Ten Plays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Translator’s Preface

  ALCESTIS

  HIPPOLYTUS

  ION

  ELECTRA

  IPHIGENIA AT AULIS

  IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAURIANS

  MEDEA

  THE BACCHAE

  THE TROJAN WOMEN

  THE CYCLOPS

  Glossary of Classical Names

  Misunderstood in his own time, Euripides was a genius whose plays explore the inequalities of society, the agonies of war, the conflicts of faith and reason, and the cruelty of human nature. His most famous play, The Bacchae, is often cited by scholars as one of the key texts of Western civilization. The enduring significance of Euripides’ themes and the power of his poetry ensure that he remains one of the most widely read of the ancient Greek dramatists.

  Paul Roche, a noted English poet and scholar, is the author of The Bible’s Greatest Stories (Signet) and the translator of The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles and The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus (both Meridian).

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  Introduction

  Of the nineteen extant plays of Euripides, out of the more than ninety that he wrote, nine are about women. If we add his first play, the lost Daughters of Pelias, presented in 455 B.C. when Euripides was about thirty, the number becomes ten. Women, war, and God were his perennial themes. And of course, the human condition.

  As to the first, he was appalled by the low status of women even in hypercivilized Athens. They had no vote, they were expected to stay at home, they could not engage in commerce—and of course not war—and they were barred from the dramatic festivals.

  In spite of this, we must be on our guard against supposing that their prestige and influence were nil, as they would be with us under similar trammels. Euripides, without being a feminist, showed in play after play that women were powers in society, and though he does not approve of the henpecked husband or of giving a child the mother’s surname, he takes almost more care in the delineation of their characters than he does in those of men.

  As to war, three of his plays, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Trojan Women, and Helen, inveigh against the cruelty and stupidity of war. Indeed, at every possible turn in his plays he underscores the monumental folly of war, which wrecks and demoralizes both victors and vanquished.

  When it comes to God, there are those who see a problem and accuse Euripides of being an atheist. This premature and unjust assumption is, I believe, based on his apparent dismissal of the gods and his distrust of Apollo. The truth is that a sense of divine presence and omnipotence is taken for granted in all his plays. His “dismissal” of the gods was a plea to look further and deeper than a wine-bibbing Bacchus, an inept Apollo, or a rollicking Heracles.

  He was not understood, even by the clever Aristophanes, who lampooned him mercilessly. People did not realize that Euripides was propounding great moral problems, demanding a new analysis of human nature, its instincts, passions, and motives. He deals with the cornered human heart of the individual, at bay against the tyranny of a false theocracy. He deals with the cruelty and selfishness of man.

  Euripides, in his seventy-third year, disappointed possibly by the public’s lack of appreciation (he had won first prize only four times, and even his masterpiece the Medea took only third prize), accepted an invitation from King Archelaus of Macedon to come and live with him. So he was able to escape from being “baited incessantly by a rabble of comic writers, and of course by the great pack of the orthodox and the vulgar.”*

  In Macedon he wrote three more plays, including his greatest, The Bacchae, which was presented after his death in Athens in 406 by his son, and took first prize.

  The happy endings of Euripides’ plays may seem to us silly after all the horror that precedes them. They must have seemed silly to Euripides too: the rescue out of the blue of a murderous Medea; the return of Alcestis from Hades to Admetus, who did not deserve her; the marriage of Electra to Pylades, who deserved something better. In all these quasi-deus-ex-machina escapes from reality it is as though Euripides were saying: “You want a happy ending, but can’t you see that the ending would not have been happy? Very well, I’ll give you an ending that you can’t believe in.”

  Tradition has it that Euripides was taciturn and retiring. We know that he sought solitude for his work in a cave on the island of Salamis near Athens. Recently a clay pot inscribed with his name has been unearthed in a cave at Peristeria in the south of the island. The pot has been dated between 440 and 430 B.C. and only the first six letters of his name are inscribed. Experts say that the inscription was applied later by an admirer of the poet. It seems to me just as likely that the inscription was on the pot because the pot was his, and the pot was in the cave because that was the cave Euripides wrote in.

  I have based my translation on two Greek texts: that of the Harvard University Press and William Heinemann in the Loeb Classical Library, edited by Arthur S. Way, and that of the Collection des Universités de France, edited by Léon Parmentier and Henri Grégoire. When line numbers are given in the footnotes, they refer to the numbers in the Greek text of the Loeb Classics series.

