Tales from Ovid was a surprisingly enjoyable collection of stories. I enjoyed reading about how the Roman gods and the demi-gods interacted with the characters in the myths. One of the things that I believe made many of the stories more significant is how most of them had morals and alternate meanings in them, even if I missed some of them. I don't have a huge amount to say on Tales from Ovid because each story was different. In a few of the stories/myths I was a little confused as to who was doing what and had to keep reading and put the pieces together in my head. The names used weren't a problem most of the time but occasionally I would have to flick back to check I had the right names.

I read this several days ago whilst in Cornwall, not all at once. Having just finished The Metamorphoses I found this in an Oxfam charity shop in Devon (prior to then travelling to Cornwall, where I proceeded to read it on the beach). During my time reading both this and through the Metamorphoses, ironically, I've been facing some changes in my life (not quite being changed into a bird or a rock by the Gods) but certainly some changes, large enough to seem significant. I always find it odd how what one reads reflects their life. I think that's the sign of a good book, unless it's just us looking for connections in what we read to make ourselves feel better, I don't know.

Anyway. This was damn good. Hughes' 'Full Moon and Little Freida' is one of my favourite poems and his collection Birthday Letters completely rocked me when I read it so taking the awesomeness of Ovid's Metamorphoses and having Hughes rewrite them, I was there. And I was glad to be there. Hughes is perfect for this. His love and talent for writing about nature plays hand-in-hand with the myths. I cannot possibly remember and write down all the best lines, but there were some that stand out. The first line, that excited me, which made me realise how much I was going to love it was this, on page 9:

'No sword had bitten its own
Reflection in the shield.'

That's some beautiful, and cool, imagery right there. The way Hughes wrote Narcissus was fantastic too, he cries to himself,

'I torture myself. What am I doing to myself -
Loving or being loved?'

Or how tragically he writes too, like when Tereus realised he had eaten his children, Hughes writes:

'He staggered about, sobbing
That he was the tomb of his boy.'

I could go on. This is often described as a good introduction to Ovid, in which case I have read them the wrong way round. This only includes 24 myths compared to the over 100 in the Metamorphoses. Hughes has apparently chosen his favourite, or the most important, to try his hand at. I won't comment on which is better to read first, this is far easier and far shorter. I was glad, however, to have read Ovid's first and then seen Hughes' remakes, so to speak.

Either way, Hughes has proven again to be a very good poet. But maybe, he's still not a very good man.

This is a selection of poems from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and not the whole work. That said, Ted Hughes was a great poet in his own right and captures Ovid's flair and sardonic charm. Though there are complete translations of the "Metamorphoses" out there (including an excellent translation by Rolfe Humphries), this would be my first choice for someone wanting to get a good taste of Ovid.

That was wonderful. Hughes brought it to life with incredible vividness and power.

I understand why Ted Hughes was poet laureate.

Hughes brings his typical style to these myths; an intense, peering, pondering vision - resonant, soaked in blood and perhaps a little lugubrious.

It's better written, more insightful, more immersive and more readable than perhaps any other volume of mythology i've read.

I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had been written with a lighter tone. On the other hand, as it was a transcription of Greek Myths by a poet known for his seriousness who happened to be dying of cancer at the time, I guess a light tone is the most unreasonable thing I could possibly ask of this book.

Recommended to anyone interested in Greek/Roman Myths.

There is something interesting about seeing a poet translating the work of another poet. Such an arrangement creates a very different vibe from seeing a poem in the hands of an academic who makes a living translating works.

Or perhaps it does not? Who is to say how far any translator alters the work by choice of words to reflect something of their own concerns? However we do not know the backgrounds of the translators, but we do of a poet like Ted Hughes.

It has been a while since I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so I am uncertain how close Hughes sticks to the text. Presumably stories are missed out. Perhaps some are shortened and lengthened.

Certainly Hughes throws in a few modern touches. A few of the descriptive passages would be anachronistic in Ovid’s time. Hughes also shares the bad habits of many modern poets – occasional obscure sentences that seem clumsy and a love for finding unnecessarily long words. This is particularly problematic when characters are making speeches, and using words that most of us only ever see in writing.

