SOURCE: Lyne, Raphael. “Golding's Englished Metamorphoses.” Translation and Literature 5, no. 2 (1996): 183-200.

In the following essay, Lyne suggests that Golding not only translated the Metamorphoses into the English language, but also appropriated the stories into English culture. Lyne contends that through the translation of Latin text, Renaissance translators such as Golding helped to define English literary identity.

He begins by metamorphosing Ovid: by turning the sophisticated Roman into a ruddy country gentleman with tremendous gusto … and a gift for energetic doggerel. If the Latin mentions Midas's ‘tiara’, Golding calls it a ‘purple nightcap’. The exotic ‘harpé’ of Perseus, the curved blade so special it had a special name, becomes a good English ‘wood-knife’.¹

Golding's Ovid has regularly attracted slightly patronizing affection from twentieth-century critics and editors.² Gordon Braden, in the best recent study, provides an account of the translation as an Elizabethan Ovid of a particular kind: the product...