| Summary: | <p>This project is a comparative study of translations and adaptations of Ovid’s <em>Heroides</em>. Specifically, it demonstrates the key role of creative and innovative English translations and adaptations in transforming understanding of the poems. As some of the only poems outside Greek and Roman drama imagining the unmediated first-person perspectives of mythical women, they have inspired a wealth of creative responses throughout the history of their reception. However, <em>Heroides</em> scholarship is only beginning to recognise the breadth and significance of these receptions. Since scholarship on the <em>Heroides</em> and on Ovid, especially his gender politics, has in recent years undergone significant development and reconsideration, new studies of the reception of the <em>Heroides</em> are especially urgent and timely.</p>
<p>The thesis compares several recent English versions that reimagine the texts for their own times and audiences, and examines how these reimaginings reflect their respective sociopolitical contexts. These versions are explored against the changing background of <em>Heroides</em> scholarship, which has burgeoned particularly since the turn of the millennium. It particularly highlights women and non-binary writers’ translations and adaptations, which have tended to be produced and distributed in more marginalised, independent environments, and to be informed by contemporary progressive responses to sociopolitical issues faced by women. It also assesses how these both supplement and challenge more traditional and more widely available versions such as the Penguin Classics edition and the Loeb. Guided by the responses of Josephine Balmer, Emily Wilson, Shelley P. Haley, Stephanie McCarter and others to the particular problems of developing productive translation practices for ancient texts, the thesis assesses and compares each reception in terms of how it breaks open the emotional complexities and shifting characterisations of the Ovidian heroines. It gives particular attention to instances where different translation decisions noticeably affect the sense or tone of whole poems. The receptions explored include close translations, more thoroughly recontextualised creative versions or ‘transcreations’, and intersemiotic adaptations for the stage. It demonstrates that innovative translations and radical adaptations make the once marginalised voices of ancient heroines newly compelling and relevant, and are thus instrumental in renewing the <em>Heroides</em> for a modern readership as a perennially resisting text. Conversely, it finds that versions informed by patriarchal preconceptions tend to foreclose any such possibilities.</p>
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