Still these are minor cavils, and Hughes mostly writes with clarity and precision allowing the stories to unfold. After a few early descriptive passages of the world’s creation, which seem to hint at a Christian god more than a Greek one, Hughes plunges into the familiar stories.

Some of these are the famous tales found in other ancient Greek or Roman plays – the death of Hercules, or the murder of Pentheus at the hands of half-crazed Bacchanalians, some of them his own family members.

Other stories are popular enough to be known by themselves – Minerva challenging Arachne to a weaving contest, Phaethon losing control of the chariot that moves the sun, Pygmalion falling in love with his own sculpture,or the doomed love of Echo for Narcissus.

We may know some from T S Eliot – Tereus and Procne, or Tiresias. Shakespeare mentions several – Niobe, for example, or Pyramus and Thisbe, which provides a whole play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Are there common themes here? The title is a clue. Many of the characters are transformed into constellations or landmarks, or into flowers or animals. These provide origins stories for how certain natural phenomena came to be. On a loose level, the poems are about the creation and origin of the world, and everything in it.

If there is a moral in some of these stories, it is not to engage in spiritual pride or defy the gods. Another possible moral is not to demand impossible or impractical favours if you have foolishly not considered the consequences. Arachne and Niobe pay the price for defying the gods. Phaethon suffers for insisting on a task that can only bring about his own destruction, as does Semele.

Midas is a little bit of both. The first half of the story describes the more famous part of his life where he asks for everything to turn to gold. After he escapes the consequences of this action, he then foolishly angers a god and is punished for that.

There is a curious tension in Greek mythology. The Greeks and Romans were somewhat less reverent of their gods. The moral of the stories is ‘Don’t cross a god because they are very dangerous’, rather than ‘Love the gods because they are perfect and wise, or else you will be punished’, which is the Abrahamic attitude.

Nonetheless, even that is not enough. Actaeon is turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds for no other reason than because he accidentally saw a naked goddess. Many women are raped or seduced by lusty gods, and then punished for it, especially if the perpetrator is Jupiter and the punisher is his wife, Juno.

Arachne’s punishment is more severe because she not only defeats Minerva in a weaving contest, but also weaves tales showing the shame and disgrace of the gods, who behave badly. This is blasphemous, but what is Ovid doing if he is not performing the same action in writing the poem? The same is true of the other stories.

Another trend in the poems that Hughes chooses is to find particularly horrifying stories. Hughes does not flinch at portraying rape, mutilation, dismemberment and a variety of horrifying deaths and transformations.

Such passages would be grist to the Sylvia Plath admirers who still insist that Hughes was abusive to Plath and responsible for her suicide. I found many of the passages a little hard to read myself, as Hughes dwells on the nasty details with an unsavoury relish.

Still while the ugliness of the stories was sometimes repellent to me, I must praise Hughes for his work in providing clear and powerful poetry that brings Ovid to life for a new generation.

I love myths, I love how base they are - tapping into the most basic emotions. They're passionate and wholly themselves, both touching upon gods and humanity and how little truly separates us. Ted Hughes breathed a complex but modern form of life into Ovid's myths that were particularly enjoyable. The often violent crests of emotions transformed these ancient men and women into completely new forms based on their transgressions against wily, spiteful gods. I loved them all. Their griefs, their loves, their jealousies were real and powerful. Overall, fantastic.

I'm not nearly as familiar with Mr. Hughes' work as I am with that of his wife, Sylvia something or other, lol. Suffice it to say that there seems to me to be way more Hughes than Ovid in this "translation", e.g., insertions of eighteen lines in places where Ovid had three, etc. That's all well and good, if you want to read a Ted Hughes book. I haven't studied the matter deeply or at great length, but it does seem pretty clear that at many, if not most turns, Hughes is looking for an opportunity to riff, as if he considers the finished product a partnership of some kind.

