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

by Ted Hughes (Author) "Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed..." (more)
Key Phrases: twelve labors

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
England's poet laureate Ted Hughes first turned his hand to Ovid's Metamorphoses when he--along with other prominent English-language poets such as Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, and Charles Simic--contributed poems to the anthology After Ovid. In the three years following After Ovid's publication, Hughes continued working with the Metamorphoses, eventually completing the 24 translations collected here. Culling from 250 original tales, Hughes has chosen some of the most violent and disturbing narratives Ovid wrote, including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, Bacchus and Pentheus, and Semele's rape by Jove. Classical purists may be offended at the occasional liberties Hughes takes with Ovid's words, but no one will quarrel with the force and originality of Hughes's verse, or with its narrative skill. This translation is an unusual triumph--a work informed by the passion and wit of Ovid, yet suffused with Hughes's own distinctive poetic sensibility. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Hughes, the renowned author of innumerable works of poetry, prose, and children's literature and currently the poet laureate of England, offers a lively, readable, rendering of 24 tales from Ovid's Metamorphosis. The translations are unrhymed poems in their own right, but this collection is most welcome for making the most popular book of the classical era?a veritable source-book for writers during the Middle Ages, not to mention Chaucer and Shakespeare?so pleasantly accessible to the general reader. A fine addition to all libraries; highly recommended.?Thomas F. Merrill, Univ. of Delaware, Newark
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525870
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525873
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,709 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of those golden books you'll want to return to often., June 5, 2001

By	tepi "tepi" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great translation, great selection, May 29, 2000

By	M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant stuff, October 25, 2005

By	Critique that "Riss" (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the "Metamorphoses" (Paperback)

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.