Ezra Pound's knowledge of Ovid's text may have been patchy, but he did assert on behalf of his Cantos 'that a great treasure of verity exists for mankind in Ovid and in the subject matter of Ovid's long poem, and that only in this form could it be registered.' In Pound's assertion of a transcendent 'verity' manifested in the Metamorphoses and in the 'form' of the Cantos, one senses the trope of metamorphosis at play. The Metamorphoses is not claimed as the source or origin of this verity, rather each work is a historical embodiment or incarnation of it. This might recall for some Walter Benjamin's theory of translation which holds that truth is defined by its translatability. Benjamin's model for this is the interlinear version of the scriptures: truth does not inhere in any one instantiation, but is sensed in its capacity to be accommodated to different versions, mutatis mutandis, the same claim could be made for the 'Ovidian'.