Ovid: New Introductions and Translations

Some things never change, and among them is the popularity of Ovid. From silly love songs to mythological epic and even to a didactic poem on ladies’ cosmetics, the Roman poet’s range was as extensive as his style was enchanting. He has never wanted for an enthusiastic readership, and despite the mean-spirited attempts of the stuffy emperor Augustus to silence him—Ovid lived his final years in ignominious exile in Romania—the boast with which he concluded his Metamorphoses is more than justified: Vivam, Ovid wrote in self-assured defiance—“I shall live.”

And live he does. The past few years have seen several new translations of the poet’s work appear and a few acute scholarly studies, too. Among the more accessible of the latter category is Katharina Volk’s introduction to Ovid from Wiley-Blackwell, a publisher that has been emerging as a powerhouse in the world of classical scholarship for over a decade now. Volk, a professor of classics at Columbia and the new editor of The Transactions of the American Philological Association, is about as high a star in the American academic firmament as one might find. Her tone is devoid of the jargon and pretense by which many an Ovidian monograph is marred. After concise initial chapters on the poet’s work and life, we find sensible discussions on elegy, women, and Rome, as well as a selective survey of Ovid’s subsequent reception in Western art and literature. She deals briefly with the multitude of novels depicting the poet’s forced exile on the Black Sea. As Volk shows, images of this most urbane of poets ending his days among a savage and illiterate people have proven as irresistible to novelists as the scenes of mythological transformation in Ovid’s work have been to such artists as Bernini and Titian.

Another recent introduction to Ovid comes from the Modern Language Association. Barbara Weiden Boyd and Cora Fox, both redoubtable literary critics, have edited the useful new collection Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (to which, I should note in the interest of full disclosure, have contributed a brief chapter on Roman religion). The sections on reception here are much fuller than Volk’s brief review, with thought-provoking discussions of the literary appropriation of Ovid by Dante, Cervantes, and the English Renaissance, as well as a very fine chapter by Raymond Cormier on that unusual medieval allegory, the Ovide Moralisé. But the best parts of this book, unsurprisingly, are those focused on pedagogy. There is a refreshing emphasis throughout on the actual classroom experience of Ovid, and it is clear from essays gathered here that, with all his artifice and outrage, the Roman poet easily connects with the experiences of the young—if only their teachers will have the good sense to get out of the way. By and large Ovid is known to modern readers in translation rather than in Latin, and, much to their credit, Boyd and Fox assess a number of English versions of the Metamorphoses. While Fox concentrates on earlier translations (Golding, Sandys, etc.), Boyd gives an informative and highly readable account of nine contemporary translations, including those of Rolfe Humphries, Charles Martin, and Michael Simpson. Her close reading and shrewd appraisal of the ways translators have handled the Apollo and Daphne episode is well worth having a look at.

Since the appearance of the mla volume, at least two new worthwhile translations of Ovid’s work have appeared. From Hackett comes a new Metamorphoses from Stanley Lombardo, among whose previous efforts include a very successful Iliad and Odyssey. With Homer, Lombardo employs a hard...