Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator's gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid , which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes's supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete , as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Hughes, the renowned author of innumerable works of poetry, prose, and children's literature and currently the poet laureate of England, offers a lively, readable, rendering of 24 tales from Ovid's Metamorphosis. The translations are unrhymed poems in their own right, but this collection is most welcome for making the most popular book of the classical era‘a veritable source-book for writers during the Middle Ages, not to mention Chaucer and Shakespeare‘so pleasantly accessible to the general reader. A fine addition to all libraries; highly recommended.‘Thomas F. Merrill, Univ. of Delaware, Newark (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

During his lifetime, the first-century Latin poet Ovid made a notoriously reluctant moralist. Ever since the Middle Ages, however, when commentators took the Metamorphoses for divinely inspired Christian allegory, readers have freely attached their own morals and glosses to Ovid's witty, melancholy tales of supernatural lovers in hot pursuit. Hughes is no exception. With a bravado that recalls Robert Lowell's Imitations, Hughes riffs at every turn on his original. Punished by Zeus with floods, mankind "Floats like a plague of dead frogs." Pygmalion's prudishness turns "Every woman's uterus into a spider." These extra-Ovidian flourishes are not Hughes's only innovation. In his "Pygmalion," for instance, it is suddenly Galatea, "sick of unbeing," who possesses Pygmalion and brings herself to life through his hands. Clearly, Hughes proves a more resistant medium than his sculptor-hero: as a translator Hughes prefers partnership to possession. Luckily, there's a natural affinity between Ovid and the British poet laureate, a writer known for both his delightful bedtime stories and dark, earthy animal myths. Hughes captures brilliantly the "human passion in extremis" that is for him Ovid's chief interest, while Ovid's compression curbs Hughes's old penchant for list-making, show-stopping oratory. Yet for all their insight into the feeling between Ovid's lines, these absorbing fables are unmistakable, very welcome Hughes. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

By retelling 24 of the Greco-Roman myths in Ovid's huge Latin poem Metamorphoses, England's present poet laureate joins a long, honorable tradition that started 600 years ago with Chaucer. He does it proud, revitalizing such legends as those of Phaeton's disastrous attempt to drive the chariot of the Sun; the hunter Actaeon, devoured by his own hounds; the frustrated loves of Echo and Narcissus; the infatuation of the goddess Venus with the youth Adonis (and within that story, the bridal race of Atalanta and Hippomenes); and the sculptor Pygmalion and his statue that came to life. Hughes seizes on Ovid's prime characteristic--fascination with extreme passions, especially lust--to spark his versions, but it is the muscularity of his language and rhythms that makes them ignite. Dispensing with Ovid's hexameters, Hughes casts the stories in stanzas of from three to six variable lines or in paragraphs of mostly 8-and 10-syllable lines, and his enjambment is impeccable. He gives us a great way to reacquaint ourselves with these bloody, wonderful tales. --Ray Olson

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in England and attended Cambridge University, where he became interested in anthropology and folklore. These interests would have a profound effect on his poetry. In 1956, Hughes married famed poet Sylvia Plath. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1957 until 1959, and he stopped writing altogether for several years after Plath's suicide in 1963.

Hughes's poetry is highly marked by harsh and savage language and depictions, emphasizing the animal quality of life. He soon developed a creature called Crow who appeared in several volumes of poetry including A Crow Hymn and Crow Wakes. A creature of mythic proportions, Crow symbolizes the victim, the outcast, and a witness to life and destruction. Hughes's other works also created controversy because of their style, manner, and matter, but he has won numerous honors, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, and the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1974. His greatest honor came in 1984, when he was named Poet Laureate of England.

Ted Hughes died in 1998.

(Bowker Author Biography)