Ovid is really talented at expressing the same sentiment in a million (I’m being hyperbolic, of course) different ways.

I came across this book in a used bookstore on Chincoteague and started it on the drive home, reading good bits out loud to my family.

This book brought to life the early Roman Empire in a way that very few books I've ever read have. No historical fiction can compete with the surprises an original source can offer. It helps when your source is a phenomenal writer in his own right, as Ovid was. I liked this translation, too.

Ovid was exiled from Rome by Caesar under mysterious circumstances. The official reason had to do with Ovid's racy book, but more likely it was his association with a group of traitors. Ovid spent the rest of his life on the edge of the Black Sea, writing laments and pleas to return. He was not allowed to go home. The locals were somewhat bemused by his continued emperor worship: how's that working out for you...?

I've no prior exposure to Ovid (or to A.D. Melville in fact) but, digesting this book in small bites, found it at times both poignant and elevating. Perhaps because of why and when it was written in the original, and my lack of classical training, I found however that most of the references to deities, history and myth used by Ovid missed their mark with me, making the volume merely 'ok' to me, rather than 'great'.

Nonetheless a good read, and an interesting one, more than worth the time and little effort it took.

Let the storm have its will of man – but let
storm and poem
reach their end, I pray, each at the same time!

This translation is completely readable. The notes are helpful and as thorough as I could want.

The fall from the grace can be sometimes very painful and trigger the most interesting writings and poetry. Ovid was exiled to the small and compared to Rome, barbarian town called Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. Lot of pain, lot of pleading all in vain. The poetry is like screams for something that never came. I like Ovid but his late poetry is not what floats my boat.

The famous Roman poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus in 8AD, following a scandal, to Tomis on the shore of the Black Sea (modern day Constanta in Romania). We don’t know what exactly the scandal involved. It seems his work the Art of Love - which instructed young Romans in seduction - offended the moral revolution led by Augustus, and earned Ovid the resentment of some high ranking officials. Furthermore, he may have been involved in an incident with Augustus’ own daughter Julia, who was accused of adultery with a number of wealthy Romans, and who was herself exiled to an island of Pandataria.

Tomis was remote, a Greek colonial foundation on the edge of the Roman Empire. In his introduction to this volume, Peter Green explains that the choice of Tomis cut Ovid off not only from Rome, but from all current Graeco-Roman culture. Tristia (poems of sadness) and epistulae ex ponto (letters from the Black Sea) are the works he wrote in exile. In them he compares his new home unfavorably to Rome and Italy (which he portrays as centers of culture constructed in opposition to the "barbaric" Black Sea region), and begs Augustus to allow him return. The poems were sent back to Rome where they were circulated by his friends. The letters too were not intended to be private, but were to be circulated and read more broadly, in the hope that Augustus would be pressured to give in. They essentially amounted to a propaganda campaign for his recall. Unfortunately Augustus never relented, and Ovid died in Tomis. In one of his poems (Tristia III.3) he writes ‘my Roman ghost will wander among wild Danubian spirits for ever, a stranger’. These collections are, I think, my favourite of Ovid's works.

Sad to note that the best of the Black Sea Letters come after the death (murder?) of Ovid's most promising advocate. It's when he's willing to lose hope that he writes his best, breaking from the unvarying "Get Me Out of Here" theme.
If you've ever felt sentenced to a distant outpost, this is an unflattering look at what such exile does to one's relationships.

“i’m falling apart, ramshackle, dilapidating to ruin,”

I emphatically do not like this translation - come on, Arthur Leslie Wheeler, do better - but the poetry itself is good. Read for my displacement class, in which we're looking closely at Tristia 1.3.
For someone who doesn't want to dedicate the time needed to reading it, though, the collection can be summed up as this: 'I'm so sad, and it's cold here, and pretty please ask Augustus to let me come back to Rome because the Getae don't speak Latin and they think I'm weird. Also I miss my wife.'

I picked this up to complement my recent reading of The Last World. It turned out not to be much of a complement, but rather lots of complaints and pleadings relating to Ovid’s exile. I always enjoy reading Slavitt’s witty translations, but the content was too dull and full of references I didn’t know for me to make it all the way through.

Banished from Rome for unclear offense, Ovid wrote this series of poems bemoaning his exile and desperately trying to regain the graces of the Octavian. Comically lacking in the stoic virtues for which Roman society is traditionally esteemed.