The complete plays of Sophocles: a new translation

591 Pages·2011·1.828 MB·English

by  Sophocles

THE
COMPLETE
PLAYS
OF
SOPHOCLES
A New Translation
ROBERT BAGG AND JAMES SCULLY
Dedication
We dedicate these translations to the memory of three didaskoloi, the classicists John
Andrew Moore, Thomas Fauss Gould, and Charles Segal. They inspired not only their students
but also a new generation of classical scholars—many of whom provided, through their own
works or comments on our translations-in-progress, a constant source of insight and forward
momentum.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication

GENERAL INTRODUCTION - WHEN THEATER WAS LIFE: THE WORLD OF SOPHOCLES

Aias
INTRODUCTION - ACHILLES IS DEAD
Play

Women of Trakhis
INTRODUCTION - “YOU’VE SEEN NOTHING THAT IS NOT ZEUS”
Play

Philoktetes
INTRODUCTION - SOPHOCLES AT 87
Play

Elektra
INTRODUCTION - “HAVEN’T YOU REALIZED THE DEAD … ARE ALIVE?”
Play

Oedipus the King
INTRODUCTION - “SOMETHING … I REMEMBER … WAKES UP TERRIFIED”
Play

Oedipus at Kolonos
INTRODUCTION - “HIS DEATH WAS A CAUSE FOR WONDER”
Play

Antigone
INTRODUCTION - “FROM WHAT KIND OF PARENTS WAS I BORN?”
Play

NOTES TO THE PLAYS
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Also by Robert Bagg
Also by James Scully
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
WHEN THEATER WAS LIFE:
THE WORLD OF SOPHOCLES
I
Greek theater emerged from the same profound creativity that has propelled the
institutions and innovations of ancient Athens, through two and a half millennia, into our
own era. Athens gave us epic poetry, painting and sculpture based on the human form,
democracy, philosophy, history, anatomy and medicine, experimental science, trial by jury,
grand civic architecture, and state financing of the arts, including (and especially) drama.
Athenians also took pleasure in two forms of high-spirited social interaction that, in more
subdued forms, remain in vogue: the symposium and the bacchanal.
Historians have tended to emphasize Athens’ glories, showing less interest in the
brutal institutions and policies that paid for and enforced its wealth and dominance: its
slaves, for instance, who worked the mines that enriched the communal treasury; and its
policy of executing the men and enslaving the women and children of an enemy city that
refused to surrender on demand.
Athens’ raw and unbridled democracy became, during its war with Sparta,
increasingly reckless, cruel, and eventually self-defeating, in part because Athens vested
enormous decision-making responsibility in its impulsive assembly. But inherent in its
questing, risk-taking energy, and the vesting of its fortunes in its male citizenry, was
critical examination of its own actions, policies, principles, and beliefs. Drama, both
comic and tragic, played an influential part in this search for self-recognition. The mantra
“Know thyself” stared down from Apollo’s temple at the pilgrims seeking advice from the
oracle at Delphi. Playwrights, known to the Athenians as didaskaloi (educators), used their
art to enlighten audiences of thousands about themselves, both individually and
collectively.
Athenian tragedy did not have the restrictive meaning it does at present: plays that end
badly for nearly every character. Several Athenian “tragedies” conclude with positive
resolutions of their major conflicts. In Aias, Philoktetes, and Oedipus at Kolonos, for
instance, the surviving protagonists achieve resolutions or reconciliations that emerge
from the play’s action, usually in some suspenseful or unexpected way. Will Odysseus and
Neoptolemos succeed, in what seems a mission impossible: delivering Philoktetes and his
bow back to the war against Troy? If so, how? What circumstance or argument, what
measure of grit, human character, or divine intervention, will carry the day?
Sophocles’ plays all possess a distinct attribute of Athenian creativity: critical
engagement with life, not just the life preserved in heroic legend but also that taking place
around him in Athenians’ homes, the city’s agora and assembly, its temples, law courts,
and battlegrounds. Plato, through his character Socrates, personalized this imperative,
holding that for individuals “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Other Athenian
intellectuals, including Thucydides, Euripides, Plato himself, and Aristophanes, widened
the view by explicitly examining and judging the actions and morality of their
