Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The greatest single narration of what the mythic world of antiquity looked, thought, and felt like at its climax in a striking translation. In this tour de force, all the classic tales of Western mythology come to life. With 15 ills. "Charles Boer has reshaped the Metamorphoses in a way Olson, Zukofsky, and Pound would have approved of, making us see the poem's violence, turbulence, and angular strangeness. Every age refinds the classics in its own way: Boer sees Ovid's primitive energy and gives us a poem we can place beside Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a harsher, more staccato, louder Ovid than were used to, but also a more vivid one."-Guy Davenport

"This is the authentic Ovid, the feeling, the pulse, the mental and vocal style of a vanished people. Boer has found this hidden beat, and the eerie excitement in every line shows me what veils have lain between us and the ancients up till now . . . This is what the ancients were sitting still for, nothing less, of that I'm certain." -William Kotzwinkle