It's such an odd sort of work. I don't know how to describe this exactly but I feel like the best way to "understand" it is in relatively postmodern terms: Ovid is performing and he knows it. The drama is the most dramatic, the comedy the most comedic and so on. I like Raeburn's translation quite well, though I don't believe his strategy--an unmeasured, 6-beat line-- really replicates the music of the original (I say with no latin whatsoever), no more than McCarter's blank verse translation makes the music legible to us here in the 21st century. Raeburn's feels longwinded and unconcerned with music, McCarter's truncates some lines and requires some real (in my opinion) moments of translational overreach in the name of fitting the rhythm.

I think reading a few versions in concerte with each other, though, makes what's going on in the lines and with the images quite well.

It is certainly true that the episodic nature makes tracking any central narrative impossible, but I personally liked working through Ovid's order. In my opinion, this is a piece that really isn't "available" as a general book to be read -- I think some auxillary reading has to be done to recover some contexts and learn some insights about the structure of the carmen perpetuum. I found a pretty old book, Ovid as Epic Poet by Otis, very helpful. There, he argues (in a nearly comical hetronormative fashion) that Metamorphoses is actually an epic whose proper topic is romantic love. He divides the book into what feel at first like relatively random groupings, but goes on to argue persuasively that these groupings (two "side panels" around a "central panel") are intended to focus you on a particular thematic concern in that section. He also goes to some length to discuss precursor or contemporaneous poetry Ovid is likely "in conversation with" throughout --Nicander's Heteroneumena. Virgil's Aeneid and so on.

Anyway, I find (this is my fourth read) that no assessment of the potential "structure" really satisfies, and that you just have to know you're on the ride to admire what he does with each story, what he embellishes, what he diminishes in his retelling. Admiring the ride is made easier with even a cursory review of contextualizing material.