“Metamorphoses” by Ovid, trans. Stephanie McCarter. Penguin. 608 pages.

Ovid begins the “Metamorphoses” by declaring his intention to weave a carmen perpetuum, a perpetual song, in the senses both of a long, continuous poem and of a work of enduring fame. He achieved the latter in spades — few non-religious works were copied so frequently by medieval scribes, and the treasury of interlocking stories served for Chaucer and Shakespeare as the definitive handbook of Greco-Roman mythology.

Falling silent, however, is only one way for a perpetual song to be obscured; other voices may interject themselves, say. Interpolated verses — lines of poetry inserted by later readers, often to clarify unusual diction but occasionally out of an effusion of poetic inspiration — are represented in large numbers in Ovid’s textual tradition, with one perhaps over-zealous German editor condemning upward of 250 verses in the “Metamorphoses.”

Another way for a song to be obscured is for its own echoes to overwhelm it, as happens within the baptistry at Pisa. A work’s omnipresence can make it difficult to encounter on its own terms — “The William Tell Overture,” for many, irresistibly summons the Lone Ranger. In an example from Ovid, the modern reader has difficulty reading the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe without smiling at the antics of the Bard’s Nick Bottom and his associates.

Stephanie McCarter, in the preface of her new translation of the “Metamorphoses,” avows concerns that seem modish on first glance: “Perhaps the best reason to read Ovid, to my mind, is simply that he gives us stories through which we can better explore ourselves and our world, and he illuminates debates about power, sexuality, gender, race, and art that humans have been having for millennia.”

Yet Ms. McCarter’s work allows Ovid to sing out in English without history’s obscuring echoes. She explains her compromises between awkward literalism and a more poetic but less Ovidian product, valuable for those whose encounter with Ovid will be in English.  She engages in what Heidegger called “the destruction of history” — removing longstanding ways of thinking about the text that prevent us from grappling with the author’s original thought.

Retrojecting modern qualms onto Ovid is longstanding practice; medieval English nuns even produced a complete bowdlerization of the “Metamorphoses” for female audiences, omitting all sexual material. Ms. McCarter repudiates efforts to soften Ovid’s shocking content. “I avoid commonly used euphemisms such as ‘ravish’ and ‘plunder’ when rendering sexual violence, preferring to use clear words such as ‘rape’ and ‘force,’” she writes. 

“I am careful,” she writes, “to add no adjectives that are not present in Ovid’s Latin.” The result of her spare approach is nothing short of classic. An example from the monologue of Pythagoras in Book XV,

neque enim consistere flumen
nec levis hora potest: sed ut unda inpellitur unda
urgeturque prior veniente urgetque priorem,
tempora sic fugiunt pariter pariterque sequuntur
et nova sunt semper; nam quod fuit ante, relictum est,
fitque, quod haut fuerat, momentaque cuncta novantur.

becomes

Both the river and the swift hour
can never stop. Just as one current drives 
another, each propelled by one behind it
as it propels the one in front, so time
Both flees and follows, and is always new.
What was is gone. What is, is not what was.
Each moment brings a metamorphosis.

Ms. McCarter preserves Ovid’s carefully balanced doubling of words within the restraints of her blank verse rendering, and draws out the allusion of “momentaque cuncta novantur” (literally rendered “they are renewed every moment”) to the programmatic statement of the poem — “in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora,” which she renders as “My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed / into new bodies.”

Ms. McCarter’s “Metamorphoses” is not a crib or a pony on Ovid’s Latin; nor is it an original work with vaguely Ovidian window-dressing, a la Anne Carson’s take on Sophocles in “Antigonick.” Rather, it is what its title proclaims — a transformation of Ovid’s fluid Latin into Ms. McCarter’s taut English, something new and distinct in form but, still, under it all, the same.