Word: ovid
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ovid at the Polo Grounds...
...especially interested in your May 23 review of Rolfe Humphries' translation of the Metamorphoses to see that Mr. Humphries is the son of a onetime player for the New York Giants. Though Ovid might have been a fan too, I suspected some prejudice on the translator's part when I read his story of Tiresias...
Anyone who takes Ovid for a gentle poet of the hearth will do a double take when he comes to the sadistic eye-gouging battles of the centaurs. One centaur swings a chandelier like an axe and fells another...
Divine Delinquents. Ovid rarely paints a passage purple, but once in a while he slips into what might be called senatorial rhetoric, and even Poet Humphries cannot salvage it ("0 winds, O little breezes, O streams, O mountains, O lakes . . .")-The gods with their king-sized personalities and jester-sized consciences dominate the Metamorphoses. Ovid accepted the Greek notion that the gods were created in man's image: lusting, brawling, conniving, cruel, with offhand streaks of decency -a prize parcel of divine delinquents...
These Stories of Changing Forms, however brutal, point the moral of Ovid's poem. Mankind is punished for the great sin which the Greeks called hubris-overweening pride. "I am too great for Fortune's power to injure," says arrogant Niobe, proud mother of seven sons and seven daughters. The boast is scarcely uttered, when Apollo looses 14 fatal arrows from his bow. "She would have been happiest of all mothers," comments Ovid, "had she only not thought herself the happiest." Over and above the turn of Fortune's wheel, there is an inexorable change-the passage...