Shapeshifters: Tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses

It is significant that two of the most important English poets of their day, Ted Hughes and Adrian Mitchell (two years apart in age), should have turned in their last years to the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Ovid’s great poem sequence about the gods of Greece and Rome portrays, as its title suggests, a world in which everything has the potential to turn into anything else. And it is the transformation of one thing into another by means of metaphor that lies at the root of poetry, and of storytelling. Both Hughes and Mitchell take these stories extremely seriously, because they understand this deep connection between Ovid’s myths of metamorphosis and the wellspring of their own poetic power. Nevertheless Mitchell allows himself a proper liberty with the source material, describing in his introduction how in retelling the stories, ‘I tried to change them so that they were more like themselves with every change.’

The finished retellings vary from rhyming couplets or quatrains to sturdy prose to loping free verse. In my view the most successful are in the confident unrhymed verse of ‘The King of Hunger’ or ‘The Proud Weaver’, in which Mitchell’s storytelling attains a cinematic power. ‘The King of Hunger’ tells the story of the impious king, Erysichthon, who is punished with a hunger so all-consuming that in the end the tormented man begins to gnaw at his own flesh and ‘eats himself to death’. This intensely visualised poem really needs no illustration, but the gruesome description of personified Hunger draws a fine response from the illustrator, Alan Lee.

The rhymed poems are sometimes too jogtrot for comfort, with some unnatural forced rhymes (‘prayer’ and ‘slayer’) which grate on the ear. But they introduce humour into the mix, and when Mitchell really gets going, as in the rollicking poem about Actaeon and his hounds, his use of rhyme builds excitingly to a dramatic climax, ratcheting up the tension with every line end.

Although essentially a translation (which itself is a form of metamorphosis), this book, Adrian Mitchell’s last, is deeply felt and highly personal. In its vigour and its dramatic range it is a fitting memorial to a writer who added such a vibrant human note to literature for both children and adults.