"Ovid Laureate" : personajes de las "Metamorfosis" en Ted Hughes y Carol Ann Duffy

Abstract

Within the wider frame of a renewed interest for Greek and Roman literature spread across English poetry throughout recent decades, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been the inspirational reference for Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (1997) as well as for several poems included in Carol Ann Duffy’s "The World’s Wife" (1999). After presenting the main traits of both works and their relation to Ovid’s model, this paper focuses on the figures of Pygmalion, Tiresias and Midas as treated by both British poets laureate. Hughes follows closely the three Ovidian tales –which he selected to explore several of his own life’s conflicts– and adds subtle formal and narrative alterations that near his versions to the sensitivity of the modern reader. Duffy designs her three compositions as dramatic monologues uttered by the female partners of Ovid’s male characters, which allows her to present an alternative interpretation of the myths and a disillusioned vision both of the relationships between men and women and of the principles that rule such relationships.