Letter: Hughes's Ovid
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: When I described Ted Hughes as having put Ovid "into a language that we really want to read" ("Hughes wins Whitbread Prize", 28 January), I wasn't disparaging Latin.
The context was a reference to other recent English translators of Ovid, praised at Hughes's expense by the classicist Bernard Knox in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. Their renderings may be more correct but Hughes's Ovid, like Chapman's Homer and Dryden's Vergil, is a great poem in its own very readable right.
JEREMY TREGLOWN
Chairman of the Judges, Whitbread Book of the Year,
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
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