[Carl Copeland]

This is skillfully done, Glenn, and I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but all the inversions and old-fashioned diction (including the anachronistic “lute”), and even the insistence on rhyme where the original had none, give it a rather stiff, century-before-last feel for me. Some of my translations of nineteenth-century Russian poets sound like this, and I go back and forth with myself: How modern should or can an archaic poem sound? Should it or can it sound the way it did to the first readers? (“Punk” is probably getting there.)

Another criticism—too obvious to need mentioning and even less useful—is that Ovid’s very clever introduction of his metrical form is undermined by the very different form of the translation. I personally like imitations of ancient meters, but they can be no more than imitations, of course, and who knows whether readers will take to them.

Maybe you’ll find something more useful among these random thoughts:

… Who gave control to you. / of poems? Our band of bards obeys the Muses.

There’s a stray period after “you,” and the inversion here is stretching things. As much as I like the alliterative “band of bards obeys,” you may need to drop “of bards” to make room for “control” in that line.

… What if Ceres / rules hilly woods, or if Diana runs / plowed fields, …

I should have taken the cue from “rules,” but I still thought it more likely that Diana was running across the fields than running them in the sense of managing them.

You sneak everywhere, even to the Muses’ bower,

This is one of several metrically ambiguous lines. I can think of at least three different ways of scanning it, but I suppose it reads well enough, however you cut it.

He flexed his bow and knelt down to deliver
the missile, “Because you’d sing, bard, here’s your prize!”

You could do me a favor by putting a colon after “missile.” I keep ignoring the quotation marks and trying to read “because” as grammatically linked to what comes before.

With Venus’s myrtle circle your golden brows,

You need a comma to stop me wondering what a “myrtle circle” is. You could also regularize that line a little with “Venus’ myrtle.” Such singular possessives are acceptable, I believe, for classical and biblical names.