The Secret Poet (Metamorphoses, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Ovid's Metamorphoses, we welcome translator Charles Martin to discuss Ovid's well-documented life and his exile, the popularity and subversiveness of Ovid's writings, and the creation of a new epic form through the lack of one epic hero. 

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.

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