It was Dante's Inferno that first led me to Ovid's Metmorphoses: tales that explore the ways in which the violent passions of the soul apply pressure to the body until it changes shape. In Dante's Hell, shape-changes are governed by divine justice--punishments fitted to the sinners' crimes--but Ovid's world is governed by the gods' caprice, punishing, rescuing, rewarding and destroying sinners and victims alike. It is hard to say which is the more true depiction of the way we live, but reading Ovid, one feels the world to be dazzlingly, magically beautiful and terrifyingly violent all at once, full of passions more powerful than wisdom and uncontrollable urges toward hubris. Rereading the tales this summer at the same time that I have been tackling Cien años de soledad, I couldn't help but see in Ovid an ancestor of the Magical Realists whose modern myths are inspired by that same conviction of the imagination that insists that eros and thanatos, not gravity or atomic energy, are the true elemental forces of the universe and that human emotions in their extremes of pathos and desire exert a sympathetic power over the natural order of the world--whatever Ruskin might insist to the contrary.

I've not read any other translations of Ovid and I don't know Latin, so I have little choice but to take these selections from the Metamorphoses at face value.

That value is very high: Hughes writes gripping, driving poetry that impatiently whips you along the narrative, with hardly a chance to catch your breathe sometimes. Faster paced than many a novel, there is no chance of being lulled to sleep by endless iambs here. Startling, powerful, often brutal metaphors pay no heed to shouts of "Anachronism!" and use whatever image suits Hughes' purpose. There is hardly a dull moment in the entire volume.

Anybody who thought narrative poetry was dead needs to think again: Hughes brought nature observation back to the fore-front of modern poetry with The Hawk in the Rain and subsequent volumes; here he rescues narrative verse from the Romantics and gives it to anybody who loves a good story.
Further - if you had no interest in the Classics before, you will after reading this.

I have to look back to Crow to find the previous volume of Hughes' poetical works that I responded to so uniformly positively.

Like you, like us all, I've been meaning to read the Metamorphoses for, like, ever. The intro to this gorgeously-translated edition highlights the intense passion with which Ovid was so preoccupied, and the ways that's resonated across millennia is pretty amazing. However, as with most classics, I don't feel I've got a lot to say on this one except: if you can put aside what a dick Ted Hughes was, you're in for something pretty fucking exceptional. I spent ages trying to find the "right" translation, and if this text isn't complete, it more than makes up for it in the intensity and diction of the writing. It reads easily, beautifully, and poetically while still capturing a raw depth to Ovid's words. Also Billy's my boy and this isn't new info but oh man Shakespeare had no new ideas love yall bye

Beautifully translated and narrated by Ted Hughes

A wonderful re-imagining of some wonderful stories to begin with.

I'm a huge fan of Ovid and have an abiding admiration for Ted Hughes' poetry, so to stumble onto what was one of Hughes' last works was an unexpected delight. Hughes maintains Ovid's playful and satirical style while also cleverly modernizing the myths.

As I've never read any other version of Ovid's classic, I can't comment on Hughes' faithfulness to the original, but if you like your poetry rip-snorting, earthy, sensual, blood-warming, soul-stirring, this is the book for you. I've read a lot of Hughes' work, and I think this is his greatest poetic legacy.

Beautiful. Powerful. I wish I had read long ago.

Good intro to Ovid. More than just a translation--think of it as cover song with the added touch that gives it new life. Passionate, very passionate (the dude was married to Sylvia Plath, he learned from the best).

I read the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses (2007) before reading this edition by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. My review of the Penguin Classics edition can be found here: Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (http://feliciareviewsbooks.blogspot.c...). The Penguin Classics edition is much longer, much more detailed, and increasingly complex, partly due to the fact that more stories were included and the language (translated by Mary M. Innes) is closer to Old English than is this edition translated by Ted Hughes. That being said, Hughes' translation is phenomenal in that his selections seem deliberate and his use of words is laconic in a very keen childlike way; the stories almost read like short fables, even for all the horror they hold. Both are recommendable depending on how much time the reader has, and how advanced the reader might be. Though Hughes' Tales might also allow for a broadened and finer focus of the essence of some of the most cautionary tales within Ovid's original Latin text.

