The creative English translator Arthur Golding (1536-1606) was born into a family of influential Puritans. His siblings achieved wealth, but Arthur’s life was filled with financial uncertainty.
Married, with seven offspring, the bereavement of his brother made him a rich man. However, the properties were mortgaged and other burdens drained his inherited resources. Despite his huge body of work and several influential and wealthy patrons, Arthur’s finances were depleted and he was detained in a fleet prison due to debt. He dedicated his first publication to Sir William Cecil; these were the first classical translations that brought him fame. After his death, his literary translations gained recognition. The translation of Ovid was his most important work written in iambic heptameter.
Golding as the English translator of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ was remarkably a strong man filled with Puritan compassion, who translated several works. He set out the moral standards contained in the stories and infused the metamorphoses with a stern moral tone. It was from his pages that Elizabethans obtained their knowledge on conventional mythology. He translated commentaries of Julius Caesar, the history of Junianus Justinus, Niels Hemmingsen and David Chytraeus’ theological writings, etc., and completed translating the ‘Trueness of Christian Religion’. His original work is prose entitled the ‘Discourse on the Earthquake of 1580’, where he was inspired by how God portrayed his wickedness through the catastrophe.
Golding is the renowned English translator of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, which William Shakespeare used as a reference. His importance in sixteenth-century writing extends further than this work on several religious and classical texts. Golding’s translations were broadly read and discussed in literary groups of his day.