In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora

by StrayTaoist

Everyone needs poetry in their soul, whether they realise it or not. Poetry is notoriously difficult, both in understanding and liking. The range and depth of it is much like everything in this world, where 98% of everything is either mediocre or worse.

However, I have my pretentions, and like some poetry. The one I have chosen to write about, Ted Hughes' 'Tales From Ovid', crosses several areas I love: Ted Hughes, classics, Gods and monsters, men and women, death, depression, beauty and meaning. Now, to those who see Hughes only through some wrong-headed feminist hatred (oh! Poor Slyvia! Please. Read around it, received wisdom is anything but, plus, he was a much better poet) he is hard work. Rather than that, I find his work achingly raw, both his adult and children's works as it happens. (Maybe I will review 'The Dreamfighter', which I read to my progeny many years ago, and is a beautiful book. Or even 'The Iron Man', another heart-rending piece of prose.)

But 'Tales From Ovid', as selection from 'Metamorphoses', which is a collection of myths from antiquity, is retold with more force than even the originals. Or a differently directed force, as these aren't literal translations. (My Latin struggles with some of it, that muscle while not quite atrophied within me, certainly not overly stretched recently). As in 'Birthday Letters', his later work is more telling in the way the world works, or how his view of it, from the latter part of his life, is seen.



The myths of ancient Greece and Rome are relevant to us today, in what they say, and reading these beautifully poetical version of that reinforces why. The range of human emotions, the interaction we have with each other, whether it be face to face, or in relation to the gods and they signifigance that holds, are all on display here, as important now as it was three thousand years ago. The reason Classics are important is that we forget we are not the height of civilisation, we have an arrogance that is equally on display throughout the downfall of those in these verses.

It is a regret that he didn't (re)translate and (re)interpret the rest of 'Metamorphoses', as I for one would have loved to have seen that.

And do you know all the genre fiction you love? The horror, the sci-fi, the terror? It all has its roots here, every story, every tale, every journey lived before. And Hughes' retelling is a masterful (re)working of it all. Give it a go, you might be suprised as to what poetry can do, beyond what you (and I) were forced to recite in our schooldays.