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Ali Smith and Ovid

2019; Springer Nature; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s12138-019-00511-9

1874-6292

Holly Ranger,

Australian History and Society

Ali Smith invoked Ovid to describe the simultaneous perils and delights encountered when using the online tool Google Translate.She noted that the software 'is not an Ovidian god … [although it offers] the kind of pleasure that a writer like Ovid would surely have understood'; and on the conversion of Salman Rushdie to Salmon Residue by her computer's spellcheck function, she joked that both Ovid and twenty-first century electronic word processing programs remind us that 'language can change us … even into another species'. 1Despite the extent and depth of Smith's engagement with Ovid, few critics have pursued the link between the two writers, and fewer still have considered how Ovid crucially informs her oeuvre. 2 The central focus of this essay is the many and varied effects of Ovid's presence in three novels: Like (1997), Girl Meets Boy (2007) and How To Be Both (2014).