SOURCE: "Transforming Ourselves into Beasts," in Spectator, Vol. 278, No. 8806, May 10, 1997, pp. 37-8.

[In the following review, Levi lauds Hughes's translations of Ovid's poetry.]

It must be 100 years since Maurice Baring remembered in print how an Eton master, enquiring what class he was waiting for, commented 'Oh, that hog Ovid!' But Ovid, as the young Baring remarked later, is not a hog. All the same, it has taken a century or more to make him one of the most appetising to us of all Roman writers. How has the trick been achieved, if not by following him backwards from his influence on Shakespeare and on his translations from Marlowe onwards? Yet his poetry, modestly sharpened in sex and violence, admittedly, by the Poet Laureate, reads like something from the folklore movement, that might have been admired by Yeats and William Morris. Indeed, it seems a pity that these...