Tales from Ovid - Rambling Readers

English language

Published April 13, 1999

ISBN:: 978-0-571-20225-6

(1 review)

Tales from Ovid is a poetical work written by the English poet Ted Hughes, published in 1997 by Faber and Faber. The book is a retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 1997 and has been translated into several languages. It was one of his last published works, along with Birthday Letters. Four of the tales had been previously published in 1995, in After Ovid, New Metamorphoses, edited by M. Hofmann and J. Ladun.A stage adaptation was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the autumn of 1999 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble has also performed dramatisations of excerpts from Hughes' book, between 2006 and 2008.In 2009, Fiona Shaw performed one of these tales, Echo and Narcissus, in the context of a Prologue to Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, with Les Arts Florissants, directed by …

Tales from Ovid is a poetical work written by the English poet Ted Hughes, published in 1997 by Faber and Faber. The book is a retelling of twenty-four tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for 1997 and has been translated into several languages. It was one of his last published works, along with Birthday Letters. Four of the tales had been previously published in 1995, in After Ovid, New Metamorphoses, edited by M. Hofmann and J. Ladun.A stage adaptation was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the autumn of 1999 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble has also performed dramatisations of excerpts from Hughes' book, between 2006 and 2008.In 2009, Fiona Shaw performed one of these tales, Echo and Narcissus, in the context of a Prologue to Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, with Les Arts Florissants, directed by French conductor and harpsichordist William Christie.Professor James Shapiro, writing for the New York Times, said of the book: "Hughes makes clear his admiration for the gift that Shakespeare shares with Ovid: insight into what a passion feels like to one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis -- passion where it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural. Hughes, too, is blessed with this gift, and this book brilliantly succeeds at bringing Ovid's passionate and disturbing stories to life."

2 editions

Arbieroo reviewed Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes

Review of 'Tales from Ovid' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I've not read any other translations of Ovid and I don't know Latin, so I have little choice but to take these selections from the Metamorphoses at face value.

That value is very high: Hughes writes gripping, driving poetry that impatiently whips you along the narrative, with hardly a chance to catch your breathe sometimes. Faster paced than many a novel, there is no chance of being lulled to sleep by endless iambs here. Startling, powerful, often brutal metaphors pay no heed to shouts of "Anachronism!" and use whatever image suits Hughes' purpose. There is hardly a dull moment in the entire volume.

Anybody who thought narrative poetry was dead needs to think again: Hughes brought nature observation back to the fore-front of modern poetry with The Hawk in the Rain and subsequent volumes; here he rescues narrative verse from the Romantics and gives it to anybody who loves a …

I've not read any other translations of Ovid and I don't know Latin, so I have little choice but to take these selections from the Metamorphoses at face value.

That value is very high: Hughes writes gripping, driving poetry that impatiently whips you along the narrative, with hardly a chance to catch your breathe sometimes. Faster paced than many a novel, there is no chance of being lulled to sleep by endless iambs here. Startling, powerful, often brutal metaphors pay no heed to shouts of "Anachronism!" and use whatever image suits Hughes' purpose. There is hardly a dull moment in the entire volume.

Anybody who thought narrative poetry was dead needs to think again: Hughes brought nature observation back to the fore-front of modern poetry with The Hawk in the Rain and subsequent volumes; here he rescues narrative verse from the Romantics and gives it to anybody who loves a good story.
Further - if you had no interest in the Classics before, you will after reading this.

I have to look back to Crow to find the previous volume of Hughes' poetical works that I responded to so uniformly positively.