The Metamorphoses of Ovid
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | The Metamorphoses of Ovid |
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| Author: | Allen Mandelbaum, Ovid |
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| Publisher: | Harvest Books |
The Metamorphoses is a treasury of classical myths, filtered through the far from reverent sensibility of the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17). It weaves together every major mythological story to display a dazzling array of miraculous metamorphoses, from the time chaos is transformed into order at the moment of creation, to the time when the soul of Julius Caesar is turned into a star and set in the heavens. Through the poetic artistry of Allen Mandelbaum, this glorious achievement of classical literature, whose influence on English literature is rivaled perhaps only by that of the Bible, is revealed anew. Declared the Bloomsbury Review, “Mandelbaum’s Ovid, like his Dante, is unlikely to be equalled for years to come.”
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Publius Ovidius Naso, whom we know as Ovid, was already established as a writer when The Metamorphoses was published in A.D. 8, when he was 52 years old. It had taken him a decade to compose his great poem, during which time he published little, but the Roman world was still abuzz with excitement over his richly erotic Art of Love. So, unfortunately, was the court of Augustus Caesar, and the emperor banished the poet to what is now Romania. Augustus may have taken exception to the poet’s turn to the impolite realm of the body—or he may have objected to a rumored affair between Ovid and the emperor’s nymphomaniacal daughter Julia, who figures so prominently in Robert Graves’s Claudius novels. The poet who had declared Rome to be his only home could have found no worse punishment than exile, but no amount of pleading could sway Augustus, and Ovid died on the shores of the Black Sea a decade later. Full of veiled political and historical references, The Metamorphoses lived on to become a permanent fixture in the canon of European literature. In Allen Mandelbaum’s hands, it lives on for a new generation.
