Mythical history in dactylic hexameters; Theseus /
Least affecting, but Daedalus and Icarus make the room feel dusty.

Publius Ovidius Naso, or, Ovid, as he's more generally known, several decades prior to Christ's death, wrote the most inventive, fun, excessive, gory, revolting, heartwrenching poem of all time.
A primary sourcebook for Shakespeare, the myths of Ovid have entered into our culture in a thousand different ways. Through Romeo and Juliet, which is just a retelling of Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe, or through various retellings of the Icarus myth, or the myth of Narcissus.
Ovid's predilection for searing irony and excess make him downright postmodern at times. These first 8 books contain the most widely read sections. My personal favorite is the arrival of Bacchus and the Daughters of Minyas.
Ultimately, however, reading this in Latin heightens the experience tenfold. I want to refresh my Latin skills so I can go back and enjoy all of the syntactical hijinks of this master poet the way I did in high school.

A book I've spent so much time with, it's permanently ingrained in my consciousness. And really, I don't mind a bit.

great commentary on I-VIII

Found it to be a bit more on the incoherent and boring side overall.

That said, there was one interesting story in here. There is a girl who is a virgin, who is beautiful, who wants to remain a virgin forever. One guy is totally infatuated with her, and he essentially tries to rape her. During the process, she makes a wish, to take away her beauty, which causes “too much delight” in others, in order to escape the transgression, and she turns into a tree stump. The guy continues to grope and kiss the tree stump, and wants to keep the tree in his backyard, or something along those lines.

What I found interesting was the transformation, and the words and language used in that sequence. It’s powerful and well written, a symbolic representation of feelings that occurring during a sexual assault, such as the desire to escape, or the self-loathing one feels towards one’s body or one’s body.

Outside of that, there wasn’t much I particularly enjoyed. But I probably would not have finished the book, had it not been for that passage pretty early on.

I find it hilarious that the only version of Ovid’s most famous work available to the masses through the Pima County public library system is in two volumes with side-along Latin text, translated in 1915. Not the most accessible translation by far, although personally I find it more musical than the others I looked at. Raeburn’s translation seems to be the one most commonly assigned for class, judging by number of battered used bookstore copies. Raeburn is definitely clearer than Mr. Miller in many instances, but I still find Raeburn’s version less satisfying as poetry, and the explanatory notes don’t quite satiate my curiosity. I’m still looking for a good English version of this, for the simple reason that...I think I love it.

Look at me, blathering about Ovid translations like some cravat-wearing, independently wealthy gentleman scholar. I would really appreciate some advice on the matter, but the only nice, brief, comprehensive guide is for older translations, by a guy who seems almost embarrassed to have read Metamorphoses three times in a row for The Paris Review (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...). Just own it, man. Nobody does that unless they felt strongly about it. And although I too feel snobbish carrying this book around, we should all loosen up a bit about the things we love and how they rank in cultural cache.

I am loving the tendrils of curiosity that brought me here (most potently, Richard Powers' The Overstory and Ovid's compelling first line as quoted there, "Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things"), and the ones that are now branching away in other directions (translation, sacred trees, the Broadway musical Hadestown). But I am only half-way through, and the other volume from the library is here.

After completing Book III, I abandoned the rest of this translation since I'm reading the Golding Translation and the Mandelbaum at the same time, story by story; I found that this prose version by Miller adds nothing for me other than that it includes the Latin text along with the translation. Not being a serious scholar and having long since lost track of practically all of my High School Latin, the two versions I'm already reading in detail are more than sufficient.

A great work of myths and changes.

A man gets turned into a donkey and suffers all sorts of outrages in first century Rome.

I actually read the Teubner edition. I believe this remains the longest thing that I have read in Latin. I enjoy Ovid, and this is one of the best ways to survey ancient mythology.

“As the yellow wax melts before a gentle heat, as hoar frost melts before the warm morning sun, so does he, wasted with love, pine away, and is slowly consumed by its hidden fire.”

trans. by Frank Justus Miller

α - Loeb Library