Product Description

In AD 8 Ovid's brilliant career was abruptly blasted when the Emperor Augustus banished him, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, to Tomis (Constanta) on the Black Sea. This is a new translation of the five books of Tristia (Sorrows) which express his reaction to this savage and, as he clearly regarded it, unjust sentence. The title of the Tristia belies them: though their ostensible theme is the misery and loneliness of exile, their real message, if they are read with the care they deserve, is one of affirmation. Both directly and, as befitted the Roman Callimachus, allusively, Ovid repeatedly asserts, often with a wit and irony that borders on defiance, his conviction of the injustice of his sentence and of the pre-eminence of the eternal values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power. These elegies are informed throughout by Ovid's awareness of, and continuing pride in, his poetic identity and mission. In technical skill and inventiveness they rank with the Art of Love or the Fasti. This is poetry as accomplished as anything he wrote in happier days and which demands no less critical respect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3271143 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 206 pages

Review
"Melville has added another excellent translation of Ovid's poetry to his two earlier renditions--of the Metamorphoses and Love Poems....He has given the reader of whatever background a real taste of the Ovid who has delighted generations of readers....The translation is an unqualified desideratum for anyone who wants to enjoy Ovid's poetry and his frame of mind in his last unhappy years of exile."--Choice