Fabulous rendering, the tales read like new discoveries.

I'm fairly new to the work of Ted Hughes, and haven't immediately warmed to his own original poetry. But his translations of Tales from Ovid are wonderful, full of the strange magic and off-kilter situations that we expect from classical mythology, all rendered into a vigorous modern English that is lean and highly readable. Hughes distills the essence of his source material, and does so without sacrificing the core of each tale, ultimately delivering the best English-language interpretation of Ovid that I have yet seen.

Wonderful! Stories from Greek mythology that have been retold innumerable times. Hughes’ poetry is accessible and limpid as Narcissus’ mountain pool—I was amazed at the wonderful narrative pace of these funny, bloody, passionate stories. They are especially satisfying to read aloud. Can’t say enough about Hughes’ beautiful language rendering them in a semi-contemporary form.

Here’s Midas, worshipper of Pan:

It so happened
Midas was within hearing
Collecting nuts and berries. Suddenly he heard
Music that froze him immobile
As long as it lasted. He did not know
What happened to him as Pan’s piping
Carried him off—
Filled him with precipices,
Lifted him on weathered summits,
Poured blue icy rivers through him,
Hung him from the stars,
Replaced him
With the fluorescent earth
Spinning and dancing on the jet of a fountain.

A safe choice for my second poetry book of the year, from what I knew of Hughes, in that a) his style is meant to be similar to Seamus Heaney's (I can kinda see that), b) I like Greek/Roman mythology, and c) I'm not Sylvia Plath.

This was decent. I'm surprised at the whole "Whitbread Book of the Year 1997" promo stuff on it, as I can't see how it could possibly be worthy of that kind of accolade - it's solid, for sure, but surely Hughes didn't need the extra profile the year before his death? - but it's very well done. Different poetic styles for each piece, none rhyming, full of anachronisms while still feeling like authentic representations of the originals.

There are even, surprisingly given his personal life, a number of poems showing sympathy for women victims of male violence. These, for me, tended to be among the best in the collection - especially Tereus.

Ovid is intense.

This is the first time I have read classics verse when it was actually hard to put it down. I have to clarify that I haven't read much in this area. But if it were all like this, I might!

Rather than try to explain why it's so good, here's a sample of a story everyone is familiar with. The following is when Midas is about to respond to Bacchus' offer to grant one wish:

He did not have to rack his brains.
A certain fantasy
Hovered in his head perpetually,
Wistfully fondled all his thoughts by day,
Manipulated all his dreams by night.
Now it saw its chance and seized his tongue.
It shoved aside
The billion -- infinite -- opportunities
For Midas
To secure a happiness, guaranteed,
Within the human range
Of what is possible to a god.
It grasped, with a king's inane greed
The fate I shall describe.

Midas said: "Here is my wish.
Let whatever I touch become gold.
Yes, gold, the finest, the purest, the brightest."
Bacchus gazed at the King and sighed gently.
He felt pity --
Yet his curiosity was intrigued
To see how such stupidity would be punished.
So he granted the wish, then stood back to watch.



You want to read the rest now, don't you? :)

I’ve yet to read an English translation of the Metamorphoses that I genuinely enjoy. There are the standard issues with all poetry translations (difficulties juggling imagery, meaning, metre etc.), which are exacerbated by the conjugations and declensions in Latin allowing much more economy and flexibility than English. Arguably the best Latin poet, Ovid is able to luxuriate in details, yet never overwhelm the poem itself; to convey as much in one line as the best English poets could do in three. This isn’t a slight against English poets, but a reality of the English language itself.

All that being said, Hughes has produced a work that is clearly more interpretation than translation, writing in free verse and falling back on his usual brutal terseness and limited lexicon. This negates the most pleasurable parts of Ovid, but, more to the point, this iteration of Hughes is not exactly his own best either.

I decided to read this book by book in parallel with Mary M. Innes' translation of Metamophoses. Innes' rather sober prose probably sticks close to the original, thereby providing a baseline of sorts against which to assess Hughes' fanciful (but far more entertaining) verse. Hughes has taken great liberties with Ovid but given the far-fetched nature of the legends to begin with, I feel that he's entitled to do so. Moreover, it's likely that Ovid himself was extemporizing on tales from a variety of sources. Hughes takes the process a bit further, somewhat in the manner of a talented actor treating his script as just a point of departure and proceeding to inundate his audience with a free-form series of rhapsodic "variations on a theme". Given the vast number of stories to be found in the 15 books, Hughes was obliged to be selective in what he chose to include in this collection. He starts off with 4 stories from Book 1 but from that point onward he extracts vignettes from 12 different books, in no particular order. In each case, he illuminates his offerings with his own wit, arresting anachronisms — and in places sheer whimsy.
When he seizes upon the tale of Bacchus' confrontation with Penthius, King of Thebes, he really gets the creative bit planted firmly in his teeth, spinning off into an extended dithyramb {how many years have I waited for an opportunity to use THAT word in a sentence!} of his own devising. Great fun!

I honestly couldn’t get very far—even skimming—because of the author’s clunky translations. Hughes somehow managed to overwhelm with low-frequency vocabulary while simultaneously delivering simplified, choppy sentences. I became so distracted that I was unable to get lost in Ovid’s normally beautiful writing. (Admittedly I prefer complex and poetic translations, which can get away with similar vocabulary.) These resulting translations do not feel “vigorous and supple” as they are claimed to be on the inside cover.

My original reading of the metamorphoses was a few years (perhaps a decade or two even...) ago, and it had to be end with one hand on the poetry and one in the very detailed footnotes. The result was a sometimes frustrating read through unfamiliar territory obfuscated by poorly understood knowledge.
So when I came across the version by Ted Hughes in Waterstones, about which I had heard good things, “it just fell into my basket”.
And pleased I was it did.
This is rollicking ride through the landscape of Ovid, and set using TH’s unique take on language. Thus, the poetry is transparent to the story; and much like an overexcited teenager at a rock festival, you are pulled in and out of the conflicts between mortal and immortal, between love and lust, between pathos and hubris.
And whilst the English might not be perfectly laid out in the artistic grandeur of Ovid, it suits the stories to the modern ear.
So, yes I enjoyed reading this. Recommended.
Oh before I go... it’s not the complete set of Ovid: just a selection of 24 stories. And not a footnote in sight, although there is a glossary placed at the back of the book almost as an afterthought.

i gobbled these stories up easily best story collection thank you ted hughes who i hate to admit brought life to ovid who it turns out is more queer than i ever imagined

Not being a classical scholar, I have no idea of the degree to which Hughes's 'translation' accurately represent the original but Hughes's clear, unembellished verse ( almost Spartan in its simplicity) somehow uncovers the inner essence of these stories and the reader's imagination make what we will of them ourselves.