This is my Season of Ovid.

Ted Hughes has translated some of the stories from the larger Metamorphoses. I matched up the stories and read them out of order, but as they occurred in the larger book. They are a wonderful complement! They are briefer and (for lack of a better word) easier, and often helped me understand the stories better.

I am reading Metamorphoses with my book club and we have 5 more chapters to go (XV total chapters) but the last story in Hughes is from book XI.

Highly recommend, alone or as a companion read. Add in Wake, Siren by Nina Maclaughlin for a modern/feminist take and you’ve got yourself a homemade Ovid course. (And there is a lot more, of course. For example: Stephen Fry mythos & heroes. All that visual art and opera and ballet and… Ovid is everywhere.)

this poetry collection reminds me very much of the 2020 movie ‘emma’ - a modern adaptation that perfectly captures the essence of the original text while breathing new life into it for modern audiences

Having only previously read Ovid's love poems, I find this work illuminating. Here is his talent, his way with words, the reason for his legacy. My favorite quotes were:

From the Age of Gold (in Four Ages)

"Cities had not dug themselves in
Behind deep moats, guarded by towers.
No sword had bitten its own
Reflection in the shield. No trumpets
Magnified the battle-cries
Of lions and bulls
Out through the mouth-holes in helmets."

From the Age of Iron

"Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots.
And the long trunks of trees
That had never shifted in their lives
From some mountain fastness
Leapt in their coffins
From wavetop to wavetop,
Then out over the rim of the unknown."

After "The Odyssey" (and a scattering of mention of myths in my childhood) I was really keen to get into "Tales from Ovid".

A much more vicious pantheon of gods take the forefront here in the tales of sex, scandal, blood and betrayal. An absolutely riveting collection of tales that I found surprisingly easy to read (I was expecting a more Odyssey-like delivery).

I think that before reading this anthology, it is important to know a little bit about Ovid and the times he lived in - so I would advise just a quick bit of research (Wikipedia will do).

Ted Hughes, on his birthday August 17
A reawakened classical mythology which parallels that of the Jungian psychologist James Hillman, and a poetic classicism of refinement, passion, and beauty; so the works of Ted Hughes may be described. He is a figure of Orpheus, his poems songs of rapture and of the celebration of life and love, its mysteries and its joys; yet beware where they may lead. For the path of his renaissance leads backwards through time, like Merlin living from a potential future to his origins to confer the gift of prophecy, to an event horizon of inchoate chaos in which we may be immured as was Merlin in the tree of Nimue.
The poetry of Ted Hughes calls into question the nature and purpose of poetry and all art; the reading thereof made difficult by his being an anachronism, a Romantic in a modern age and closely aligned with his fellow Shakespearean and Neoplatonist Iris Murdoch.
On first reading his poems about nature and the society of crows, so many years ago, my immediate reaction was “Is this poetry?” It contained nothing I was expecting; no language play or social protest, nor the political satire implied by the references to Aristophanes and the theatrical traditions his works are steeped in; I assumed I was simply unfamiliar with the English political figures he was lampooning. More problematic, his poeticized natural history, so reminiscent of his Transcendentalist and Romantic models, and unlike Annie Dillard whose works so resemble his own, did not follow the structure of motifs and symbols nor the philosophical thematics of his forebears Walt Whitman and Byron.
What is poetry? Before all else, poetry is the forge of language, where we change the ways we are able to think about things, and to communicate with others. Here we find new words, meanings, structures, and the direction of origins and teleologies. By changing our thinking and sharing our thoughts with others, we change who we are, both ourselves and each other.
This is why we are as we speak and write; our language is nothing less than who we are.
Secondarily, poetry shares with all language and art a sociocultural adaptive function, its survival value, and a praxis, the action of its values.
The first category, that of experiment and creative origination, establishes meaning and value, the second regulates its usefulness.
These two categories are expressed as dyadic vital shaping forces which are interrelated, both necessary and neither good nor evil in themselves: a revolutionary force, and a conserving force. Lose the balance of these polarities and our ability to adapt to changing conditions suffers.
My quandary regarding Ted Hughes’ meaning and intention was resolved on reading the great book Crow, hymns of classical paganism to a god of his own invention; magical conjurations, the summoning of archaic human potentialities, and a harkening to our origins. The story arc of the poems gathered herein follows the structure of Biblical myths, replacing Jesus with the Trickster figure of Crow. A restoration of our stolen traditions from antiquity, it represents a conservatism in the finest sense.
A Dancer to God: tributes to T.S. Eliot, an investigation of his hero’s great poem The Wasteland, is a magnificent work of critical scholarship that also functions as a gateway to his wonderful and foundational study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. The latter is one of two essential works on the Bard, the other being Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
His translations of classical dramatic works merit study as their own subject and inform one’s reading of his poetry; Racine’s Phedre, Euripides's Alcestus, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and his immortal classic Tales From Ovid. The latter mythologizes his relationship with Sylvia Plath, which he addresses directly in the superb poetry collections Birthday Letters and Howls & Whispers.
Tales From Ovid is beautiful and magnificent; though it could be read as a sacred text of pagan mysteries along with Crow and Cave Birds, a word of caution; if you are going to cast yourself and your partner as mythic figures, don’t choose the tragically doomed couples. Madness and death are not enviable goals; indeed I believe he choose Sylvia Plath as his destroying angel, and in so doing doomed them both.. His reimaginations of the myths of Actaeon and Diana, Orpheus and Eurydice, Venus and Adonis, Echo and Narcissus, et cetera are brilliant and gorgeous, as if we could move by the spell his words cast into the worlds represented in the paintings of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, but while they hang prettily on my walls I fully grasp the menace and twisted sexual power of the stories they depict; these are warnings, not myths to live by.
Driven by a volitional embrace of his Freudian death wish which acted as a tragic flaw, sabotaging his relationships both actual and with the idealized eternal feminine he marked himself as a sacrifice to, sending shockwaves and fissures of maladaptive sexuality and gendered identity throughout his great project of pagan reawakening, Ted Hughes also remains a brilliant poet and interpreter of classical literature and archetypal psychology, flawed but great.
In the end I can think of no greater compliment than to say he fought his corner well, with tenacity, fearlessness, and imagination. His was a strange conservatism, encompassing revolutionary means to his ends, a rejection of the modern originating with Christianity, born of his classical studies as was that of the great iconoclast Nietzsche’s. Align him with his sources and peers T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Byron, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, James Hillman, and to a degree Shakespeare and the classical dramatists and poets which inform his work.
So, read his marvelous works, but beware: Here Be Dragons.

