From Shakespeare to Titian to Ted Hughes, Ovid’s extraordinary stories have influenced artists through the ages. He wrote them at a time of social and psychological turbulence on the threshold of Roman and Christian eras, when new cults, philosophies and religions were changing old ways of thinking and disrupting the old order. Perversity and violence were ever present.
This is the background to Ovid’s weird tales of supernatural transformation. People overwhelmed with emotion – grief, lust, anger – become animals, flowers, birds and stones. Intense and memorable poetry, unlike anything else. Ovid is a poet of Postmodernity – a poet for our troubled times of shifting insecure identities and uncertain futures. Richard Spaul’s hard-hitting and experimental new translation and his extraordinary powers of vocal shapeshifting bring out the compelling modernity of Ovid’s poem in a way not heard before.