  I owe an enormous debt to Moses Hadas and John McLean, whose translation in the Bantam Classic edition steadied me throughout. I found it a masterpiece of direct, simple, and scrupulously faithful rendering. If I have lifted a phrase or two it is because they could not be bettered. br />
  In compiling the glossary I am indebted to Professor J. E. Zimmerman for his small but comprehensive Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1965 edition), published by Bantam Books.

  I am also greatly beholden to my patient editor at Penguin Putnam, Hugh Rawson, who has guided me throughout.

  Translator’s Preface

  One of the features of my endeavor to render Euripides faithfully is that I keep strictly to the structure of his plays, which varies very little.

  He begins with a Prologue spoken by one of the characters, which is followed by the Parados (entry song of the chorus) or sometimes by the First Episode. Occasionally a lyric monologue or dialogue stands in for the chorus. After which comes the First Choral Ode or Lyric (I use the terms Choral Ode and Choral Lyric interchangeably), followed by the Second Episode, followed by the Second Choral Ode, followed by the Third Episode, and so on till the final chorus.

  The advantage, if there is an advantage, of giving headings to this structure is that it stresses Euripides’ procedure. There is this to it, too, that with signposts pointing the way it is easy for a student or an actor to pick exactly any passage that he or she wants to study or rehearse.

  Lastly, I must make clear that this version is a translation, not an adaptation or a paraphrase. I might almost boast that it could be used as a crib by that little band of people that still studies classical Greek.

  There are no stage directions or divisional headings in the Greek text. These are my additions.

  The Prosody of Euripides

  Many years ago in my first attempts to translate Greek drama (it was Sophocles), I wondered how I could transcribe the iambic trimeter of the Greek, which is a twelve-syllable line set out in two sets of three. If read naturally and not with the theoretical quantities imposed on it by grammarians, the line reads with six basic stresses.1

  I discovered (as I say elsewhere) that the pace of Greek is faster than English, and this would make a twelve-syllable line in English (hexameter) too slow for the Greek and not at all its aesthetic equivalent. This made me cast my first translations in the shorter line of iambic pentameter; but I came to realize that pentameter was too much of a straitjacket for the fluidity of the Greek, so I invented a line I called “Compensated Pentameter.” In this, the length of the line could vary, so long as the overall count was the same. For instance, if I went into a hexameter, I would compensate the next line by making it a tetrameter.

  This worked fairly well, but though I sprinkled around a goodly smattering of dactyls, anapests, trochees, and spondees, I found that the line was still too rigid to reflect the limpid flexibility of the Greek. Then I thought: different though Greek is from English, both tongues love iambs. Indeed, iambs are natural to English in verse and prose, though in prose one should not strive for a musical line unless the emotion requires it.

  The upshot of all this was that I alighted on what I christened the “Freewheeling Iambic,” and that is what I use now. The Freewheeling Iambic reads very naturally and I have arranged the lines exactly as they should be spoken.

  The choruses, whether in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, are another matter: especially in Euripides, who wrote almost as if he were composing hit tunes. I have generally attempted at least to echo his meters, taking trouble to make the strophes and antistrophes strictly correspond.

  The Challenge of Translating

  I have spoken at length in my translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles about the problems of the translator and my attempts to solve them. It has always struck me as ironic that one begins to be equipped to translate a Greek play only when one has completed it; though complete it one never does—at least not until it is acted. Only then do the weak lines, the impossible lines, embarrassingly scream for another attempt. I would willingly put all my translations in the wastepaper basket and try again.

  When Crossroads Productions was filming my translation of Oedipus Rex for Universal Pictures, I kept the Greek text in my pocket and would whip it out to accommodate some unhappy, and usually recalcitrant, actor or actress.

  I shall never forget the horrific day in the old theater of Dodona when Orson Welles, as Tiresias, was being filmed. He had spent the night combing through his lines and removing most of the stichomythia (line by line) dialogue. He no doubt did a good job so far as meaning went, but what he did not realize was that he had blurred the gradual crescendo of feeling propelled by the antithetic rhythm of the lines. The result was that when Oedipus and Tiresias had finished their great set-to, Oedipus, far from being demolished (as Sophocles intended) was as cocky as ever.

  Ezra Pound made the same mistake in his otherwise remarkable renderings. It is the mistake of someone who has confused logical succinctness with the power of poetry. And yet the world of pop and rock has proved over and over again, from errand boy to archbishop, that rhythm bypasses the meddling intellect and goes straight into the bloodstream of intellectuals no less than that of the most bovine.

