Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ Is Transformed Into a New English Classic
Stephanie McCarter allows the Roman poet to sing unobscured by the echoes of history.
“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.
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