We are living through an age of groundbreaking translations of Classical texts. The last decade has seen a number of firsts – S. Ruden became the first woman in 2008 to translate the Aeneid in its entirety into English. In 2016 C. Alexander was the first woman to translate the whole of the Iliad into English, and E. Wilson's translation of the Odyssey (2017) is the first in English poetry by a woman. Ovid, too, is enjoying renewed attention – in France M. Cosnay has just received the Nelly Sachs Prize for Translation for her new version of the Metamorphoses, while the acclaimed novelist M. Darrieussecq published Tristes Pontiques, a translation of Ovid's exile poetry, in 2008. In 2013 C. Pollard published her translations-cum-adaptation of the Heroides under the title Ovid's Heroines, while in 2014 J. Alison published a selection of passages from the Amores and the Metamorphoses entitled Change Me! – Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. The poet K. has himself been part of this international trend through his translations of Horace, Catullus, Virgil and Ovid.

His translation of Ovid's erotic poems is especially to be welcomed at a time when interest in Ovidian studies appears to be far more heavily weighted towards the Metamorphoses and the exile poetry. This is a lovely volume, including a vivid and detailed introduction to Ovid and his abiding significance by Ruden, and an interesting meditation on the theory of translation by K., which appears as a preface. K. writes passionately of Ovid's enduring relevance and his wish to preserve the Classics as a bulwark against ‘a degrading and debilitating “presentism”’ (p. 19). More than this, his aim was ‘to bring to the reader an English Ovid dealing with love in all its permutations’ (p. 22). The Englishness of K.’s Ovid is foregrounded through his decision to write his translation in rhyming couplets composed of iambics – hexameters followed by pentameters. As Ruden points out in her introduction, this may carry echoes of writers like Pope to the reader's ear. Such an effect both familiarises and destabilises – we recognise the weight of the English literary tradition, but it has an old-fashioned feel. Such a strategy might mirror our response to Ovid – he belongs to a foreign, far-off world, and yet he belongs to us. Take the opening couplet of Amores 3.8, et quisquam ingenuas etiamnunc suspicit artes, / aut tenerum dotes carmen habere putat? (1–2), which K. translates as: ‘Does anyone respect the liberal arts these days, / Or think that courting brides with verses pays?’ The first line glances at the contemporary debates about the values of Humanities degrees, while the second thrusts us back into a bygone age of courtship. Through touches such as these K. achieves a masterpiece – a translation that is familiar and strange, a work that reminds us of the history of English literature even as it conveys to us two important works of Roman poetry.