Customer Reviews

Ovid in Love: Ovid's Amores

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just in time for Valentine's Day comes the timeless gift of Ovid's handbook on love. The ways of man and maid have not changed in the intervening two millennia, and Guy Lee makes that clear with this light, witty, and appropriately naughty version of these love poems. And his loyalty to the original Latin is beyond reproach. As the translator of Ovid's Heroides (Dutton, 1972), I can attest to the difficulty of the task, but Lee carries it off without apparent effort. The illustrations add a vivacious charm and remind the reader that these poems are classics in both the popular and the traditional sense of the term. If you haven't time to brush up your Latin, or you never had any, this book is the answer!

This particular translation, by Guy Lee, captures the fluidity, idioms, and casual attitude of Ovid's Latin and puts it into equally casual, idiomatic, and fluid English. An enjoyable read, with fluid and casual illustrations as well.

The Amores are filled with lust, sex, explicitness, self-deprecating humor, rape, cheating, etc... This is the Rome you've all heard about; the culture painted on the walls of Pompeii.

Though I prefer Marlowe's, Lee's translation of the Amores is complete. Lee's translation is also accompanied by some of the most erotic and sexiest illustrations of any of the books reviewed.

The only issue I have is a perennial one with me. I don't like free verse translations of traditional poetry. Translate the form as well as the meaning. Lee's verse, to me, just feels too prosy and lazy, lacking that extra zing that meter can give. Ovid wrote his own verse in Elegaic Couplets using quantitative meter.

Nevertheless, the book is beautifully presented.

For this and a host of other reviews of erotic books, visit PoemShape and click on Books, Criticism and Reviews.

The many drawings in this book are delightful; they complement and illustrate the poems and are of impressively high quality. Worth buying for the drawings alone.