Product Details
Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the "Metamorphoses"

Tales from Ovid: Twenty-four Passages from the "Metamorphoses"
By Ted Hughes, Ovid

List Price: £12.99
Price: £7.59 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Delivery on orders over £5. Details

Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk

50 new or used available from £0.01

Average customer review:

Product Description

Hughes's three contributions to the anthology "After Ovid" an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project, with 24 passages including the stories of Phaeton, Actaon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne and Midas.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #40928 in Books
  • Published on: 1997-05-05
  • Original language: Latin
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Hughes pumps the very spunk of life back into the old gods.5
Tales from Ovid. This is more like reading a rattling good novel than poetry. Having said that the language is stunning with imagery to fill the screen of the widest imagination. Driving narrative and brilliant, graphic language embroil the reader in these steamy, violent, amoral myths.Physicality bursts through the language in the way it did in Hughes 'Crow' twenty odd years ago, except this time its people whose hearts and loins are thrashing on the page. Be warned, it's gorey stuff. E.M. Forster, in a personal view of Heaven, surmised that the solidity of those that abided there depended on the degree to which they were remembered on earth. Zeus & co. may all have been on the verge of becoming fast-fading entities but Hughes pumps the very teeth and spunk of life back into the old gods. It's like they're still carrying on their capers down in the blue blazing Aegean.

Exhilerating5
I've never been a particular fan of Ted Hughes, but this volume of translation of Ovid's wonderful stories is nothing short of astonishing. Rarely has such meaty, bold, exciting poetry been written. The phrasing is exquisite, with raw, graphic imagery, and moments of emotional purity which can be deeply moving. Taking the original Latin to soaring new heights, this is a masterpiece.

Great poetry - but it's not Ovid4
I'm not knocking this text as like the other reviewers here I think it's gritty, raw and imaginative - but I do dispute the idea of it being a 'translation' of Ovid, because it isn't: it's Hughes own take on the mythology of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but just be aware that this is a work to be read on its own merits, and if you want to read Ovid then try the David Raeburn translation published by Penguin.