Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics) Paperback – April 15, 2009

This impressive relic of antiquity spans a wide panoply of themes, characters and situations. It's simply magnificent. Scholars have noted an opaque style in Metamorphoses, and someone reading commentary like this might believe this multifaceted poem is vacuous...ornamentation and little else. However, as I read A. D. Melville's glorious, if abstruse and demanding, translation, I feel I'm experiencing a wellspring of William Shakespeare--the material is that colorful and full of life. And of course I am, because when the Bard set off to write plays for his highly successful acting company, he grabbed Ovid's Metamorphoses; as many Shakespeare fans know, it had been assigned reading during his grammar school years.Ovid's scenes are beautifully woven: the rhetorics and structures, usually borrowed from existing stories, are clever, and the characters live and breathe. Although the effects of the many cross-currents among god and mortal, creature and nature, etcetera are, at least superficially, those of wild fantasy and myth, examples of the poet's subtle-yet-overriding Logoi can be found in passages like Narcissus and Echo, Tiresias and Pyramus and Thisbe, where the action seems as much fated and rational as ridiculous. That is, Ovid employs artifice wherein one conceit mirrors and affects another (and yet another and another and so on) in clear, logical fashion. For example:When Apollo wielded his bow, writes Ovid, "He drew two arrows of opposing power./ One shaft that rouses love and one that routs it." Or when describing anthropomorphic pathos of nature and earth, the artist suggests, "Then hungry nature lacking nourishment/ Will faint and, starving, starve her furnaces." This inspired language is masterfully rendered by Melville, who likes to end passages with rhymed couplets like: "And in its stead they found a flower--behold/ White petals clustered round a cup of gold!"Unlike so many contemporary translators, Melville is after more than mere information and "accuracy" here. He's striving for fidelity to the original, Latin text vis-à-vis the reader's experience, and with the help of E. J. Kenney's useful--if too short--introduction and the book's copious endnotes, I feel the effort yields success. Compared with Mandelbaum's disappointing The Metamorphoses of Ovid, an overly bland and technical piece for someone who displayed such remarkable prowess in The Aeneid of Virgil (Bantam Classics), this Oxford edition transcends and entertains.As it should, too, because Metamorphoses is great fun. So much so, it inspired a school-aged bard six centuries later.My TitlesShadow FieldsSnooker GlenDasha

Ovid has written a work that all writers should read at least once. The imaginative fodder is abundant. Perhaps it is through him that we have come to know the first shapeshifters. Transforming into birds, snakes, bears, and elements, nothing is too strange for the human being to experience. And no deed is too heinous for man—or woman—to perform. But snuggled within this work of great inventiveness that houses myth and homage to the Greeks, the legends and the progeny to come, are the rich doctrines of Pythagoras. His wisdom and pacifist leanings are worthy of reading all on their own. One cannot help but sense the truth of spirituality in his words, that which is uncontaminated by the burdens of the church that is to come. It is in this section that we learn the truth and meaning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: we are always changing; from birth to death, ever evolving into another part of ourselves; we are connected by this evolution and thus are one.In all creation, be assured,There is no death—no death, but only changeAnd innovation; what we men call birthIs but a different new beginning; deathIs but to cease to be the same.I wonder if the meaning of life—and death—cannot be culled from the tales of Ovid’s "Metamorphoses."

This book by Ovid tells in verse the story of all the Greek myths. I used to read it to my son when he was younger, translating into Spanish because it is our first language, but he loved it so much that now that he is 18 he searched for it to purchase one for us and one to give as a present to a friend from school.Ovid's theory is that everything metamorphoses or changes and he starts with the story of the creation and moves accordingly to the stories of the Titans, the Gods and the heroes. It is beautifully written, the images very rich and poetic. One of my favorite stories is of Echo and Narcissus. The English is antique, and since it is in verse, reading can be a little difficult, but if you go past this it is a book to cherish and remember.

I thought that I would give lyrical prose a chance because I had seen some quotes from Ovid's Metamorphosis that were really inspirational and thought provoking. While there are plenty of explanatory footnotes I still can't follow the prose. But I do recommend Oxford world classics for most things. This is a good volume of this work.

Great poetry, but more important is that you will find the plots of present day books and movies with ancient context.

As for translation from the Latin poem, the Oxford text is readable and each line is translated to create a corresponding English line (the Penguin translation takes up multiple lines for each one of the original Latin lines);However, unlike most epic poems published today, this Oxford version does not include numbers for the lines of text at 5, 10, 15, 20, etc, intervals. So the lines are NOT numbered. Instead the lines are only listed at the top of each page e.g. “Lines 128-158” which makes it more difficult to follow. More awkward is the task of finding the footnotes, which are NOT numbered either; instead, they are asterisks marked * which are all identical but corresponding with the books (vii, viii, ix, x) listed at the top of the page and relisted in the footnotes. Basically, a consistently higher percentage of time is required to maneuver between the text, the lines, and the footnotes.Also, FYI, this is probably NOT recommended for novice Ovid readers, but I am not sure which publication is.