  My own endeavor in translating is to find out as nearly as possible what the great playwright said and how he said it. This is very different from adapting or paraphrasing in the manner of Jeffers, Anouilh, Lowell, and Hughes. Such “imitations” have their value and can be masterpieces in their own right (vide Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer), but as scholarly transcriptions of what was actually said and meant, they are virtually useless.

  If then the translator intends to be faithful to the text and is not merely using it as a vehicle for his own invention, how does he find the words which not only denote and connote neither more nor less than they do in the original, but at the same time bring over the emotive power locked in the sonic texture? It is a question both of unearthing the right words with the right meaning, association, color, timbre, and valence, and of putting them in the right order with the right tones, rhythms, and cadences.

  As an illustration, a phrase of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus comes to mind. Clytemnestra, in her exultant speech explaining how a relay of beacons flashed the news of the fall of Troy to Greece, says: “with a leapfrog over the sea the strong light skipped with joy.” Her words in the Greek for “a leapfrog over the sea,” are hupertelēs te pontou hōste nōtizai, which translated literally mean: “leaping over the sea like a back flip.” But one cannot pronounce hupertelēs te without it being onomatopoeic: the very rhythm of the seven syllables does the leap for one. Therefore in English I found a similar rhythm of seven syllables, “a leapfrog over the sea.” Of course, “somersault” would have done as well.

  Let us take a simpler example in another language. How does one translate the two words Italia mia? Nothing easier: “My Italy.” But “My Italy” gets nowhere near the emotional blend of pride, fondness, and gentle defiance that emanates from the Italian. Pronounce the syllables with a good round mouth and think of Italy. The whole phrase purrs and sings. What can be done about it in English? Very little. I would venture “Italy, my Italy!” This at least begins to capture the magic.

  Take another example: Horace’s witty remark “Quidquid dicam aut erit aut non,” which translates literally into “Whatever I may say either is or is not,” which doesn’t sound particularly aphoristic or clever. What if we use the rhythm of his aut . . . aut but don’t actually translate it and say: “Whatever I may say certainly is or certainly isn’t”? Now some of the sharpness begins to tell.

  I once lived in Mexico near a village called Santo Thomas de los Platanos. How poetic and evocative! How can I possibly turn this into St. Thomas of the Bananas? Or what if we put into French Tennyson’s famous lines “Break, break, break on thy cold grey shores, O sea!”, and have him say (as Edith Hamilton, that great classicist, acutely pointed out): “Cassez-vous, cassez-vous, cassez-vous sur vos froids gris caillous, O mer!”?

  And, as a last absurdity, let us consider Xenophon. He tells us in his Anabasis (The March Up-country) how the ten thousand Greek mercenaries after months of fumbling their way through the wilds of Mesopotamia climb their final hill, a
nd as each wave of soldiers hits the summit, the ones below hear a roar: “Thalassa! Thalassa!” (“The sea! The sea!”). What if we render this immemorial yelp semantically correctly as: “A vast expanse of salt water! A vast expanse of salt water!”? It is unthinkable.

  But even among the synonyms of our own tongue we cannot ignore the imaginative charge of words without being monstrous. You might, for example, be excused for declining an invitation to dinner when the menu offered was dead calf with fungus in heated dough, scorched ground tubers, and cabbage stalks, all swilled down with rotten German grape juice, and topped off with the dust of burnt berries in scalding water diluted with congealed oozings from the udders of a cow. You might well decline such a bill of fare, but you would miss an excellent meal of veal and mushroom pie, roast potatoes and spring greens, chased by a bottle of hock, and finished with a steaming cup of coffee and cream. What’s in a name? Just about everything.

  When it comes to Greek drama, the pace is surprisingly fast. The dialogue is written in iambic trimeter, a twelve-syllable line which (as I point out earlier in this preface), scans as six feet divided into two sets of three. “Aha!” says the incautious translator, “the English equivalent is another twelve-syllable line, none other than the iambic hexameter.” He slaps it into that and has fallen into the trap. He may be a genius, but he will never know why his lines begin to pall and drag. They do so for the reason that twelve syllables of English ordinarily take more time to say than twelve syllables of Greek.

  I puzzled over this and it was only when analyzing the opening lines of Sophocles’ Antigone that the truth struck me. English uses twice as many consonants as Greek and it is the consonants that delay. Take a two-syllable word like sophos and put it against a two-syllable word like knowledge. How swift is the Greek! How slow and stodgy the English! And this in a mere two syllables. What of twelve? Multiply the extra seconds needed in line after line and no matter how brilliant the translation, it will drag. The effect is something like looking at a film in which every shot is several seconds too long.