Ovid's Metamorphoses

The classic Elizabethan translation of the Roman masterpiece, now in a new edition

This landmark translation of Ovid was acclaimed by Ezra Pound as "the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)". Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends in which men and women are transformed-often by love-into flowers, trees, stones, and stars. Golding's robustly vernacular version was the first major English translation and decisively influenced Shakespeare, Spenser, and the character of English Renaissance writing.