Very happily reading Tales from Ovid as I approach the end of the Hughes Collected. And what an ending to his career, with two great and yet completely different collections to confirm his brilliance at the end of the volume.
I know the Ovid material particularly well, being fortunate to get hold of readings of the translations by the writer himself just after publication. I can hear his voice as I read the tales which is very helpful in grasping the tone. There's an extraordinary sense of wonder involved in this gloriously accessible verse. For all its sophistication it reminds me of his work for children. The gods are both genuinely majestic, often terrifying, but we're never all that far from a kind of tongue in cheek humour.
It's as if working in translation freed Hughes from the obsessions which sometimes weighed down the poetry of his middle period. The mythology finally works.
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