contemporaries. At stake was not only the life of the individual but also the viability of the
polity as a whole. Aristophanes, as a comic playwright, was free to pillory not only
policies he didn’t like but also the conduct of living persons including, in The Clouds, the
forty-year-old Socrates, a relentless interrogator notorious for challenging established
wisdom and for proposing concepts thought preposterous by hoi polloi, “the many” whose
votes and opinions outweighed those of the aristocrats throughout most of the fifth century
BCE.
Virtually every Athenian theatrical innovation—from paraphernalia such as scenery,
costumes, and masks to the architecture of stage and seating and, not least, to the use of
drama as a powerful means of cultural and political commentary—remains central to our
own theatrical practice. We thus inherit from Athens the potential for drama to engage the
most controversial and emotional issues people face. The fusion of dramatic narrative,
poetry, acting, music, song, and spectacle moved Athenian audiences, as Aristotle tells us,
to the pity and fear, but also to the enlightenment they experienced in the theater.
Through the plays of Sophocles, in common with those of Aeschylus and Euripides,
thousands of theatergoers could witness and contemplate human life at its most extreme
and meaningful. Sophocles’ scripts bristle with ironies and implications that suggest his
characters do not, or cannot, understand everything that is happening to them. They, and
we as the audience, sense that we’re in over our heads; the knowledge of who we are and
what we are doing is an unfolding mystery. Consider the words of Oedipus’ wife, Jokasta,
as she enters, unexpectedly, to mediate a quarrel between her husband and her brother
Kreon. Oedipus has just accused Kreon of conspiring with the blind seer Tiresias to
identify him as the murderer of Laios, Thebes’ previous king (and Jokasta’s late husband).
Wretched men! Why are you out here
so reckless, yelling at each other?
Aren’t you ashamed? With Thebes sick and dying
you two fight out some personal grievance?
Oedipus. Go inside. Kreon, go home.
Don’t make us all miserable over nothing. (747–752)
Jokasta demands the men stop behaving like children and get back to the more urgent
matter: finding the source of the plague that is ravaging Thebes. Her intervention starts a
sequence of discoveries that will prove the seer correct and identify Oedipus not only as
Laios’ killer, as the prophet Tiresias predicted, but also as Jokasta’s own son. The tone she
takes toward her husband and brother conveys what we, who have our own theorizations,
might recognize as a Freudian irony—Jokasta’s motherly dismissal reminds us of her
initial relationship to Oedipus. The revelations following her rebuke remind us that
attempts to avoid looming trouble can backfire. The consequences of our actions cannot
always be foreseen.
Sophocles’ remarkably resilient plays have proven themselves as timeless as the
experiences they dramatize: human vulnerability to suffering both merited and unmerited,
the courage required for a citizen to face down a tyrant, violence inspired by vengeance or
sexual passion, the effects of war on combatants and civilians, and the longing of the ill-
fated for justification and redemption. Implicit in this timelessness, however, is timeliness.
The myths that engaged Sophocles’ audience originated in Homer’s epics of the Trojan
War and its aftermath. Centuries later Sophocles reworked material from these epics,
which were central to Athenian culture, into dramatic agons (contests) relevant to the
tumultuous, often vicious politics of Greek life in the fifth century BCE. Today Sophocles’
themes, and the way he approached them, correspond at their deepest levels to events and
patterns of thought and conduct that trouble our own time.
Even so, though his plays communicate in and through time, translations of them do
not. Each generation, in its own idiom and in accord with its own cultural presumptions,
renders them into the style it believes best suited for tragedy. This inevitably calls into
play the translator’s own sense of ancient and foreign linguistic decorum. The catch is that
decorum, ancient or current, does not exist in a social or historical vacuum. At the very
least, any contemporary translation must begin by trying to convey both what that
literature seems to have been communicating and how it communicated—not only in its
