Key Passages Talk: Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid’s poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid’s themes of sexual violence, gender, sexuality, and the body. She will consider throughout how she carefully negotiated Ovid’s playful style and disturbing subject matter to produce a poetic, accurate, and ethical translation.

Stephanie McCarter is a professor of Classics at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her works of translation include Horace’s Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin Classics, 2022), which won the 2023 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also recently edited and contributed translations to Women in Power (Penguin Classics, 2024), an anthology of classical myths and stories about ancient female rulers.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Key Passages series and Hester and Cedric Crowell Endowment