This summer, I read the Metamorphoses of Ovid, a translation of the original text by Allen Mandelbaum. I think this was the biggest book I’ve ever read: It was taller, wider, and heavier than a normal book. It took me the entire summer to read, but it was definitely worth it.
It was in a poetry style, not prose. 15 books make up Metamorphoses, each book containing multiple stories. As I started reading, I noticed the verse, alliteration, and rhyming, and it made the experience much better than if it were prose.
My favorite line from the book is probably from the prolouge: “…may the song I sing be seamless as its way weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.” The alliteration with the “s” and the “w” — I can’t even begin to explain why I like it so much. It just sounds so good!
Ovid basically tells stories to the reader from his own point of view in Metamorphoses. Sometimes characters are telling stories to other characters. There’s the Trojan War, Odesseus, Zeus’s affairs, Perseus and Medusa, anything you might expect to find is in that book.
I think my favorite character might be Athis – a son of a daughter of the Ganges River in India. I mean, yeah, Athis was killed by Perseus and wasn’t mentioned anywhere else, and I don’t really know why he was important. But the fact that he’s from India resonates with me. Somehow. I don’t know. It just does.
I also really loved the way Orpheus’s story was written. It was so tragic and it made me feel so strongly that I almost cried, which I never do when I read. Another thing was how many affairs Zeus had. He had so many it was hilarious!
Overall, I would definitely recommend that you read reading the Metamorphoses of Ovid, even if Greek mythology doesn’t necessarily interest you. It does require a very, very long attention span and lots of time, but I would say it’s definitely worth it.
