Volume 42, Number 7 · April 20, 1995
Cosmic Leg-Pull
By Jasper Griffin
Ovid: The Poems of Exile
translated with introduction, notes, and glossary by Peter Green
Penguin, 451 pp., $10.95 (paper)
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses
edited by Michael Hofmann, edited by James Lasdun
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 298 pp., $25.00
The Roman poet Ovid fascinated the Middle Ages, influenced Shakespeare, inspired Bernini and Titian and Handel, was loved by Dryden and Pope, and shocked the nineteenth century (by which I mean the real nineteenth century, the hundred years from, say, 1835 to 1935). Our age is turning again to the subversive Augustan: translations of his poems are multiplying, and scholars are producing commentaries and monographs on him in numbers unimaginable a few years ago.
Review, 4971 words
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