“Jane Alison’s new translations brilliantly render into English a series of erotic passages from the Amores and various wondrous tales of strange sexuality from Metamorphoses… making this collection a lively, fresh, and modern version of the Ovidian stories.” —Patricia Salzman
Ovid’s stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovid’s dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the Metamorphoses are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self, and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts?
In Change Me, Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of The Love-Artist, renders substantial portions of Ovid’s great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid’s Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alison’s Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet’s great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison’s guiding principle and Muse. Change Me will transform forever readers’ experience of this most ingenious of poets.
Reviews
“Jane Alison takes on a demanding challenge, translating substantial portions of Ovid’s great epic of universal change into elegant and remarkably faithful blank verse. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid’s Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career and in which he first displayed his intimate and knowing familiarity with the psychology of desire. When these selections are taken together, Alison’s Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet’s great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison’s guiding principle and Muse.”
– Barbara Weiden Boyd, author of Ovid’s Literary Loves and Brill’s Companion to Ovid
“Jane Alison finds a key to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the transformations wrought by sexuality. She creates her own Metamorphoses by selecting passages that together tell the story of erotic change, the inception of desire through the gaze, its often transgressive fulfillment, and the lasting disruptions and alterations it brings to lovers, victims, and those around them. First-person accounts of love’s effects, drawn from Ovid’s earlier Amores, tighten the links between mythical narrative and direct experience. Alison’s smart and sensual translations well convey a face of Ovid’s work likely to engage and intrigue a modern audience. The volume as a whole will entice new readers to explore this sophisticated poet; those who already know Ovid well will learn to read him differently thanks to Alison’s perspective and her nuanced insights into the workings of his narratives.”
– Andrew Feldherr, author of Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction
“Jane Alison’s new translations brilliantly render into English a series of erotic passages from the Amores and various wondrous tales of strange sexuality from Metamorphoses. Alison brings to life the highly visual and poetic content of Ovid’s verses and vividly conveys a sense of the Latin meter, narrative pacing, vocabulary, tense use, bizarre forms of naming, and frequent use of the second person apostrophe, making this collection a lively, fresh, and modern version of the Ovidian stories. With Elaine Fantham’s essay on Ovid and his Augustan context and Alison Keith’s comprehensive overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world, this book makes for a wonderful introduction to Ovid and his erotic poetry.”
– Patricia Salzman, author of Webs of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, & Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses