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Zusatztext “Reading Mandelbaum’s extraordinary translation! one imagines Ovid in his darkest moods with the heart of Baudelaire . . . Mandelbaum’s translation is brilliant. It throws off the stiff and mild homogeneity of former translations and exposes the vivid colors of mockery! laughter! and poison woven so beautifully by the master.” — Booklist “Mandelbaum’s Ovid! like his Dante! is unlikely to be equalled for years to come.” — Bloomsbury Review “The Metamorphoses is conceived on the grandest possible scale . . . The number and variety of the metamorphoses are stunning: gods and goddesses! heroes and nymphs! mortal men and women are changed into wolves and bears! frogs and pigs! bulls and cows! deer and birds! trees and flowers! rocks and rivers! spiders and snakes! mountains and stars! while ships become sea nymphs! ants and stones and statues become people! men become women and vice versa . . . An elegantly entertaining and enthralling narrative.” —from the Introduction by J. C. McKeown Informationen zum Autor Ovid Klappentext Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis . Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new life through his subtley, humour and understanding of human nature, and elegantly tailoring tone and pace to fit a variety of subjects. The result is a lasting treasure-house of myth and legend. 'The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)' - Ezra Pound Ovid was born in 43 BC in central Italy. He was sent to Rome where he realised that his talent lay with poetry rather than with politics. His first published work was 'Amores', a collection of short love poems. He was expelled in A.D. 8 by Emperor Augustus for an unknown reason and went to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died in AD 17. Mary M. Innes graduated from Glasgow and Oxford Universities and subsequently taught in the universities of Belfast and Aberdeen, before spending some twenty years proving to schoolgirls that classical languages can and should be enjoyed. Excerpted from the Introduction THE POETRY OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE Many periods in Rome’s long history produced great poets.From the end of the Republic in the mid-first century BC , we have Lucretius’s Epicurean masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, and the kaleidoscopic variety of Catullus’s oeuvre, ranging from the coarse obscenities of political epigram, through beautiful love lyrics, to the sophistication of epicizing mythological narrative. Nero (ruled AD 54 –68 ) had a high opinion of his own poetic talents, but they were quite eclipsed by the tragedies of his adviser, Seneca the Younger, and by the Civil War , the political epic of Seneca’s nephew, Lucan. The years before and after the richly deserved assassination of Domitian in AD 96 produced the stiletto wit of Martial’s epigrams and the powerful satires of Juvenal, as marvellously trenchant and memorable as they are intolerant and appalling. It is universally agreed, however, that the poetic achievements of no other period can stand comparison with those of the age of Augustus, the first emperor, who attained sole rule with his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC , and maintained it ever more firmly throughout his long reign – longer than that of any later emperor – eventually to die peacefully in his bed, a privilege enjoyed by very few of his rivals and enemies, in AD 14 , at the age of s...