If you love Ovid, why not attempt to render him as literally as you can, without being slavish of course, in beautiful, terse hexameter? Of the sort that he used? I may get a hold of the Penguin Raeburn translation, which apparently attempts to do just that.

Perhaps this marks me as a philistine. So, I'll just leave it as a caveat emptor, lol. This is a book by Ted Hughes, which ought to be entitled, "Ted Hughes improvises on Ovid". If that's what you want, get a hold of it ASAP! :-)

I feel annoyed with myself that I loved, but not excessively,this book. Good stories (many of them of course were already familiar) that reflect so interestingly on human nature, particularly on its darker side. And yet I kept feeling that something was missing for me. I guess what I wanted was deeper exploration of characters’ psyches and… This last one really hard to admit as it probably reflects more on me than on the two distinguished poets involved in this book, but… I actually found the language at times not inventive, not rich enough. So either the emperor(s) is/are naked or, more likely, it is me not getting something, not sensitive enough to this work's poetry. Having said all this, there were many wonderful descriptive lines and clever turns of phrase in this book. In short, it was good. And yet not good enough to give it 5 stars.

Yet he did what he could to insulate
And filter
The nuclear blast
Of his naked impact--
...
Arrayed in this fashion
Jove came to the house of Cadmus' daughter.
He entered her bedchamber,
But as he bent over her sleeping face
To kiss her

Her eyes opened wide,
And burst into flame.
Then her whole body lit up
With the glare
That explodes the lamp

I just felt like a little quoting was in order. This text is best read slowly and aloud. I, of course, did neither. But I'd like to do so again.

Hughes offers a selection from Ovid, hitting on many stories that are part of the cultural canon, along with plenty that are not. He adds just enough modern language to ensure that the forcefulness of the original clearly comes across.

But mostly he preserves the strangeness of the whole. The gods are foolish, cruel, thoughtless, forgiving, vague, and hasty. They torture and they bless. There are some lessons on what not to do, but mostly descriptions of absurdity run amok. The world is unchained with Ovid, and Hughes makes it feel that way for English speakers. Recommend to just about anyone to read one at a time and be thrown a tad off kilter.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses without the boring bits. Hughes translates the emotions rather than simply the words - the passion, grief and terror of these spellbinding tales are raw and extreme. But Hughes also captures the wry smiles Ovid shares with the reader, sometimes in the midst of the horror.

“These dreams
Have shown me this new god, son of Semele,
And they have shown me a preview, in full colour,
Of a banquet
Bacchus will hold for you, Pentheus,
At which you will be not only guest of honour
But the food and drink. Think of it.
Your expensive coiffure
With your face wrapped in it
Wrenched off like a cork, at the neck,
Your blood
Poured out over your mother and sisters,
Your pedigree carcase
Ripped by unthinking fingers
Into portions, and your blue entrails,
Tangled in thorns and draped over dusty rocks,
Tugged at by foxes.”

As Hughes points out in his illuminating introduction, Metamorphoses is a work that has captivated and dominated the Western imagination for two millennia. But he is happy to play fast and loose with it in order to summon up something like its original power, inserting a modern turn of phrase or idea that bridges that 2,000-year gap.

“Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask -
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything - but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.”

The pivotal point of each tale, the unbearable emotional climax where one body is changed into another (often humans into animals), is rendered very skilfully. Each metamorphosis has an organic, fluid quality, often grotesque, sometimes beautiful, occasionally both.

“The goddess
Squeezed onto the dangling Arachne
Venom from Hecate’s deadliest leaf.
Under that styptic drop
The poor girl’s head shrank to a poppy seed

And her hair fell out.
Her eyes, her ears, her nostrils
Diminished beyond being. Her body
Became a tiny ball.
And now she is all belly

With a dot of a head. She retains
Only her slender skilful fingers
For legs. And so for ever
She hangs from the thread that she spins
Out of her belly.

Or ceaselessly weaves it
Into patterned webs
On a loom of leaves and grasses -
Her touches
Deft and swift and light as when they were human.”