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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—Publius Ovidius Naso—(43 bce–ce 17 or 18) was born into a wealthy Roman family and became the most distinguished poet of his time. He died in exile on the Black Sea, far from Rome and his literary life. Klappentext A masterpiece of Western culture, this is the first attempt to link all the Greek myths in a cohesive whole to the Roman myths of Ovid?s day. Horace Gregory, in this modern translation, turns his own poetic gifts toward a deft reconstruction of Ovid?s ancient themes. 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 seventy-five. In the 20 s BC , the literary salons controlled by Augustus’s chief political adviser, Maecenas, and by his military commander, Messalla Corvinus, provided a galaxy of great poets with a venue for the recitation of their latest works. Virgil had already established his reputation with his Eclogues , pastoral poetry in imitation of the third-century BC Sicilian Greek poet Theocritus, and with his Georgics , a didactic poem on farming in four books, modelled on theWorks and Days , composed in the eighth century BC by Hesiod, Greece’s earliest literate poet. He was now at work on his last and greatest poem, the Aeneid , an epic to rival both the Iliad and the Odyssey . Horace had published his Satires and Epodes in the 30 s, and was to publish the first three of his four books of Odes in 23 BC . Love elegy also flourished in this decade. The genre appears to have been invented by Cornelius Gallus, a friend of Virgil and one...
