Latin Review Project

The Metamorphoses are regarded as a top source for historians and classic scholars to study how our predecessors told Greek Mythology. This epic poem is one of Ovid's finest works, and paints a picture of the romantic settings and plots in literature at that time. The Metamorphoses are told with a certain zeal that captures the reader's attention, while inscribed into text in ways that tug at our emotions. It illustrates the origins and history of the cosmos and the gods, and uses many stories of beings transforming their form to illustrate morals onto society. After it was put into text by the great Roman poet Ovid, it has been celebrated as a near accurate depiction of many of the stories associated with ancient Greek Mythology. It has been translated countless times into several different languages ever since, and is primarily studied by Latin and classics students based on it being an excellent example of an epic poem. However, many of these translations should be deemed less than satisfactory, and can throw off their readers from what Ovid originally said. My goal, for the rest of this article, is to show you three different translations of the Metamorphoses, and to shape your judgment on how to perceive a nicely translated source from the loosely translated.
The first translation I will discuss was written by an Englishman named George Sandys in 1626. Sandys was an English traveler and poet, who studied in Oxford before traveling across the Mediterranean to write a narrative, directed to Charles I of England. Prior to working on translations of the Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, he briefly lived in the newly founded crown colony of Virginia. As you can assume from his background, his translation was very thick in old English grammar and spelling, which is often harsh to read. This was one of the earliest English translations of Metamorphoses, so I can’t criticize him for that. However, it appears to me that Sandys wrote this translation with a greater concern on making his version rhyme in an elegant manner. After all, his work was preceded by John Dryden’s translation of Metamorphoses, which Dryden made to rhyme in an appealing manner. It seems that Sandys sought to rival the rhyming abilities of Dryden, so it appeared that he focused less on the actual flow of the text. Consequentially, I could not understand the story when reading any random part of it, because his version was full of discrete descriptions that I could not understand. I would rank this the lowest compared to my other sources.
Another translation that I could read easier was John Dryden’s, who’s translation of Metamorphoses was one of the earliest English translations ever made. He was a very successful poet and literary critic who dominated the English Restoration, but was also a notable translator. His translation features a simple rhyming scheme that was common in English poetry, and was also effective in illustrating the mythology in Metamorphoses. His rhyming techniques and use of vocabulary appeared much less shaky to me than Sandys’ version, but it still seemed to me that Dryden was still more concerned with rhyming, even at the consequence of losing interest. I would rate this above Sandy’s translation, but this is not the absolute best translation.
The last translation I will discuss is that of Arthur Golding. Golding was also an Englishman, who was most notable for his translation of Metamorphoses. Ironically, he was a very devout Puritan, and made this clear at the end of his translation by asking his readers to look past the heretical beliefs in the poem. His translation was completed in 1587, making it the first English translation of the Metamorphoses. His translation is also in rhyme, but is less vigorous in making the rhyme work concerning how much the poem makes sense. It flows much more to me than the other two poems, and also occasionally features lines that were rhymed rather well. Because of this, I would place this at the top of my list of translations, and recommend this as the best source for classics scholars in seek of a translation of Metamorphoses.

http://etext.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/sandys/1.htm
http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/ovid00.htm
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.1.first.html