I really enjoyed Ted Hughes's translations of Ovid; the language he used felt more modern than most translations and gave the stories a little more clarity. It's probably one of the better classic translations I've read, and I think Ovid is one of my top favorite classic poets. Hughes did great work bringing the stories of the Metamorphoses to life.

I never knew Ovid could be so enthralling. Ted Hughes has done a magnificent job of translating/interpreting these stories for the modern reader. One of the more standard translations of "Metamorphoses" was required reading in my first year of college, and oh, what a dreadful slog it was.

But I've been taking a Teaching Company course on Greek mythology and wanted to brush up, see how Ovid compared to Hesiod's Theogony too. Dreading the effort, I went to the library and found this wonderful book. I believe even someone not so terribly interested in ancient Greeks would enjoy these stories as well. Truly terrific.

nothing against ted hughes, or ovid, but i just get bored after a while. partly because of all the long crazy greek names and the fact that i'm supposed to know who these people and places are, which i don't (and don't care to) and partly just because after the first couple it's really easy to see where things are going (or at least how things are going to get there). some of the stories work better than others... callisto and arcas is pretty devastating, and tereus is amazing, and there are lots of great other moments and the guy has ideas like nobody's business, but in general it just sort of feels like everything turns into everything else and so on and so on and so on, without beginning or end or rhyme or reason... which i suppose is sort of the point, philosophically / theologically / storytellalogically / whateverally... sort of unsatisfying to me, though, after a while, and actually made me a bit queasy. it also sorta made me want to read auerbach's Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature again.

i've read other translations of ovid, meanwhile, and i have to say this one certainly is... muscular. it reads more like the iliad than i would expect. but whatever, i'm no classicist.

The last time I read this was 5 years ago. This book captures the flavour of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from which it has adapted a small selection of its tales.

Back then, like now, I’m struck by the sharp, vivid imagery.

Juno rose from her throne
Like a puff of smoke from a volcano.
In a globe of whirling light
She arrived at the home of Semele.

Four lines but you just know things aren’t going to go well from Semele. Semele is one of the many women who faces Juno’s wrath for her husband’s lust. Like the other tales here, the ending is tragic, and it’s only after reflection that the embroidered words jolt.

If you’re new to Ovid’s work this is a good place to start, but I warn you, as beautiful as the poetry is, the content in places can be very unsettling.

kiss my ass ted hughes

Nearing my end of reading through Hughes's major work and here we have 24 translations of tales from Ovid. I haven't read any of Ovid yet, so have no idea what other translations are like, but this does have the feel and voice of Hughes and at his best too. Not a single thing is out of place or badly done, all 24 tales are perfect in content, writing and they are perfectly choosen , that they flow into the next one. Highlights~ "Phaethon" "Tiresias" "Echo and Narcissus" "Hercules and Dejanira" "Barcchus and Pentheus" "Midas" "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus" "Tereus" and "Pyramus and Thisbe".

No wonder everyone converted to Christianity, the pagan gods just couldn't chill out