Metamorphoses

welcome to...METAMARCHOSES. this is another installment of project long classics, in which i read intimidating books in small chunks over the course of a month in order to achieve three goals: a) seem smart, b) make puns, and c) have an excuse to buy penguin clothbound classics. this one is slightly d......more

I bought this copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses when I was living in Rome. It's the book I was reading on the plane when I left Rome, as the realization sunk in that an awesome and strange adventure was drawing to a close, and it's the book I was still reading when I moved back to Minneapolis and attempt......more

Book the First: “Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing” The world is a constant changes… Everything moves and one thing always changes into the other. The earth was created by the god unknown as a sphere hanging in space… And life there was an idyll: no crimes, no enmity no wars… “From veins of......more

The Metamorphoses are Ovid’s masterpiece and one of the literary monuments of Antiquity, alongside the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. As the title suggests, Ovid’s book is about change, transformation, mutation. Its scope is exceptionally ambitious, encyclopaedic even. It cove......more

There's honestly something deeply fascinating to me about reading the words of someone who lived 2000 years ago, who wrote these exact words 2000 years ago, and though I completely understand why reading translation is done - I think reading translated lit is amazing - it is undoubtedly more interes......more