Showing posts with label Ted Hughes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ted Hughes. Show all posts

Saturday, 8 September 2012

Life, Death, Sex: Ovid in music

Now I am ready to to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies
So starts Ted Hughes's translation of the Metamorphoses. This great work has not been out of fashion since it was written over 2000 years ago. A perpetual reminder that we are fascinated by the stories of human passion and obsession, as well as exploring the whimsical caprice of gods and goddesses. At the heart of the poem is 250 stories of change, told with a lightness of touch and linguistic depth comparable with the parables of the bible. Stories that take difficult ideas and transform them so that anyone can understand them; human complexities distilled into perfect concentrated capsules awaiting release.