Word: ovide
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...translation of The Art of Love was also a description of the translator. The modern Mr. Humphries, my Latin teacher at Woodmere Academy until his departure, used to explain Caesar's military escapades in terms of machine guns, mortars and armored tanks. It was no surprise that Ovid's women be dressed by Dior...
Thank you for the review of my Ovid translation; it was a splendid notice...
...Pygmalions to the ancient Roman poets, two lifelong classics scholars and teachers, Gilbert Highet (Columbia) and Rolfe Humphries (now a lecturer at New York City's Hunter College after 32 years at Long Island's Woodmere Academy), have love and skill to spare. Poet Humphries renders Ovid's famed, amoral The Art of Love in its most readable translation since Dryden's, including in his book much of Ovid's remaining love poetry. Critic Highet assembles an ingratiating montage of seven Latin poets (Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibiillus. Ovid. Juvenal), combining samples of the poetry...
...Ovidius Naso (i.e., "Big Nose") had any qualms about the decadence of Augustan Rome, it can only be inferred, as in Restoration comedy, from the intensity of his frivolity. "Every age probably regards itself as unique in its sexual sophistication," says Translator Humphries. In a city of such sophisticates, Ovid, whose unlikely origin was the hard, bitter soil of Abruzzi (where he was born 2,000 years ago last month), became the elegant arbiter of sexual dalliance. The Art of Love has no four-letter words, only four-letter situations. Written in a sportively professorial tone, it tells the young...
...Ovid was banished from Rome for the last nine years of his life, possibly for some act so flagrant that he himself thought it too scandalous to confide to posterity. It can be said of Ovid, as Hilaire Belloc once hoped for himself: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." Rarely have they read more delightfully than in Humphries' jaunty recreation of the urbane amorist's pagan high spirits...