saying but also in its doing. These plays were not just entertainments. They were social,
historical events. Recognizing this basic circumstance doesn’t guarantee a translation’s
success, but it is a precondition for giving these works breathing room. They were not
made of words alone.
Victorian translators tried to match the elevation they believed essential for Greek
drama. Increasingly, however, the ‘high tone’ once expected from gods and heroes
sounded affected or bombastic. Worse, it glossed over the foibles and occasional
playfulness of those gods. In Aias, for instance, Athena is unmistakably teasing and
flirting with Odysseus, boasting how she has spun Aias around in his own rage. It had
been difficult to render nuances of this order until, in the second half of the twentieth
century, William Arrowsmith, editor of the Oxford series of Greek Drama in New
Translations, commissioned poet-translators to write and publish more natural, idiomatic,
and thus more accessible and playable versions.
Some scholars and critics still view the use of modern idiom as not only grating but
also as a gratuitous departure from established ‘literal’ meaning, thus undermining
Sophocles’ stylistic and ‘communicative’ intentions. And yet, though patches of literalness
are possible and desirable, a consistently literal translation is literally impossible. Not all
Greek words correspond exactly to modern English words. Many have quite different
spectra of associations and nuances. Depending on context, logos can be and has been
translated as “word,” “language,” “theory,” “reason,” “ratio,” “proportion,” “definition,”
and “a saying”—as in the opening line of Women of Trakhis (“People have a saying that
goes way back”). Of course logos is also the basis for the English “logic” and the
conceptualizing of biology, geology and every other ‘-ology.’ And then there’s “In the
beginning was the Logos, and the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” How does
one put that into a hermetic linguistic filing system? In life, in actual production, neither
easily nor well.
Greek, in every sense a living language, does not stand still. The ancient Greeks lived
with a panoply of dramatic expressions, from the pungency of cut-and-thrust dialogue to
exhortation, exultation, and elaborately detailed messenger narratives. Audiences expected
chorus members to be capable of conveying sympathy, rebuke, irony, naïveté and wryness,
and outbursts of pain and mourning and, between each scene, to perform complex and
often highly allusive choral songs. To translate the rich range of expressive modes
Sophocles had at his disposal, we need the resources not only of idiomatic English but
also of rhetorical gravitas and, on rare occasion, colloquial English as well. Which is why
we have adopted, regarding vocabulary and ‘levels of speech,’ a wide and varied palette.
When Philoktetes exclaims, “You said it, boy,” that saying corresponds in character to the
colloquial Greek expression. On the other hand Aias’s “Long rolling waves of time …” is
as elevated, without being pompous, as anything can be.
Unfortunately we’ve been taught and have learned to live with washed-out stereotypes
of the life and art of ‘classical’ times—just as we have come to associate Greek sculpture
with marble pallor, despite the fact that the Greeks painted most, if not all, of their statues.
The statues’ eyes were not blanks gazing off into space. They had color: a look. To restore
their flesh tones, their eye color, and the bright hues of their cloaks would seem a
desecration, but only because we’ve become accustomed to static, idealized conceptions
of ancient Greek culture. A mindset that sees Greek statuary as bland marble may
condition us to preserve, above all, not the reality of ancient Greek art but our own fixed
conception of it—which, ironically, is inseparable from what the ravages of centuries have
done to it.
The classical historian Bettany Hughes writes in The Hemlock Cup (81) that Greek
sculptures “were dressed in real clothes as if they suffered hot and cold like any other
human… . Statues, monuments, temples … were all painted and stained in Technicolor.
The stark application and gloopy pigments used would shock most of us today, but these
were designed to be seen under the bright Attic sun, and their gaudy glory to be
remembered.”
As translators we have a responsibility not to reissue a replica of classical Greek
culture but rather to recoup its living reality. We recognize that locutions sounding
