Customer Reviews

The Love Poems (Oxford World's Classics)

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Melville's translation fails for one specific reason: the Latin text is not translated faithfully, and he sacrifices an accurate representation for producing rhyming English verse. I should remind potential readers that Latin poets did not produce rhyming poetry, and the tendency for English-speaking scholars to do this is a rather out-dated, 19th century (and earlier) practice. Look to Peter Green's Penguin translation, which is a much better translation of these excellent poems.

The poetry here is racy, beautiful, funny, and provocative. The translations are well done (who am I to judge?), preserving the original intent and meaning, but the notes tend a little on the prudish side. While the notes are invaluable for a serious student (me), and especially since some translations of Ovid's Amores have no notes, this editor leaves out some pertinent information about Caesar Augustus, and family, who ruled at the time of publication, and whom Ovid addresses occasionally in his works. Also, the translator admittedly prefers the Metamorphoses, seemingly because it is gentler and more mature, so I am left wondering whether this colored his translation of the Amores--it's racy, but is it as racy as the original?

I see it as this: everyone should have some writers or books to constantly go back to, and re-read as time goes on, this Dryden translation of Ovid is such a masterpiece that I go back to it as much as I can.