Metamorphoses Format: Electronic book text

About Charles Martin’s translation

Winner of the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, Charles Martin’s blank-verse translation of the Metamorphoses is a “smoothly readable, accurate, charming, subtle yet clear” (Richard Wilbur) version that “highlights [the poem’s] lightness and pervasive sense of universal mutability” (Michael Dirda).

Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. The recipient of numerous awards, Martin has received the Bess Hokin Prize, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Three of his poetry collections―Steal the Bacon (1987), What the Darkness Proposes (1996), and Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems (2002)―have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.