Name: Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid
ISBN: 9780199941650

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Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid

Jane Alison

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Ovid's stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers. Ovid's dark pleasure in telling such stories with a full register of tones is palpable. But the stories of sexual encounter in the Metamorphoses are also infused with deep questions. What does it mean to have thoughts and passions trapped inside a changeable body? What is a self, and where are its edges? If someone can pierce you in sex and in love, how do you survive? And if your outer form changes, what lasts?

In Change Me, Jane Alison, critically acclaimed author of The Love-Artist, renders substantial portions of Ovid's great epic into elegant and remarkably faithful English. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid's Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career. When these selections are taken together, Alison's Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet's great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison's guiding principle and Muse. Change Me will transform forever readers' experience of this most ingenious of poets.

FEATURES

The thematically organized translations are lucid, apt, precise, and playful

Elaine Fantham's Foreword places Ovid in his Augustan context

Alison Keith's introduction offers an overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world

Incorporates sixteen color plates from classical antiquity that illustrate Ovidian themes

Audio recordings (read by Alison) of sixteen selected passages are available at www.oup.com/us/alison

Book Details

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publish Date: Feb 3rd, 2014
Pages: 176
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.10in - 6.10in - 0.60in - 0.60lb
EAN: 9780199941650
Categories: • Ancient & Classical

About the Author

Jane Alison's previous works on Ovid include her first novel, The Love-Artist (2001) and a song-cycle entitled XENIA (with composer Thomas Sleeper, 2010). Her other books include a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (2009), and two novels, Natives and Exotics (2005) and The Marriage of the Sea (2003). Currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, she has an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Praise for this book

"Jane Alison takes on a demanding challenge, translating substantial portions of Ovid's great epic of universal change into elegant and remarkably faithful blank verse. Her focus is on episodes that involve desire, sexuality, and the transformations brought about by powerful emotion; because these themes are so central to the Metamorphoses, Alison introduces them with a selection of elegies from Ovid's Amores, the collection with which the poet launched his career and in which he first displayed his intimate and knowing familiarity with the psychology of desire. When these selections are taken together, Alison's Ovid comes alive; the Roman poet's great ability to perform contemporary themes through mythical subject matter, and vice versa, is Alison's guiding principle and Muse."--Barbara Boyd, Bowdoin College

"Jane Alison finds a key to Ovid's Metamorphoses in the transformations wrought by sexuality. She creates her own Metamorphoses by selecting passages that together tell the story of erotic change, the inception of desire through the gaze, its often transgressive fulfillment, and the lasting disruptions and alterations it brings to lovers, victims, and those around them. First-person accounts of love's effects, drawn from Ovid's earlier Amores, tighten the links between mythical narrative and direct experience. Alison's smart and sensual translations well convey a face of Ovid's work likely to engage and intrigue a modern audience. The volume as a whole will entice new readers to explore this sophisticated poet; those who already know Ovid well will learn to read him differently thanks to Alison's perspective and her nuanced insights into the workings of his narratives."--Andrew Feldherr, Princeton University

"Jane Alison's new translations brilliantly render into English a series of erotic passages from the Amores and various wondrous tales of strange sexuality from Metamorphoses. Alison brings to life the highly visual and poetic content of Ovid's verses and vividly conveys a sense of the Latin meter, narrative pacing, vocabulary, tense use, bizarre forms of naming, and frequent use of the second person apostrophe, making this collection a lively, fresh, and modern version of the Ovidian stories. With Elaine Fantham's essay on Ovid and his Augustan context and Alison Keith's comprehensive overview of gender and sexuality in the ancient world, this book makes for a wonderful introduction to Ovid and his erotic poetry."--Patricia Salzman, Montclair State University