Ovid the Metamorphoses

Rating:
Summary: Cheapest translation; best poem
Review: Horace Gregory's Ovid has been my Ovid since high school in the fifties. I'm on my third or fourth paperback copy, and the one I'm using now is held together by shipping tape in place of a spine. In my view no English translator of Ovid since the days of Golding and Marlowe has been half the poet Gregory is. His may not be the most accurate version for minutae, but it's sheer, transfixing poetry from end to end, fully living up to the Romans' own term for epic--perpetuum carmen, or "unending song." Here's a taste. Jove has just decided to end the world with a flood (partly because he fears the potency of his own thunderbolts):

...Auster he released, its dark

Wings over earth, the Nubian darkness

Deeper than midnight, beard and long grey hair

In fall of rain, black forehead in wild clouds,

Its great clapping hands thunder in the dark.

Gregory's Medea grows wicked before your eyes. His Perseus is as clueless as Dudley DoRight. He makes a rousing, enveloping success of the battle of the centaurs and Lapiths, punctuated with the story of the utterly charming centaur filly Hylonome:

Twice a day she washed her face and hands

In a bright waterfall that dropped from high green places

Above Pagasa, then for further beauty

(And twice a day) she bathed in that same water.

She had fine taste in dress, and draped a shoulder

Or a pointed breast with ermine, mink or fox.

Gregory's Ovid can be mildly or uproariously funny, or utterly romantic. Here's Pygmalion, wonderstruck as his beloved statue comes alive. Surely Ovid's and maybe Gregory's feelings about their art are involved here as well:

[He} kissed the sleeping lips, now soft, now warm,

Then touched her breasts and cupped them in his hands;

They were as though ivory had turned to wax

And wax to life, yielding, yet quick with breath.

Pygmalion, half-dazed, lost in his raptures,

And half in doubt, afraid his senses failed him,

Touched her again and felt his hopes come true,

The pulse-beat stirring where he moved his hands.

Then, as if words could never say enough,

He poured a flood of praise to smiling Venus.

He kissed the girl until she woke beneath him.

Her eyes were shy; she flushed; yet her first look

Saw at one glance his face and Heaven above it.

This is not just my favorite translation of the Metamorphoses. It's one of my favorite translations of anything, a great poem in its own right. Buy it.