A blossoming of thought occurred to me after finishing Tales from Ovid, a different kind of dialogue from what I originally encountered internally after reading the Innes translation: what happens when Gods and Goddesses, men and women, become so corrupted by their vanity that they forget from whence they came? Their interior histories, the makeup of their bodies, their flesh, the unseen nature of their forms? What happens when these Gods and Goddesses, men and women, become superficial, running after their own hide, their own skin? Ovid's tales tell us that they are punished by some kind of cosmic karma; a reversion back to those creatures and beings whose sacredness has been forgot: a stag, myrrh, mountainous ranges, the river's flow. They cease, by the power of something bigger, to embody their initial manifestation (whether flesh or ethereal supernaturality) almost as a reminder that to take this for granted in favor of greedy glory degrades them to their concealed, unconscious fear. For me, these punishments are gracious... though I understand why these punishments would terrorize their subjects for centuries.

The greedy glory of the characters is the modelling of themselves in comparison to only and always only themselves, itself for itself alone, as if rendering all Others as less than their own assumed greatness. For what is really brutal about becoming a bear, a body of water, a murmuring brook, a bountiful plant, a spider and its web? The answer is nothing, except what one makes of them, except what meaning is placed on those Earthly objects of growth, decay, life, and death.

Then again, there are those blessed by their suffering, as in the case of Pygmalion, whose imaginative hands registered a possibility of being moved by another guiding force unlike its own. By the creation done in that partnership, a wish of true love was granted after a soul's prayer.

Some of the most memorable stories from this collection are Echo and Narcissus, Myrra, Pygmalion, Arachne, Midas, Salmacis and Hermaphoditus, Pyramus and Thisbe. Some end woefully, some end surprisingly peaceful and even happy. What connects them all is the notion, the warning, the cosmos' request that one never forget their origin, their humility, their gratitude for creation in all its forms... every single one finally bound to the Earth in a terribly vicious and/or delightfully sensual river of eternal labor, whether physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, religious, social, cultural... all tied taut to its fiery core.

Ted Hughes was a brilliant translator.

If I had picked up this book without ever having read the tales of Ovid, I might have enjoyed it merely for the fantastic stories of transformation, which are engagingly told in a rhythm that seemed more modern than timeless to me. But since I was already familiar with the tales, what really kept me turning the pages was Ted Hughes' creativity as a translator. Throughout the book there are passages that startled me with vivid imagery. His use of anachronistic language and concepts made me change my mind over and over again about whether or not I "liked" the translation. In the end, I realized my liking was irrelevant, Hughes had done his poet's work in making me read an old text in a new way.

Here is a comparison of Hughes' translation to the same passage translated by Dryden:

So now Jove set his mind to the deletion
Of these living generations. He pondered
Mass electrocution by lightning.
But what if the atoms ignited,
What if a single ladder of flame
Rushing up through the elements
Reduced heaven to an afterglow?
(Hughes)

Already had he toss'd the flaming brand;
And roll'd the thunder in his spacious hand;
Preparing to discharge on seas and land:
But stopt, for fear, thus violently driv'n,
The sparks should catch his axle-tree of Heav'n.
Remembering in the fates, a time when fire
Shou'd to the battlements of Heaven aspire,
And all his blazing worlds above shou'd burn;
And all th' inferior globe to cinders turn.
(Dryden)

I love this comparison, because it shows me that Hughes was not just translating words, but meanings and feelings. Uncontrolled fire is not frightening today in the same way it was in the 17th century, so Hughes conjures imagery of the electric chair and nuclear chain reaction. Had Hughes lived long enough to the see the completion of the Large Hadron Collider, I imagine his Jove might have worried about unleashing a singularity able to consume heaven and earth in a black hole!

I still love the Dryden translation. It is comfortable and familiar and the first I read, but it no longer has the power to shock me the way Hughes' translation sometimes did. I only wish Hughes' translation had been more complete. (He only translated 24 tales.)