Am loving reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, here at Varuna.

I have been meaning to read it for ages because I never have, and it’s the text on which the French Baroque composers based many of the operas in which La Maupin performed. Also because, hidden in among the exploits of Jason and Perseus is the story of Iphis, who was raised as a boy: a story La Maupin would have known well.

I don’t get much reading time, but it’s glorious, and one of those splendid, robust 20th-century translations (Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press, 1955).  I imagine Eleanor Dark reading this, while the wind rages around the house, as Juno (or whoever is in charge of the weather in Katoomba) decides to flood the earth:

… he turned loose

The South-wind, and the South-wind came out streaming

With dripping wings, and pitch-black darkness veiling

His terrible countenance. His beard is heavy

With rain-cloud, and his hoary locks a torrent,

Mists are his chaplet, and his wings and garments

Run with rain. His broad hands squeeze together

Low-hanging clouds, and crash and rumble follow

Before the cloudburst, and the rainbow, Iris,

Draws water from the teeming earth, and feeds it

Into the clouds again.