The love poems

Marlowe's translations (1596) in heroic couplets of Ovid's amatory verse have sharper bite than his successors'. A.D. Melville thus has legitimately reverted to various rhyme schemes as essential for conveying the virtuosity and wit of Ovid's supple Latin elegiac verse: the urbane posture of the chic lover-boy in My Loves; the pseudo-didactic paraphernalia of The Art of Love; its spin-off, deflationary riposte, Dr. Ovid's Cures for Love; and the fragmentary, technical tour de force, Cosmetics for Ladies. E.J. Kenney briefly introduces the Augustan historical context and annotates Ovid's easy wealth of mythical allusions and literary conflicts. Melville's eye-rhymes that "make ends of verse meet" are sometimes bothersomely imperfect ("grease" and "disgrace," "again" and "ta'en"), his diction occasionally archaic or British ("buskined," "pelf," "welkin," "woad"). Rolfe Humphries's translation, The Art of Love (1957), has no supplementary readers' aids but is more idiomatic; Peter Green's translation, The Erotic Poems (1982) has extensive, helpful notes but arresting anachronisms and a loose form. These translations hew closely to the substance yet cannot capture fully--but who can?--the piquant original's coruscating style. Appropriate for college, community college, and public libraries. -D. Lateiner, Ohio Wesleyan University