Metamorphoses

Book Club

Book Club | August 2024: Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 5 & 6

A screen of foliage filters out the sun. Boughs keep it shaded, and the dewy ground puts forth assorted blooms. It’s always spring. Inside this grove, Proserpina is playing as she picks violets or bright white lilies. With girlish eagerness she fills her baskets and skirt, eager to beat her friends at picking. Almost at once, Dis sees her, wants her, steals her. So quick is love. The terror-stricken goddess calls sadly for her mother and her friends — her… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | July 2024: Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 3 & 4

He flees through places where he’d often chasedHe flees from his own pets! He yearned to shout,“I am Actaeon‒recognize your master!”The longed–for words won’t come. Barks fill the air.Blackfur is first to gash his back with wounds,Beast–tamer next. Highlander bites his shoulder;he’s set out last but took a mountain shortcutand got there first. As they hold down their master,the whole pack gathers round and bites his fleshuntil there’s no room… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | May 2023: Ovid Metamorphoses

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song in smooth and measured strains, from olden days when earth began to this completed time! Invocation, translated by Brookes More This month’s Book Club selection is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We previously read Books 12 and… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | August 2021: Apuleius Metamorphoses VII–XI

I was harnessed to what seemed the largest wheel of the mill: my head was covered with a sack and I was at once given a shove along the curving track of its circular bed. In a circumscribed orbit, ever retracing my steps, I travelled on that fixed path, however I’d not completely lost my intellect and cunning, and made it look as though, as an apprentice to the trade,… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | July 2021: Apuleius Metamorphoses I–VI

Now! I’d like to string together various tales in the Milesian style, and charm your kindly ear with seductive murmurs, so long as you’re ready to be amazed at human forms and fortunes changed radically and then restored in turn in mutual exchange, and don’t object to reading Egyptian papyri, inscribed by a sly reed from the Nile. From Book I:1 Apuleius’ address to the reader, translated by A.S. Kline… Read more