Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid is one of the great modern reinventions of a classical text.

Rather than a literal translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hughes transforms twenty-four of its most powerful myths into muscular, contemporary English verse, preserving the original's violence, sensuality and elemental force while giving it an unmistakably twentieth-century voice.

Moving from the creation myth through stories including Phaethon, Echo and Narcissus, Actaeon, Pygmalion and Midas, Hughes reveals why Ovid has remained such a foundational writer for two millennia. This is a book equally at home beside epic poetry and modern literature, prized by classicists, poets and readers interested in myth as an enduring language for power, desire, punishment and transformation. Widely regarded as one of Hughes' finest late works.

1997 Faber & Faber paperback. Early printing. Clean, bright copy with tight binding and only light shelf wear.