Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic yet playful, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.
Ovid (43BC-18AD) was born at Sulmo (Sulmona) in central Italy.
Coming from a wealthy Roman family and seemingly destined for a
career in politics, he held minor official posts before leaving
public service to write, becoming the most distinguished poet of
his time. His works, all published in Penguin Classics, include
Amores, a collection of short love poems; Heroides, verse-letters
written by mythological heroines to their lovers; Ars Amatoria, a
satirical handbook on love; and Metamorphoses, his epic work that
has inspired countless writers and artists through the ages.
David Raeburn is a lecturer in Classics at Oxford, and has also
translated Sophocles' Electra and Other Plays for Penguin
Classics.
Denis Feeney is Professor of Classics at Princeton.
“The true brilliance, that is, the true reading, the accessibility,
of McCarter’s tapestry lies in her use of poetic form.(…)
Throughout, McCarter produces gorgeous basso continuo undertones
juxtaposed against sharp and high-pitched rhymes. Such formal
elements of the translation ultimately represent McCarter’s
interpretation of Metamorphoses and the art of translation
itself—that humble human craft that has the capacity to stand
against and despite the will of gods, power, and time. McCarter has
produced her own masterpiece that ‘Jove’s wrath cannot / destroy,
nor flame, nor steel, nor gnawing time.’ ‘My name,’ she writes,
‘can’t be erased.’”
—Anna Deeny Morales, 2023 American Poets Prize citation for The
Academy of American Poets
“The best translation of a work of ancient literature that I read
this year was Stephanie McCarter's marvellous new translation of
Ovid's Metamorphoses, in fresh, readable, vivid iambic pentameter.
McCarter captures Ovid's wit and cleverness, making us laugh at the
escapades of abusive, lust-crazed, arrogant gods and hapless, also
lust-crazed and arrogant mortals. But she also brilliantly evokes
Ovid's more serious sides, including his attentiveness to power and
the magical vivacity of the natural world. Her wonderful handling
of the metrical poetic form is a fitting match for Ovid's artful,
fluent Latin verse.”
—Emily Wilson, The New Statesman
“McCarter confronts the tricky issues associated with both the poet
and his epic not only in her forthright introduction but in the
translation itself, where, like an art restorer removing decades of
browned varnish from an Old Master, she strips away a number of
inaccuracies and embellishments that have accreted in translations
over the decades and centuries, obscuring the sense of certain
passages, particularly those portraying women and sexual violence…
McCarter’s translation reproduces Ovid’s speed and clarity. Even
better, she is alert to many of the sparkling verbal effects for
which the poet was famous in his own time… If you didn’t know she
was writing about the concerns of someone who died twenty centuries
ago, you’d think her subject was still alive.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker
“McCarter adroitly captures Ovid’s glittering darkness. There is
horror here but there is also so much wonder and delight, all
conveyed in nimble, fresh language.” —Kamila Shamsie, author of
Home Fire
“The Metamorphoses has it all: sex, death, love, violence, gods,
mortals, monsters, nymphs, all the great forces, human and natural.
With this vital new translation, Stephanie McCarter has not only
updated Ovid's epic of transformation for the modern ear and era
--- she's done something far more powerful. She's paid rigorous
attention to the language of the original and brought to us its
ferocity, its sensuality, its beauty, its wit, showing us how we
are changed, by time, by violence, by love, by stories, and
especially by power. Here is Ovid, in McCarter's masterful hands,
refreshed, renewed, and pulsing with life.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung
“Stephanie McCarter’s gorgeous verse translation of the
Metamorphoses is ground-breaking not just in its refreshingly
accessible approach to Ovid’s syntax and formal devices but for how
she reframes the controversial subjects that have made Ovid, and
Ovidian scholarship, so fraught for contemporary readers.
McCarter’s translation understands that the Metamorphoses is a
complex study of power and desire, and the dehumanizing ways that
power asserts itself through and on a variety of bodies. McCarter’s
deft, musical, and forthright translation returns much needed
nuance to Ovid’s tropes of violence and change, demonstrating to a
new generation of readers how our identities are always in flux,
while reminding us all of the Metamorphoses’ enduring
relevance.”
—Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale
"A graceful and fluid and deeply meaningful translation.
Compared to the other translations of the Metamorphoses on which
I’ve relied in the past, it’s as though this is of an entirely
different book. The reader follows the lines with genuine emotion.
And so do worlds open up—"
—Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial
Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University
"Stephanie McCarter’s translation offers an attractive alternative
to the finest versions to appear in recent decades, while the
abundance of her introductory and explanatory material gives her
work a clear advantage over those predecessors. As a vehicle for
serious engagement with Ovid’s poem in English, McCarter has no
rival." – Richard Tarrant, Harvard University, Bryn Mawr Classical
Review
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