Metamorphoses Reimagined

Michael Marder’s Metamorphoses Reimagined is a literary triumph, a transmutation more than a translation, and should be widely read. Marder’s retelling of Ovid is radical in intent and kaleidoscopic in its choice of devices. It brings the time and detail of epic together with the time and detail of the contemporary in innovative, experimental ways. There is something especially cinematic to this poet-philosopher’s vivid re-narrating of the Latin original into a montage of performance and staging directions, utterance and annotation. As he deconstructs and recomposes Metamorphoses through a constellation of genres, Marder reclaims the baroque for us, in its defiantly transgressive and unpredictable excess—as a technique of being and redrafting our relationship to the world, of recrafting stories and songs as we come to grips with our turbulent Now. -- Ranjit Hoskote, author of To Break and to Branch
Marder’s book is more than a rewriting or rereading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a writing-reading-listening-seeing at the same time, metamorphoses metamorphosing in words-images-sounds. It reveals what common hermeneutics forgets: namely, the courage to see-listen-think-write-recall-imagine in one gesture, without any attempt to unite or synthesize differences. -- Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, coauthor of Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing
Marder has metamorphized The Metamorphoses. In a bold intervention, he worked into the process that weaves and unravels Ovid’s text out of sounds, plants, flesh, bones, and spirits one more precious stone: this very book. -- Marcus Coelen, psychoanalyst, University of Munich