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Ovid's epic poem whose theme of change has resonated throughout the ages has become one of the most important texts of Western imagination, an inspiration from Dante's time to the present day, when writers such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino have found a living source in Ovid's work. In this new, long-anticipated translation of
Metamorphoses, Charles Martin combines a close fidelity to Ovid's text with verse that catches the speed and liveliness of the original. Portions of the translation have already appeared in such publications as
Arion, The Formalist, The Tennessee Quarterly, and
TriQuarterly.
About the author
Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The recipient of numerous awards, Martin has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Three of his poetry collections—Steal the Bacon (1987), What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002)—have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Summary
Hailed in Newsweek for his translation of The Poems of Catullus ("Charles Martin is an American poet; he puts the poetry, the immediacy of the streets back into the English Catullus. The effect is electric"), Martin's translation of Metamorphoses will be the translation of choice for contemporary readers.
