Ovid Void

Authors: Maria Stepanova & Eugene Ostashevsky

Publisher: World Poetry Books (2025)

The Roman poet Ovid wrote his last poems while exiled by Augustus to a border settlement on the Black Sea. The Russian poet Maria Stepanova condensed and paraphrased Ovid’s poems of exile during the winter of the pandemic, which she spent in the countryside outside Moscow. The American poet Eugene Ostashevsky responded to Stepanova’s versions of Ovid as they were being written, from his quarantine in Shanghai. The poets’ bilingual “conversation” violates the distinction between translation and the original in order to describe some of the forms that empire and exile may assume in the modern world.