What is the best translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses?

[krishna_lit]

I found a great book on classical mythology in the form of Metamorphoses by Ovid. But alongside it, I also found out about its various translations, some prose and some verse (Penguin's New Verse Translation, but unfortunately without rhyming) and that made me fall again into the dilemma of choice. Please suggest me the best translation based on your experiences with this book!

Thanks.

[Poetaster]

Roman poetry didn't really rhyme, especally with epics. Classical poetry is my main interest and I've not yet came across rhyming Roman verse anyway. While I don't claim to be an expert, I can read basic Latin and I've read a good chunk of it. I'm yet to come across a Roman poet who used rhyming; and I've read all of Virgil, Catullus and Horace, and I'm working my way through Ovid now as a matter of fact.

Ovid's verse is fluid and witty, springy and full of life. The best translation I know of, it's the one I use and it is in my opinion the best, is the A.D. Melville translation found in the Oxford World Classics. It captures the images and sounds of Ovid's poem really well, but the playfulness of Ovid is in many places simply impossible to translate into Modern English. The David Raeburn one, the one in the Penguin Classics edition, does have it's fans, but I'm not one of them.

[chrisvia]

I read the Charles Martin translation earlier this year and found it very rich and beautiful. Unless you're planning to read the original text, I wouldn't try to determine the "best" translation before diving in, because the qualification "best" will only be able to be determined by yourself. So, try different translations and see which causes the sparks! For example, I read the first canto of The Divine Comedy in a few different translations via http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html before settling on the Mandlebaum. Certainly don't allow yourself to get hung up on the integrity of the direct translation of mechanics of the verse (nearly impossible), but rather lean toward the beauty and power of the language.