Customer Reviews

Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses (AMERICAN)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anyone who may have seen the brilliant Anthony Hopkins' movie, TITUS, a movie based on Shakespeare's most Ovidian play, 'Titus Andronicus,' and one which actually features Ovid's book, and who may now have a yen to read or re-read Ovid, could do worse than take a look at Ted Hughes' reworkings, in modern idiom, of Ovid's fascinating tales.

Hughes, in his brief but quite informative Preface, finds in both Shakespeare and Ovid a "common taste for tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion." He continues : "Above all, Ovid was interested in passion. Or rather, in what a passion feels like to the one possessed of it. Not just ordinary passion either, but passion 'in extremis'" (pages viii-ix).

As a passionate man himself, one can understand the appeal that Ovid has for Hughes, and may suspect that he, if anyone, was the man to give us a modernized Ovid. Personally I found myself enthralled by Ted Hughes' versions of these tales. So what, if in furtherance of his poetic aims, he has reworked the tales to some extent? Hughes is an exceptionally talented poet, and I'll leave it to those who are his equals in poetic talent to argue with his procedures. I doubt there can be many.

Hughes' incredible skill as a poet is everywhere in evidence on these pages. His handling of image and sound and rhythm and line length, his lucid diction, and his stunning ability to find precisely the right word - as in such lines as "no earth / spun in empty air on her own magnet" (pages 3-4), or "Everwhere he taught / the tree its leaf" (page 5), or "Echo collapsed in sobs, / As her voice lurched among the mountains" (page 77), or "And there she was - the Arcadian beauty, Callisto. / He stared. Lust bristled up his thighs / And poured into the roots of his teeth" (page 46) - such skill leaves me in awe. Let purists rage, but if this isn't exactly what Ovid said, then perhaps it's what he should have said, or would have said if he too had been a vigorous Northerner like Hughes.

There are free translations of Ovid such as that of Ted Hughes. There are also more literal translations such as that of Rolfe Humphries. Both have their uses and it isn't the case that one is good and the other is bad. Hughes is good and Humphries is not bad either.

I suppose what it comes down to is whether you prefer major poet Ovid as filtered through the sensibility of another major poet, or Ovid as filtered through the mind of a Latin scholar (persons who are not usually noted for their poetic abilities, though Housman was an exception). But if it's 'poetry' you are interested in, you won't be going far wrong in plumping for Hughes. It's one of those golden books you'll want to return to often.

As an appropriation of an appropriation, hughes' manages to bring to life the classic tales of greek mythology and modernize ovid's original tales yet at the same time keeping up the essential message that ovid was bringing across 2000 years ago. Even if you do'nt speak English one could understand teh works of hughes' perfectly, his range of vocabulary is genius in itself. the language slips and slides around your mouth, burning like brimstone or as languid as lagoons.
try this for size:

Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile

Rivers of milk mingled with rivers of nectar
and out of the black oak oozed amber honey

I must confess I have to read this for my literature course, but I am so glad that I did! I never would have picked it up otherwise, whilst seemingly sophisticated and slippery it is simultaneously so simple and easy to relate to in a way that hardly condescends or patronizes the reader's understanding.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone, even if you don't speak english, even if you don't understand some of the words, it's the way it sounds that counts.
Read it with your eyes closed, you will never want to put it down.

Ovid's tales are fantastic, but few readers make it through all of his tales. Hughes picks only the most famous and makes memorable translations of them. I use this book in our high school English curriculum for mythology -- it's just enough that students learn the essential Greek myths, but not too much that it becomes overwhelming. Hughes' translations are emminently readable. Sure, he could have included more, but those he does include are fanstastic and very vivid.

Some translations of Ovid are slow. Not this one. The Humphries -- long standard -- is clear but slow and earthbound. This is the most poetic translation I have found. Plus Hughes keesp all the "good bits."

Not of course a full translation, but the right place for the curious to start.

I was 16 when I first read this book. It is now a year later and I have read it about 5 times so far. Get it! It is the best ever. OK, I admit I studied Latin and Classics in English boarding school for 6 years so I'm slightly biased..but how can anyone not realise the significance of this book! Hughes captures Ovid's spirit well...READ IT!!!

While not very strict or literal in its translation, this is still the most lively Ovid you will find. Here is Ovid at his best: swift, penetrating, conclusive: Hughes picked the best and then stripped them down to a heart racing sleekness.

To answer bayoubill's question regarding this book: "When will he translate the rest of the Metamorphoses? The Odyssey?" While that would have been great to see, Ted Hughes died about a year after the publication of Tales from Ovid. Ted's dead, bayoubill. Ted's dead.

By the way, excellent translation. Those who want to move on to read the Metamorphoses in its entirety would do well to read the 2003 Charles Martin translation, which is also excellent.

The 24 selections of Ovid's Metamorphoses that Ted Hughes translated is so modern and orginal, after reading Tales from Ovid by Ovid, Ted Hughes, I wish Hughes had translated the entire epic.

Hughes is a brilliant poet and the way he wield words dazzled me for hours:

Then Narcissus wept into the pool.
His tears shattered the still shrine
And his image blurred.
He cried after it: "Don't leave me.
If I cannot touch you at least let me see you.
Let me nourish my starving, luckless love-
If only by looking".

Beautiful, huh?

I agree with most of the positive reviewers of this book, in fact, it's a wonderful book. It's 24 or 25 freely translated, modernized Greek myths in their Ovidian versions, out of 250 or so that Ovid wrote. In the introduction, Hughes said that the stories had become part of our culture's subconscious memory, and it occured to me that that may no longer be true, and that Hughes' work of preservation here and in his anthologies of poetry had a certain touching hopefulness to it. These are great stories with implications way beyond their obvious meanings. The great enemy of mankind's future, it seems to me, and as many other people have said, is Corporate Mankind: the unpoetic, the emotionally deaf, unmusical person, greedy and mendacious. Man becoming a kind of technologically sophisticated, highly organized human insect. Anyway, Hughes was one of the people who hoped this was not our fate and who tried to do something about it. This book was one of the ways, probably the most delightful, engaging of his efforts. His versions of these myths could not be improved upon.

It makes love to your mind. When will he translate the rest of the Metamorphoses? The Odyssey? Go Ted, go.