Tales from Ovid

The "Metamorphoses" of Ovid stands with the great works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton as a classic of world poetry. Ted Hughes, one of the most admired and widely read of living poets, has now translated twenty-four stories from the "Metamorphoses." The result, "Tales from Ovid," is the most vigorous and supple twentieth-century version of this foundational work, at once a delight for the Latinist and an appealing introduction to Ovid for the general reader. Writing in clear, emphatic unrhymed verse, Ted Hughes has transformed Ovid's Latin poetry into English, giving us not only a new Ovid but a substantial new work of poetry in English, and one that speaks to our time much the way the Latin "Metamorphoses" did to Ovid's.