Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A New Translation

by Ovid, C. Luke Soucy

This fresh translation revives the politics and power at play in classical mythology’s foremost source

Centuries of conservative translators have robbed the Metamorphoses of its subversive force. In this boldly lyrical translation, C. Luke Soucy revives the magnum opus of Rome’s most clever and creative poet, faithfully matching the epic’s wit and style while confronting the sexuality, violence, and politics so many previous translations have glossed over.
 
Soucy’s powerful version breathes new life into Ovid's mythic world, where canonical power dynamics are challenged from below to drain heroes of their heroism, give victims their say, and reveal an earth holier than heaven. Incorporating the latest scholarship alongside annotations, illustrations, and glossary, this edition brings fresh insights to both returning and new readers.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Mythology, Greek Mythology, Ancient

680 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2023

About the author

Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
Ovid is most famous for the Metamorphoses, a continuous mythological narrative in fifteen books written in dactylic hexameters. He is also known for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.

Reviews

[Julian Worker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a new translation of Ovid's most famous poem where the politics, violence, sexuality, and power have been accurately translated rather than being glossed over by the translator.

The most pleasing part of this book are the extensive commentary, the text and translation notes, and a glossary of the characters referred to in the poem.

The commentary is 134 pages long, the text and translation notes are 46 pages long, and the glossary is 71 pages long. This is a very thorough book.

[Roger Marc Bond Choquette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad I picked this up on a whim. I knew nothing about Ovid or the work and, honestly, the flavor of this text seems impossible to understand except by digging in.

We have so little of the ancient world, and we presume people were so stodgy, that when something is contrived or conservative, we assume their whole world was like that. That’s my opinion, at least.

Soucy’s work, incredible for his age, kicked down the doors of the fullness of the ancient world. I am so grateful that my local bookstore happened to carry this translation alone.

[Alexander Theofanidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immediately following the dismal disappointment of Virgil’s tragically contrived Aeneid, I turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The two works are diametrically opposed in both intent and execution. While in the Aeneid Virgil engages in an inelegant plundering of Homeric epic with conspicuous political motives—sycophantically grovelling at the feet of Octavian Augustus (and, by extension, his deified adoptive father, Gaius Julius Caesar)—Ovid, by contrast, takes us on a journey through the myths of classical and classicising antiquity (with a distinctly historical turn at the end via Pythagoras), his gaze intelligent, ironic, caustic, and, at times, profoundly tragic.

Ovid’s stance toward the mighty men of his age could not be further from Virgil’s obsequious posturing. This difference is made starkly evident in the fact that Ovid died in exile, banished from Rome. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid delivers an indirect but unmistakable critique of Augustus’ mores, deeds, and political theatre. His satire is thinly veiled: in a passage near the end, he sarcastically notes that Gaius Julius Caesar’s greatest achievement was having Augustus as his adoptive heir, and he strikes even more directly when he comments, with unsettling clarity, that Caesar was “deified” simply so that Octavian might lay claim to a divine father. One does not make friends in the ruling class with such remarks—yet they win the hearts of readers two millennia later.

As for the work itself, well-known and lesser-known myths of antiquity are animated through Ovid’s pen, which does not shy from condemning what he perceives as unjust. One might even call him a proto-feminist, considering the empathetic way he portrays wrongs committed against women. He satirises the grotesque and the absurd wherever his quill takes him—an excellent example being the scene in which Polyphemus, the Cyclops we know from The Odyssey, vainly attempts to groom himself to win the love of Galatea. He renders the tragic fate of mortals, especially those who dared to rise above the limits of the human condition and challenge the petulant, vindictive gods of Olympus, with extraordinary pathos.

Special mention must be made of the episode concerning the dispute over Achilles’ arms: with two vivid monologues, Ovid stages a rhetorical contest between Ajax and Odysseus. Ajax—epitome of the warrior-hero, of the steadfast defender—offers a plain, almost naïve, account of his strength and martial deeds. He is opposed by a flagrantly cynical, shamelessly sophistic, and morally bankrupt Odysseus, who even attributes his own acknowledged errors to the collective judgement of the Greeks. In the end, Odysseus prevails… “the orators claimed the arms of the heroes,” the poet remarks with evident disgust.

Two thousand years after its composition, Ovid’s work has lost none of its charm, immediacy, satire, or biting humour—nor its harrowing violence. Consider, for example, the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo, juxtaposed with the fate of Arachne, unjustly punished by Athena. Though Arachne had indeed won the contest, the goddess—stung by defeat—transforms her not without a hint of mercy into a creature condemned to weave eternally: a spider.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really more like a 4.5 - though I could bump it up to 5 just to be in my favourites this year if nothing else impresses me much! In form and content, nothing else quite like it - Ovid shifts masterfully through genre, characters, mythology and history in a style that could only be described as a...hey, wait a minute!

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading the text is wonderful; reading the translator's notes is a delight.

[Kira Logan ⭐️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely dark but ok

[Ælfric Miltonson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the translations of the Metamorphoses this is my favorite.

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything changes… usually because someone made a bad decision or offended a god. TRUST i will lap it up.