Selections from "Sorrows" of Ovid, Exiled Roman Poet, with Modern Dialogic Replies

Ancient, yet with a feeling both modern and timeless, the "Sorrows" ("Tristia") of Ovid, Roman poet of the Augustan age, are his response to banishment by the emperor from the land whose language he raised to a new level of energy and splendor. The sixty excerpts offered here in dialogic format (with the translator's verse "replies") create a lyrical interview, an encounter of cultures. Ovid's autobiographical masterwork takes the form of letters addressed to the monarch, to the poet's cherished wife, to Bacchus and Jupiter and many Roman household and civic deities and epic heroes, to faithful friends and to those former comrades who failed him, to the inimical yet invigorating cosmic elements, even to the very text of Sorrows, addressed as the poet's child, and to other scrolls he had lovingly engendered and whose fate might now be in doubt. Ovid's journaling is a multiform therapy, drawing from the boundless wealth of metaphor and insight made available by a vast knowledge of the Greco-Roman legacy of myth and religion.