Word: ovid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...OVID'S METAMORPHOSES (401 pp.)-freinstated by Rolfe Humphries-Indiana University ($3.95; paperback...
...general rule with classics is-time mutes, translators mutilate. Poet Rolfe Humphries' rendition of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a glowing exception. A skillful poet himself (Forbid Thy Ravens, The Wind of Time), Humphries, 60, soaked up a love of Latin from his teacher father, who once played baseball for the New York Giants. Four years ago, when his translation of Virgil's Aeneid appeared, critics hailed it as the best since Dryden's. This is only the second time in the last hundred years that the Metamorphoses has been done in English verse, and there...
...rich, landowner father had no use for poetry, and wanted his son to train for the law. Ovid obediently did, but he was far fonder of Rome's artist colony and social whirl. His love lyrics were popular with all but the Emperor Augustus, a dour Cromwellian sort, who found Ovid's lively spirit immoral and subversive. In A.D. 8, he banished the poet to lifelong exile in a Black Sea village, but not before Ovid had capped his fame with a masterpiece which never saw more than first-draft form, the Metamorphoses, or the Stories of Changing...
Centaurs & Bacon. To this day every literate soul in the Western world knows the stories Ovid told, more or less in the way he told them. The titles evoke the tales: Daedalus and I cants, The Story of Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice...
Story of Midas, Baucis and Philemon, The Invasion of Troy and dozens of others. The "something extra" that Ovid brings to each saga is the saving detail of homely human interest, and Translator Humphries helps bring it out with homely colloquial touches of his own. As Daedalus fashions feathers into wings for the fateful flight from Crete, his playful son Icarus...