational as ridiculous. That is, Ovid employs artifice wherein one conceit mirrors and affects another (and yet another and another and so on) in clear, logical fashion. For example:
When Apollo wielded his bow, writes Ovid, "He drew two arrows of opposing power./ One shaft that rouses love and one that routs it." Or when describing anthropomorphic pathos of nature and earth, the artist suggests, "Then hungry nature lacking nourishment/ Will faint and, starving, starve her furnaces." This inspired language is masterfully rendered by Melville, who likes to end passages with rhymed couplets like: "And in its stead they found a flower--behold/ White petals clustered round a cup of gold!"
Unlike so many contemporary translators, Melville is after more than mere information and "accuracy" here. He's striving for fidelity to the original, Latin text vis-à-vis the reader's experience, and with the help of E. J. Kenney's useful--if too short--introduction and the book's copious endnotes, I feel the effort yields success. Compared with Mandelbaum's disappointing
The Metamorphoses of Ovid
, an overly bland and technical piece for someone who displayed such remarkable prowess in
The Aeneid of Virgil (Bantam Classics)
, this Oxford edition transcends and entertains.
As it should, too, because Metamorphoses is great fun. So much so, it inspired a school-aged bard six centuries later.
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Lines are NOT numbered; Difficult Organization of Footnotes
As for translation from the Latin poem, the Oxford text is readable and each line is translated to create a corresponding English line (the Penguin translation takes up multiple lines for each one of the original Latin lines);However, unlike most epic poems published today, this Oxford version does not include numbers for the lines of text at 5, 10, 15, 20, etc, intervals. So the lines are NOT numbered. Instead the lines are only listed at the top of each page e.g. “Lines 128-158” which makes it more difficult to follow. More awkward is the task of finding the footnotes, which are NOT numbered either; instead, they are asterisks marked * which are all identical but corresponding with the books (vii, viii, ix, x) listed at the top of the page and relisted in the footnotes. Basically, a consistently higher percentage of time is required to maneuver between the text, the lines, and the footnotes.Also, FYI, this is probably NOT recommended for novice Ovid readers, but I am not sure which publication is.
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2009
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2022
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2021
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2023
However, unlike most epic poems published today, this Oxford version does not include numbers for the lines of text at 5, 10, 15, 20, etc, intervals. So the lines are NOT numbered. Instead the lines are only listed at the top of each page e.g. “Lines 128-158” which makes it more difficult to follow. More awkward is the task of finding the footnotes, which are NOT numbered either; instead, they are asterisks marked * which are all identical but corresponding with the books (vii, viii, ix, x) listed at the top of the page and relisted in the footnotes. Basically, a consistently higher percentage of time is required to maneuver between the text, the lines, and the footnotes.
Also, FYI, this is probably NOT recommended for novice Ovid readers, but I am not sure which publication is.
Lines are NOT numbered; Difficult Organization of Footnotes
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2023
As for translation from the Latin poem, the Oxford text is readable and each line is translated to create a corresponding English line (the Penguin translation takes up multiple lines for each one of the original Latin lines);Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2023
However, unlike most epic poems published today, this Oxford version does not include numbers for the lines of text at 5, 10, 15, 20, etc, intervals. So the lines are NOT numbered. Instead the lines are only listed at the top of each page e.g. “Lines 128-158” which makes it more difficult to follow. More awkward is the task of finding the footnotes, which are NOT numbered either; instead, they are asterisks marked * which are all identical but corresponding with the books (vii, viii, ix, x) listed at the top of the page and relisted in the footnotes. Basically, a consistently higher percentage of time is required to maneuver between the text, the lines, and the footnotes.
Also, FYI, this is probably NOT recommended for novice Ovid readers, but I am not sure which publication is.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2013
Top reviews from other countries
Princess jewel
Beautiful Prose and very poetic
Reviewed in Canada on August 3, 2023Sebastião Eugênio de Souza Neto
Metamorfoses
Reviewed in Brazil on September 19, 2020
Mehmet Sonmez
A beautifully translated Ovid
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 5, 2020Amazon Customer
Great Book! A must for every literature lover
Reviewed in India on May 24, 2017