Metamorphoses: A New Translation - Softcover

"Ever since Horace Gregory published his translation of The Metamorphoses in 1958, it hasn't been bettered-until now. Charles Martin's muscular version in blank verse is remarkably lively and modern, the Ovid for our time." -- Robert Phillips "I read right through this translation and so exhilarated was the handling of movement and metaphor throughout that when I finished I wanted to start over.... Charles Martin is to be congratulated for a singular achievement." -- William Jay Smith "[Martin] has caught Ovid's sly ironies, his un-Virgilian briskness, and his own kind of tough-minded pathos, and has created a completely convincing poetic voice. The translation is a marvel." -- Rosanna Warren "Charles Martin's new translation of the Metamorphoses, the latest in a 500-year-old tradition, both gives us an Ovid for our times and reminds us that in our times Ovid is everywhere." -- The Hudson Review "Among the accomplished translations of Ovid in our day, this version of Metamorphoses by Charles Martin-elegant, witty and exuberant by turns, and epic in its span from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar-should now lay claim to its own distinguished ground." -- Robert Fagles "This translation of the Metamorphoses is all that one could wish." -- Richard Wilbur

Ovid's epic poem-whose theme of change has resonated throughout the ages-is one of the most important texts of Western imagination, an inspiration from Dante's times to the present day, when writers such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino have found a living source in Ovid's work. Charles Martin combines a close fidelity to Ovid's text with verse that catches the speed and liveliness of the original. Martin's Metamorphoses will be the translation of choice for contemporary readers in English. This volume also includes endnotes and a glossary of people, places, and personifications.