3 January 2024

At long last my name is on the outside of a book with my words on the inside. No pseudonym, no front man. As it says on the cover:

METAMETAMORPHOSES

AN UNORTHODOX LOOK AT
SHAKE-SPEARE’S INSPIRATIONAL SOURCE —

THE 1567 ‘GOLDING’ TRANSLATION OF
OVID’S METAMORPHOSES

NEWLY ADAPTED AND ANNOTATED
BY GOLDING’S NEPHEW
NED DEVERE

Top billing goes to the other boy, Ovid, the Roman poet who wrote the original more than two thousand years ago. When I was a teenager in the mid-1560s I spent a great deal of time with this great work. Near the end of 2022 I decided to spend some more. Fourteen months later, this book is the result.

METAMETAMORPHOSES is available at these Amazon sites. The links will take you directly to the book.

ISBN: 979-8-9892034-0-6
published by Good Name Press
press release [LTR] [A4]

English, 600 pages, softcover. $24.99 USD. For other currencies, see your local site. Non-USD pricing will vary with exchange rates and taxes. There is no digital version because long lines of heptameter break and look terrible on narrow screens.

24 March 2026: Amazon has given Ireland and Belgium their own marketplaces, without bothering to tell me. I discovered it during a routine book-check. I’ve added the direct links to the table.

Why is it assumed that Arthur Golding translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English in 1567? You may have heard this one before: because his name is on the title page.

Arthur was my mother’s younger half-brother. From the new book’s opening section:

Uncle Arthur was an insufferable prig.

He was one of the dour sort of evangelicals beginning to be called Puritans, the term meant as an insult. Old before he was thirty, never clever, ever fervent. Dressed in black like a carrion crow. Altogether antipolar to a bright, titled nephew with adolescent appetites and a burgeoning interest in poetry. That would be me, fifteen in 1565. Arthur regarded both adolescence and the arts as gateways to sin. Had there been an artistic bone in his body, he would have had it removed.

Why would someone like Arthur choose to tackle someone like Ovid?

[In his preface To the Reader] Arthur says that he undertook this labour for you, the wise and worthy sort. For you he Englished and versified these gory, sexy, supernatural stories, their form and content so unlike anything else he ever put his name to. He urges you to read Metamorphoses not as idle entertainment, but in order to learn from its examples. Allow yourself to feel holier than its pagan gods and sinners, even as you recognise and rue your own failings. This, he says, is the point of it.

Don’t you be fooled.

The premise was absurd, but he must needs go that the devil drives. (Two devils, in this case.) What began as my schoolwork was transformed into the published poem that bore, and made, Arthur’s name.

The story of Metamorphoses is the prequel to the story of Shake-Speare.My aim in rewriting the poem was not to begin again from Ovid’s Latin, but to improve the existing translation. It was suffering from its age, becoming increasingly unreadable and therefore unread. It needed its own metamorphosis.

Like its predecessor, METAMETAMORPHOSES is still couplet-rhymed iambic heptameter. It’s every line as long. What’s new is its voice: still old but no longer archaic. Now the poem flows.

The Ovidian myths I absorbed while immersed in the translation as a teenager became an integral part of my creative self, an inexhaustible wellspring. Time and time again these characters and their stories made their way out of me and into my work.

They are such good stories. Even Holofernes knew that Ovidius Naso was the man.

• You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the
• accent: let me supervise the canzonet. Here are
• only numbers ratified; but, for the elegancy,
• facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret.
• Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso,
• but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of
• fancy, the jerks of invention?

Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act 4, Scene 2

To augment the book I’ve posted supplementary pages in a new non-blog section of the website. 📕MMM Extras & Index, in the 📚Books section of the main menu, is the homepage where you will find links to all the others. Check out the Table of Contents. Look up people and places from the poem in the Unabridged Names List, serving as the poem’s index. When you see how many names there are you’ll understand why I didn’t put them all into the abridged list in the book. Read an excerpt from the poem, the tragic tale of lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, where you can compare the old version to the new one. Extras for each of the fifteen books (chapters) add illustrations, links, music, and attitude to the stories. If you’re a reader of this blog you’ll recognise the attitude.

On paper, that attitude is also found in the new sections I’ve added after the poem, the final quarter of the book. The attitude in the poem itself, accompanying Ovid’s, went in when I was that translating schoolboy. It’s still there.

· Thin Lizzy on Top of the Pops, 1976 ·
excerpted and adapted from video at
GreatGuitarHeroes YouTube channel

©2024 Ned Devere
all rights reserved

edevere17.com has been online since 2015, free to read without paywalls, advertising, or other annoyances. There are no current plans to end creation, maintenance, or financing for the site, but neither is its present form or its eternal existence guaranteed. The lesson of Metamorphoses applies especially to the internet: things can change.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS