Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on This Translation
A Brief Life of Ovid
The Text of Metamorphoses
1. Book I: The Shaping of Changes
2. Book II: Of Mortal Children and Immortal Lusts
3. Book III: The Wrath of Juno
4. Book IV: Spinning Yarns and Weaving Tales
5. Book V: Contests of Arms and Song
6. Book VI: Of Praise and Punishment
7. Book VII: Of the Ties That Bind
8. Book VIII: Impious Acts and Exemplary Lives
9. Book IX: Desire, Deceit, and Difficult Deliveries
10. Book X: The Songs of Orpheus
11. Book XI: Rome Begins at Troy
12. Book XII: Around and About the Iliad
13. Book XIII: Spoils of War and Pangs of Love
14. Book XIV: Around and About with Aeneas
15. Book XV: Prophetic Acts and Visionary Dreams
Contexts
1. Bernard Knox : Ovid in His Time and Ours
2. Seneca the Elder : Two Anecdotes of Ovid
INFLUENCES, ANXIOUS AND BENIGN
1. Hesiod : From Works and Days
2. Lucretius : From De rerum natura
3. Callimachus : Hymn VI: To Demeter
4. Virgil : From the Aeneid
5. Charles Martin : Ovid's Metamorphoses and Pantomime Dancing
Criticism
1. J. W. Mackail : [A Work of Such Wide Importance]
2. Diane Middlebrook : A Roman in His Prime
3. Italo Calvino : Ovid and Universal Contiguity
4. Norman O. Brown : Daphne, or Metamorphosis
Persons, Places, and Personifications in the Metamorphoses
Selected Bibliography

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. 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.

Reviews

"Smoothly readable, accurate, charming, subtle yet clear.... A lucidly fluent version of this most flowing of poems."