Tales from Ovid

"The Metamorphoses are wonderful transformation myths about the gods. Quite a lot of them are about the gods or allied creatures chasing after some nymph or other, and the nymph praying for release from this ghastly thing that is about to happen to her, and being changed into a tree or a reed or an animal, so that she can’t be got at. So you’ve got poor old Daphne, for instance, who is a lovely nymph and she didn’t wish to lose her virginity, so she prayed to the god of the river and became a laurel tree — which is why the Greek name for a laurel tree is daphne. Yes, he took some of the key Greek myths and made them into these wonderful stories. I don’t know where he got them from, perhaps he got them himself from Greece, because a lot of the Romans had Greek slaves or Greek tutors. I don’t know when he first heard them. Anyway, he’s taken the stories and made them into this wonderful collection. I’ve got lots and lots of different copies of the Metamorphoses , I think they’re essential. I could have chosen a straight translation. But I love Hughes’s poetic voice, and the way he uses language. Yes, I’m pretty sure he translated them himself. It’s not all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , it’s just 24 of them. Hughes’s voice and his poetic ear are just so wonderful. I remember reading the whole lot of them out loud to myself and thinking “Wow! This is how they were meant to be heard!” You wouldn’t have had a printed book, in the days when it was written. Ovid would have read them out loud to people, and that is how they would have heard them, he would have performed them."