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 ...

When I read poetry, it is often either Greek or Latin, and preferably short. That's one of the reasons I like Greek epigrams as they meet both criteria. Hopefully you can appreciate these three poems too. There is not much to say more, rather than I have chosen them for their theme on love. The titles are my own as are the translations.

A new blog post where I discuss the opening scene of Aristophanes's Clouds and give my reasons why I can relate to the protagonist in his opening lines. It contains the same theme as my Monday Mornings post so you may suspect I'm a bit intrigued by the process of sleeping.

One thing is certain. In love and in war, every promise is empty.

After having posted a translation out of the blue on Tuesday , I return to it on Thursday. In today's post, I revisit the genre of Roman elegiac love poetry and how Tibullus fits into that genre. I  will explain why I started with Elegy 10 and how it relates to Tibullus's other Elegies in book 1. To conclude, I will add some remarks to my Dutch translation (and discuss some emendations). Hopefully, you have obtained a better understanding of the poem!

As you have read from the title, this topic will be Tibullus Elegies. This particular work fascinates me and I am going to attempt to translate the first two books into Dutch since the most recent translation is from the year I was born.

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'.