Letter: Hughes's Ovid

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