Scratch the surface of a poet and you are likely to come face to face with blind ambition. The British poet Gavin Ewart wittily displayed this urge when he expressed the desire to write a poem “so moving/that it leaves all other poems standing” (his title, “The Most Poetic Poem”). Shakespeare got lucky when he boasted in his 55th sonnet that his “powerful rhyme” would last till Judgment Day. So far, he’s on track.

Surely one of the oldest and most daring authorial boasts—also splendidly fulfilled to date—was made by the Roman poet Ovid (43 b.c–a.d. 18) at the end of his 12,000-line epic poem in 15 books, Metamorphoses. His magnum opus will bear his spirit “up to soar beyond the distant stars,/immortal in the name I leave behind,” Ovid promised, adding for good measure, “my words will be upon the people’s lips,/and if there is truth in poets’ prophesies,/then in my fame forever I will live.”

Ovid’s original language, Latin, may be dead, but Queensborough Community College’s Professor of English Charles Martin has done his epic part to keep Ovid’s prophecy alive with a full new translation of this collection of more than 250 stories of mythical transformations (W.W. Norton). A distinguished and often-published poet in his own right, Martin is also the author of a translation of the poetry of Ovid’s lively predecessor Catullus (Johns Hopkins) and a study of his poems (Yale).

Publius Ovidius Naso—that last name apparently due to an ancestor with a large nose—was a colorful and rather subversive Roman. One of his works, The Art
of Love, was a how-to on where to find women and how to seduce them. Eventually Ovid wore out his welcome with “family values”-minded Augustus and was banished to the Roman version of Siberia, a town on the Black Sea.

But not before Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses, a brilliant collection of tales of people changed into animals, flowers, rivers, rocks, mountains; men changed into women and vice versa; and a statue famously changed into a woman. “Metamorphosis” is a Greek word for “change of shape,” and the epic’s “proem” begins with the line, “My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed/into new bodies.”

In a lengthy introduction, the eminent Harvard classicist Bernard Knox observes that the stories of “this playboy of the Roman World” are told with “such graceful charm and wit, and sometimes with a terribilità worthy of Dante at his most infernal, that they have been appropriated by poets and artists ever since.” Among countless authors inspired by them have been Boccaccio, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Ted Hughes.

He was Shakespeare’s favorite poet. Shakespeare cribbed Prospero’s speech boasting of his magic powers in The Tempest from Ovid’s sorceress Medea, and the most popular work of his career—if you judge by editions published while the playwright lived—was his poem Venus and Adonis, based on the tale of how the adorable young hunter was transformed into a blood-red anemone.

Read between the lines, however, the Metamorphoses is also strikingly au courant in the 21st century, as was demonstrated by the successful Broadway run of Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation in 2002. Knox points out that many of the tales “speak directly to the modern reader”—dealing with such common or extreme forms of human behavior as sexual harassment, rape, sex-change, homosexual and heterosexual love, depression, suicide, torture, child and alcohol abuse, and depression.

In his “Note on the Translation,” Martin, whose project was supported by several PSC-CUNY grants, describes how trial and experimentation led him to render the Ovidian hexameter lines of Latin epic in the familiar blank verse of English: “In blank verse I found…a willing and patient warhorse, infinitely adaptable and responsive to the demands placed upon it.” The choice appears to have been a good one, for Knox says the “prime virtue” of Martin’s translation is its “irresistible readability; its flowing, melodious lines sweep you on…” Referring to the poet’s valedictory boast quoted above, Knox adds that this “splendid version of Ovid’s masterpiece will give it a fresh lease on life for a long time to come.”