There is no Hermes who, surprisingly, abandons the blank verse of his surroundings and addresses Odysseus in elaborately rhymed iambic tetrameter octets, as happens in Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey 12. And he doesn’t play games with Ovid’s text. (I discovered years ago when using Humphreys that I couldn’t make most of the points I wanted to make about Ovid as a story teller because Humphreys had left out almost everything I wanted to talk about.) Simpson omits nothing, reshapes nothing. A teacher teaching the poem in English will be able to discuss Ovid from pretty much any angle. First time readers, whether undergraduates studying the poem in a class, or general readers with little or no Latin, will get a good sense of Ovid’s poem from the translation. Simpson states his aim in the introduction, to make “a prose translation in the rapid and direct American idiom while avoiding colloquialism on the one hand and academic translationese on the other” (6). The translation is accurate, concise and readable. Simpson’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses includes a table of contents listing the stories in each book (vii-ix), a brief introduction to Ovid and the poem (1-6), a prose translation (9-272), endnotes in the form of a running commentary (273-469), a bibliography (471-478), and an index of names (479-97).
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