Kevin's Classics

Ovid’s take on Orpheus  From the translations of book 10 and 11 , we can read a heart-breaking story of the hero Orpheus whose poetic prowess, though impressive enough to persuade deities and shades, cannot bring back his beloved wife. His sequential abjection of womanly love is suggested to be his downfall. Reading Orpheus’s story in this manner is a subtle implication of Ovid's own poetical superiority over Orpheus. No transformation of Orpheus & Eurydice A key point of Ovid’s work is its theme of describing transformations, i.e.  metamorphoses in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora,   my soul brings me to speak of figures changed into new bodies (Ovid. Met.I.1-2) This aspect of changing forms into new bodies seems completely absent from the characters Orpheus and Eurydice . It is only the surrounding characters that undergo metamorphoses. The first of them is the transformation of Cyparissus into a tree when Ovid narrates how Orpheus creates a ...

Introduction It was in my third year of secundary education (I believe that's the end of junior high school) when I first encountered this myth. Funnily enough, it was during a Latin exam, which tested our knowledge of the participle present. The exam consisted of some excersises that made us change verbs to their participle equivalents and vice versa, and it ended with a translation exercise. The text that we had to translate was a simplified version of this text, though it skipped to the part where Orpheus has already sung to Hades and Persephone. I don't remember what I got for that test, but the simplified Latin text, filled with present participles, is still in my mind when I think of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was a bummer to find out that Ovid's version was not so visually narrated as that simple text had been, but I was still enamoured by his style. Enfin, we are not here to recollect old school stories. We are here because we want to know how Ovid represents the myth...

Introduction:   It has been a while since I posted something, but I am back with something new for you to chew on: my own rhythmical translation of Ovid's Amores 2.5, the poem known as 'Kisses' or 'No love is worth that much'.