In Ciaran Carson’s two measured treatments of Hecuba’s tragedy, the language of sectarian violence gradually seeps into ancient feuds. James Lasdun’s “The Plague at Aegina” takes an age-old fear and infects it further, moving in and out of Ovid’s text with ease, adding his – and our – own resonances of a disease “moulding its sumptuous cadavers/Out of prime flesh – young warriors, athletes, lovers.”It’s here, rather than in the gay bars of J D McClatchy’s “Apollo and Hyacinthus”, or the eco-drama of “Erisycthon” (sic), another Lasdun contribution, that a “contemporary” Ovid might be found. Despite the editors’ enthusiasm, the gulf between Ovid’s world and our own is greater than any tenuous links: mythological incest, for instance, isn’t interchangeable with modern sexual abuse, as Frederick Seidel’s “Myrrha” suggests.Ovid’s startling tales present other problems. In Shakespeare’s day, even “rude mechanicals” could be trusted to recognise and rework the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe, but today the universal currency of classical mythology has been lost. Without even abasic glossary, the deft allusions of Michael Hofmann’s “The Log of Meleager’s Life” or the humour of William Logan’s small-town “Niobe” are rendered almost worthless to all but classical scholars. By a reverse process, Eavan Boland’s “The Pomegranate” takes the well-worn myth o f Ceres and Persephone – so familiar we can all “enter it anywhere” – and creates it afresh for both mothers and daughters in one of the collection’s most moving transformations.The scale and coherence of Ovid’s huge epic is also lost. After Ovid treats each episode as a separate entity, jettisoning the complex structure of the Metamorphoses, which weaves story upon story, change upon change, through 15 books and over 10,000 lines.

Only in the final sections of the book, where Michael Longley provides lyrical, bittersweet codas to the more formal translations of both Derek Mahon’s “Pygmalion and Galatea” and Ted Hughes’s “Venus and Adonis”, does a possible modus operandi present itself – like Adonis’s windflower, a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.In the meantime, at least Hughes et al prove that if their feet are tied, they will walk on their hands, negotiating the slippery tightrope between ancient and modern with skill and daring: star turns in an otherwise disappointing display.. THERE cannot be many contemporary authors whose admirers include Charlton Heston, Iris Murdoch and A S Byatt. Even more surprising is to win these followers with sea-going adventures. When Patrick O’Brian started his sequence of Nap- oleonic nava l stories with Master and Commander in 1971, connoisseurs of the genre soon noted that he was offering something more than conventional sea fare.

The Commodore (HarperCollins £14.99) is the 17th in the series, and by now the word has spread to a large bo dy of readers, most of whom cannot tell a hawse from a halyard. Those who start with the later volumes in the series are often bemused. They find themselves in a strange and largely sea-borne world, peopled by characters who seem to know each other well, but who have exceedingly curious manners. These characters clearly live rich and exciting lives, full of adventure and camaraderie, but their attitudes and behaviour are as foreign to most of us as the unspoilt oceans through which they voyage.
Reading O’Brian is like stepping back 200 years.

The rhythms of his prose and the set of his mind entirely match his subject matter. O’Brian confesses in his prefaces that many of his naval campaigns and sea actions are drawn straight from the Naval Chronicle and Admiralty papers of the period. These archives have also provided him with a distant way of life, no doubt strange even to the land-dwellers of the time, but infinitely more so two centuries later At one level O’Brian books are stirring adventure stories. But they are also a kind of historical anthropology, and together these two elements add up to something with no real parallel in contemporary literature.Our entry into O’Brian’s world is eased by the contrast between his two central characters. Jack Aubrey is the bluff, up-and-at-’em naval officer, at sea since a boy, whose generous loyalties and Tory values have never been diluted by abstract thought. Stephen Maturin is a spiky, ill-made fellow, half Irish and half Catalan, with a medical training and a passion for natural history.Each novel contains a voyage with Jack in command and Stephen as ship’s surgeon, interspersed by land-based interludes during which the two heroes suffer varying fortunes in the worlds of Georgian finance, politics and matrimony.

Jack lives in a simple world of naval tradition and land-owning patronage. Stephen, though scarcely modern by 20th-century lights, is aware of the fragility of order and importance of freedom.O’Brian’s earlier novels hinted at higher ambitions. The start of Master and Commander contains echoes of Joyce’s Ulysses, and much of the plot hinges on the secret nationalist past Stephen shares with an Irish shipmate. Other early novels attempt passages of social comedy in Austenesque style, as Jack and Stephen are assessed as suitors by the matrons and daughters of the county.But the ambitions have been trimmed by the constraints of the genre.