Penguin Classics: The Metamorphoses

This landmark translation of Ovid was acclaimed by Ezra Pound as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).”

Ovid’s deliciously witty and poignant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends in which men and women are transformed – often by love – into flowers, trees, stones and stars. Golding’s robustly vernacular version was the first major English translation and decisively influenced Shakespeare, Spenser and the character of English Renaissance writing.