Reader Reviews for Metamorphoses (World's Classics):
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Summary: Beloved Professor
Comment: This translation was written by Phil Ambrose, a former professor of mine at the University of Vermont. He was in the Classics Department and taught a very popular mythology class for many years. I am excited about having a translation of Ovid that he actually wrote! It is carefully written and true to the Latin, but perhaps not as easily to read for the general public as some of the other published translations out there.
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Summary: amazing
Comment: I bought this book for my Mythic Contexts course at the university. The book is hard to get; you must order it. I know I couldn't find it anywhere else other than on amazon.com. It is a great book for anyone who appreciates fine literature. I will definitely read it over and over through for years to come. Enjoy poetry at its best. It is simply a pleasure to read it. Please, do buy it. It's worth it !!!!
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Summary: The Translation Remains Vibrant and Modern
Comment: Humphries translation of the Latin classic of Greek and Roman mythology is still contemporary, fresh, vibrant, and colorful more than a half-century after first publication. For readers unfamiliar with Ovid, the great Latin poet and lover of Transformations (i.e., Metamorphoses), we are simultaneously acquainted with the great classical myths, given their contemporary meaning and perennial revelance, through a masterful translation that is as modern as the stories are classical. For example, from Book III, "Echo and Narcissus," we read:
Now Narcissus
Was sixteen years of age, and could be taken for
Either boy or man; and boys and girls
Both sought his love, but in that slender stripling
Was pride so fierce no boy, no girl, could touch him.
To understand the pantheon of the classical gods, each was a projection of one (or maybe two) human attributes is a quasi-human, quasi-divine form. Rather than trying to make a single god into a possessive, jealous, xenophobic, and emotionally-unstable, homophobic male patriarchical "prick," the pantheon of Roman and Greek gods were merely the "objectification" of the worst and noblest human emotions, intelligence, vulnerabilities, and jealousies -- just as we find in ourselves, without crusty theology to cloud the oracles of human vice and virtue (versus human depravity, sin, and redemption). This is a book one can enjoy in "sprints," or luxuriate with on a weekend afternoon, and further, enjoy reading to your Beloved. We do. With Humphries exquisite translation, hearing the poetry read makes it even livelier to the ear and heart.
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Summary: Dazzling: No Wonder Shakespeare Loved It
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Humphries' translation? Ommissions galore!
Comment: This is not a critique of Ovid, whose poetry is phenomenal and should be read and re-read. Rather, this is a critique of this translation in particular. Humphries not only does not faithfully render the Latin into English, he omits significant portions (for reasons unclear). One example: in the Deucalion and Pyrrha myth (Book 1), there is a rather lengthy description of Triton's horn in the Latin original (lines 335-342) that is entirely left out in this translation. Now, this doesn't effect the overall story, but it does omit Ovid's intention for the work. It seems that Humphries wrote for modern tastes, but is a rather jarring misrepresentation of what readers of Latin find on their own. Perhaps he chose to omit this passage because, well, it's rather challenging! If the ommission here (and from this I'll assume there are others) is telling of his work on the whole, I would advise those who want to read a good English translation of Ovid's poem to look elsewhere.
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