contorted, coy, allusive, or annoyingly roundabout to us were a feature of ordinary Greek
and were intensified in poetic theatrical discourse. Such larger-than-life expressions,
delivered without artificial amplification to an audience of thousands, did not jar when
resonating in the vast Theater of Dionysos, but may to our own Anglophone ears when
spoken from our more intimate stages and screens or read in our books and electronic
tablets. Meanwhile, where appropriate, and especially in rapid exchanges, we have our
characters speak more straightforwardly.
Of course there are no ‘rules’ for determining when a more-literal or less-literal
approach is appropriate. Historical and dramatic context have to be taken into account.
The objective is not only to render the textual meaning (which is ordinarily more on the
phrase-by-phrase than the word-by-word level) but also to communicate the feel and
impact embedded in that meaning. When use of the literal word or phrase would obscure
what we think Sophocles meant (or what his audience would have understood a passage to
mean), we’ve sometimes opted for a non-word-literal translation, seeking instead a phrase
that will communicate a more precise dynamic and significance within a dramatic
exchange. Dictionaries are indispensable for translators, but they are not sufficient. The
meanings of words are immeasurably more nuanced in life than they are in a lexicon. As
in life, where most ‘sayings’ cannot be fully grasped apart from their social context, so in
theater: dramatic context must take words up and finish them off, communicating the felt
realities that make the concerns and the actions of the play compelling.
For example, in Aias, Teukros, the out-of-wedlock half brother of Aias, and Menelaos,
co-commander of the Greek forces, are trading insults. When Menelaos says, “The archer,
far from blood dust, thinks he’s something,” Teukros quietly rejoins, “I’m very good at
what I do” (1300–1301).
Understanding the exchange between the two men requires that the reader or audience
recognize the ‘class’ implications of archery. Socially and militarily, archers rank low in
the pecking order. They stand to the rear of the battle formation. Archers are archers
because they can’t afford the armor one needs to be a hoplite, a frontline fighter. This issue
generates some of the more heated moments in the play after Aias commits suicide. The
point is that Teukros refuses to accept ‘his place’ in the social and military order. For a
Greek audience, the sheer fact of standing his ground against a commander had to have
been audacious. But that is not how it automatically registers in most modern word-by-
word translations, which tend to make Teukros sound defensive (a trait wholly out of his
character in this play). Examples: (a) “even so, ’tis no sordid craft that I possess,” (b) “I’m
not the master of a menial skill,” (c) “my archery is no contemptible science,” (d) “the art
I practice is no mean one.” In modern English idiom, tonally, his negation preempts his
assertion (the ‘I’m not … but even so’ formula). It admits weakness.
“I’m very good at what I do,” however, is a barely veiled threat: the dramatic arc of
the encounter, which confirms that Teukros will not back down for anything or anyone,
not even a commander of the Greek army, substantiates that Sophocles meant it as such.
Hearing the line in context we realize instantly not only what the words are saying but,
more pointedly and feelingly, what they’re doing. His words are not just ‘about’
something. They are an act in themselves—not, as in the more literal translations, a
duress-driven apologia. Translation must thus respond to an individual character’s ever-
changing moods and demeanor. The words should reflect states of mind, just as they do in
life.
Idiomatic or colloquial expressions fit many situations better—especially those that
have a more finely tuned emotional economy––than phrases that, if uninhabited or
hollowed out, sound evasive or euphemistic. Many of the words Sophocles gives his
characters are as abrupt and common as he might himself have spoken in the agora, to the
assembly, to his troops, or to his family and his actors.
We also have chosen a more literal translation in passages where scholars have opted
for a seemingly more accessible modern phrase. For instance, at the climactic moment in
Oedipus the King, when Oedipus realizes he has killed his father and fathered children