Metamorphoses
By Ovid
Translated by Stephanie McCarter
By Ovid
Translated by Stephanie McCarter
By Ovid
Translated by Stephanie McCarter
By Ovid
Translated by Stephanie McCarter
Part of A Penguin Classics Hardcover
Part of A Penguin Classics Hardcover
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Hardcover $38.00
Nov 08, 2022 | ISBN 9780525505990
The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings
Paradise Lost
The War of the Worlds
The Oresteia
The Iliad
The Three Theban Plays
The Canterbury Tales
Hamlet
The Decameron
Praise
“McCarter confronts the tricky issues associated with both the poet and his epic not only in her forthright introduction but in the translation itself, where, like an art restorer removing decades of browned varnish from an Old Master, she strips away a number of inaccuracies and embellishments that have accreted in translations over the decades and centuries, obscuring the sense of certain passages, particularly those portraying women and sexual violence… McCarter’s translation reproduces Ovid’s speed and clarity. Even better, she is alert to many of the sparkling verbal effects for which the poet was famous in his own time… If you didn’t know she was writing about the concerns of someone who died twenty centuries ago, you’d think her subject was still alive.”
—Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker
“The Metamorphoses has it all: sex, death, love, violence, gods, mortals, monsters, nymphs, all the great forces, human and natural. With this vital new translation, Stephanie McCarter has not only updated Ovid’s epic of transformation for the modern ear and era — she’s done something far more powerful. She’s paid rigorous attention to the language of the original and brought to us its ferocity, its sensuality, its beauty, its wit, showing us how we are changed, by time, by violence, by love, by stories, and especially by power. Here is Ovid, in McCarter’s masterful hands, refreshed, renewed, and pulsing with life.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung
“Stephanie McCarter’s gorgeous verse translation of the Metamorphoses is ground-breaking not just in its refreshingly accessible approach to Ovid’s syntax and formal devices but for how she reframes the controversial subjects that have made Ovid, and Ovidian scholarship, so fraught for contemporary readers. McCarter’s translation understands that the Metamorphoses is a complex study of power and desire, and the dehumanizing ways that power asserts itself through and on a variety of bodies. McCarter’s deft, musical, and forthright translation returns much needed nuance to Ovid’s tropes of violence and change, demonstrating to a new generation of readers how our identities are always in flux, while reminding us all of the Metamorphoses’ enduring relevance.”
—Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale
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