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Metamorphoses (Paperback)
Ovid; Translated by A.D. Melville; Edited by E. J. Kenney
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The theme of the Metamorphoses is change and transformation, as
illustrated in Graeco-Roman myth and legend. On this ostensibly
unifying thread Ovid strings together a vast and kaleidoscopic
sequence of brilliant narratives, in which the often paradoxical
and always arbitrary fates of his human and divine characters
reflect the never-ending flux and reflux of the universe itself.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has
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scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of
other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading
authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date
bibliographies for further study, and much more.
In AD 8 Ovid's brilliant career was abruptly blasted when the
Emperor Augustus banished him, for reasons never satisfactorily
explained, to Tomis (Constanta) on the Black Sea. The five books of
Tristia (Sorrows) express his reaction to this savage and, as he
clearly regarded it, unjust sentence. Their title belies them.
Though their ostensible theme is the misery and loneliness of
exile, their real message, if they are read with the care they
deserve, is one of affirmation. Both directly and, as befitted the
Roman Callimachus, allusively, Ovid repeatedly asserts, often with
a wit and irony that borders on defiance, his conviction of the
injustice of his sentence and of the pre-eminence of the eternal
values of poetry over the ephemeral dictates of an earthly power.
These elegies are throughout informed by Ovid's awareness of a
continuing pride in his poetic identity and mission. In technical
skill and inventiveness, they rank with the Art of Love or the
Fasti. This is poetry as accomplished as anything he had written in
happier days and demands no less critical respect. For this new
translation of Ovid's poems, all of which are in elegiacs, Alan
Melville has used the same system of rhyming stanzas that he
evolved so successfully for Ovid's Love Poems. Here again he has
reproduced the virtuosity, elegance, and wit of the original, and
presents a collection of poems in which the reader will find
continual interest and pleasure.
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