Dryden's Ovid
Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by John Dryden
Fra Bernardo
In 1717 Samuel Garth and the bookseller Jacob Tonson published Ovid’s Metamorphoses “translated by the most eminent hands”. John Dryden’s share is the crown of the volume: the whole of the First Book, from the Creation and the Flood to Daphne, Io and Syrinx, and some of the finest tales of the later books – Baucis and Philemon, Pygmalion, Ceyx and Alcyone with the House of Sleep, Acis and Galatea, and Pythagoras’ great closing speech on a world in which nothing perishes and everything changes. For the first time these translations can be heard as an audiobook: nearly three hours of English heroic verse, read in Ovid’s order from Garth’s text of 1717. Each of the three CDs opens and closes with Henry Purcell, Dryden’s great collaborator, in recordings by Alfred Deller and Gustav Leonhardt. World premiere as an audiobook; the narration uses an AI voice.