Although the gods were in the distant skies,

Pythagoras drew near them with his mind . . .

We—the St. Louis Poetry Center and River Styx—were thrilled to meet with the Pulitzer staff this year to come up with ideas for literary programming to accompany the current exhibition and future ones. Visions of texts danced through our heads. Ovid alighted. Read the rest of this entry »

It is interesting to note when a translator comes to his text. For his next book Mandelbaum retreated, back to the Greeks, to Homer, but does not, as most translators do, begin with the Iliad. It appears through dates of publication, for some time at least, that the Odyssey and Ovid were companions, with the fanciful lies of Odyseuss book to book with the stories Ovid tells. After all, Ovid is, above all, a storyteller, as is Odyseuss or Ulysses, as we have him from the Latin poet. (I’m not saying there isn’t a little blood in the Odyssey but the Cyclops produces a few more laughs than Cassandra does.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you pull out the Latin text of the Metamorphoses, as I have through the excellence of the Loeb Classical Library, what you will see are not English lines of verse but drab prose. Ovid is not alone, of course. It happens with Homer, Virgil and Dante, all the Greek and Latin writers in the Loeb Library. That’s fine for Plato’s Republic but not for poetry. (And we don’t have time here for the debate about Plato being a poet.) Read the rest of this entry »

This post was written by Lorin Cuoco, a consultant for the St. Louis Poetry Center, who has written and edited six books, including St. Louis: A Literary Guide, which she co-wrote with A Metamorphoses Marathon reader William Gass. She and Gass also founded the International Writers Center at Washington University.

The author of the Arabian Nights, Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer, Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton—all were students of Ovid, some were thieves. Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo in 43 B.C. His father took him to Rome at an early age, to study law, the preparation even then for a public career. It was the study of rhetoric, though, that he was drawn to and which would bring him fame and then infamy. In A.D. 8 the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis on the Black Sea. His reason? The immorality of Ovid’s love poems, Ars Amatoria (the Art of Love). Ovid himself makes reference to the offense, saying it was a poem, (and a mistake) in a poem called Tristia, written in exile. Sad, devastated, abandoned to a bad climate and unrefined inhabitants, never to return to his beloved Rome after many appeals to Augustus, and his successor, Tiberius, Ovid died in A.D. 17 or 18. Read the rest of this entry »