Translator's Preface

Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”  Poetry bridges the gap between reading the spirit of a myth’s original versified rendition in Latin, to the common tongue in which we may more fully appreciate the author’s intended meaning.  In John Dryden’s defence for his less precise and more poetic rendition of Vergil’s Aenied, it was the spirit of Vergil’s original intention that Dryden wished to convey, not literal slavish fidelity.  However, it must be stated that both Marlowe and Dryden, while being the greatest poets in the English language (alongside the likes of Shakespeare, Emerson and Thomas Browne) failed to render the original Latin with precision, but managed to relate something of the beauty of the piece. It has been my intention to do both.  The great scholar Manly Palmer Hall once said, “Mortals speak in prose, the gods, speak in verse.”  Thomas Taylor in his artful rendering of The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus retold how it would be too easy to translate such sumptuous poetry into prose.  Prose requires very little effort to translate, comparatively speaking.  It would be to do Ovid a great disservice to render The Metamorphoses in prosaic stale insipid banality, even if one had retained the pulse of the dactylic hexameter, and not rendered any kind of rhyme.  In my opinion, the greatest living translators of our time are Robert Fagles and D. Wender, whom made the effort to make Latin translation rhyme.  Among the greatest translators of the past were B.P. Moore (ars amatoria), Leonard (de rerum Natura), Arthur D. Innes, and the greatest of all, Thomas Taylor.  It is said by the legendary Classicist Dr. Didier Deman, that in order to be a great artist, one must imitate the old masters of the past, before painting an original masterpiece.  Likewise, I have endeavoured to step into the shadow of greatness that lies before us in a wealth of excellent scholarship, and translate as did the finest translators of the day.  Many of the nuances herein will be lost on the mono-lingual English speaker, as many of the subtler elements come in the form of double entendres or syllepsis, and where I have diverged from more canonical translations, it is more often on account of the fact that I have strived to render Latin phrases found either in the Cassell’s, Collins’ or the Lewis & Short Latin lexicons.  In any case, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, “Now that I have you in my power”, I trust the reader (you) will enjoy my translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that most of all, this work is owed to the hands of one divine architect: God Himself.

Yours faithfully,

Maxwell Lewis Latham (July, 2015).