The Oresteia of Aeschylus

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Our daughter was tentative and unsure when we dropped her off at her first rehearsal and now it is one of her favorite activities. Melissa creates an inclusive, supportive environment where every child leaves feeling more confident.” T he​ comparison of Mulroy’s and Bernstein’s versions with the infinitely stronger work of Ruden and Taplin is a useful demonstration of how hard it is to produce a good literary translation. This is certainly true of translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, but it is also true of literary translation in general: it is very difficult. Most readers of foreign languages are not translators; most writers are not translators. Translators have to read and write at the same time, as if always playing multiple instruments in a one-person band. And most one-person bands do not sound very good. There are all too many moments when the choices in the weaker versions are reminiscent of A.E. Housman’s brilliant comic parody, ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’. ‘Ah, how miserable!’ Bernstein’s Clytemnestra laments. It is hard not to agree. Mulroy’s Agamemnon, preparing to get his shoes taken off, calls: ‘Undo/my shoes, the servile mats beneath my feet.’ Attempts at more colloquial language fall flat: ‘Bull’s eye! The latter’; ‘they’re a violent lot’ (Mulroy). The consistent thoughtlessness about linguistic register includes, predictably, an obliviousness to exclusive language and contemporary usage; Mulroy regularly uses ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ when the Greek refers to all, not half, of the human race. Cassandra (the enslaved woman who is twice labelled Agamemnon’s ‘mistress’ by Bernstein) makes a final heartbreaking expression of pity, not for her own imminent murder, but for all mortal circumstances: βρότειαπράγματα. Mulroy renders this ‘Alas for men’s affairs!’ Taplin, far more effectively, has ‘This is the way it is for humans.’ An inexhaustible masterpiece is transformed into a glib anti-war morality play". Daily Telegraph. 1999-12-03. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 2016-02-26 . Retrieved 2018-08-13. Mourning Becomes Electra – a modernized version of the story by Eugene O'Neill, who shifts the action to the American Civil War Higgins, Charlotte (2015-07-30). "Ancient Greek tragedy Oresteia receives surprise West End transfer". The Guardian . Retrieved 2020-11-04.

Oresteia of Aeschylus by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein [PDF] The Oresteia of Aeschylus by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein

The only extant fragment that has been definitively attributed to Proteus was translated by Herbert Weir Smyth: Cassandra’s fate is met with an accordingly visceral relish in Clytemnestra’s later reaction to her murderous spree, and Bernstein delivers her interchange with the Chorus with a sanguine swagger which is somehow neatly consonant with the blindness of Tragic necessity: The tormenting aftermath of Orestes’ matricide is the subject of the final play, Eumenides. The title is translated as ‘the kindly ones’, but the Eumenides are the Furies, gods older than the Olympian pantheon, pursuing and punishing those who have sinned. The Chorus now take on the role of these avenging spirits, implacable in their desire to torment and destroy Orestes for the murder of his mother: The adept working of the final Stichomythia brings tentative accord to the Agon, before the solemnised and ritualistic release of harmony and plenteousness in an Athens whose embryonic democracy is a not unreasonable mirror to Aeschylus’ own. Bernstein’s rendering of the efflorescent comity between Athena and the Chorus of Furies is stately in language, and attuned in timbre. The softening of the Erinyes into agents of good, now Eumenides, enacts a reversal whose tone is resonant in its simplicity: To the anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen ( Das Mutterrecht, 1861), the Oresteia shows Ancient Greece's transition from "hetaerism" ( polyamory) to monogamy; and from "mother-right" ( matriarchal lineage) to "father-right" ( patriarchal lineage). According to Bachofen, religious laws changed in this period: the Apollo and Athena of The Eumenides present the patriarchal view. The Furies contrast what they call "gods of new descent" with the view that matricide is more serious than the killing of men. With Athena acquitting Orestes, and the Furies working for the new gods, The Eumenides shows the newfound dominance of father-right over mother-right. [21]

Footnotes

Jill Sharp was an Open University tutor for many years. Her poems have appeared this year in Prole, Stand and Acumen, and are forthcoming in Envoi, Under the Radar and Poetry Salzburg. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams in 2015 and she was one of 6 women poets included in the volume Vindication, from Arachne Press, 2018.

Carcanet Press - The Oresteia of Aeschylus

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus' The Oresteiais translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. Agamemnon ( Ἀγαμέμνων, Agamémnōn) is the first of the three plays within the Oresteia trilogy. It details the homecoming of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, from the Trojan War. After ten years of warfare, Troy had fallen and all of Greece could lay claim to victory. Waiting at home for Agamemnon is his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, who has been planning his murder. She desires his death to avenge the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia, to exterminate the only thing hindering her from commandeering the crown, and to finally be able to publicly embrace her long-time lover Aegisthus. [3] The play opens to a watchman looking down and over the sea, reporting that he has been lying restless "like a dog" for a year, waiting to see some sort of signal confirming a Greek victory in Troy. He laments the fortunes of the house, but promises to keep silent: "A huge ox has stepped onto my tongue." The watchman sees a light far off in the distance—a bonfire signaling Troy's fall—and is overjoyed at the victory and hopes for the hasty return of his King, as the house has "wallowed" in his absence. Clytemnestra is introduced to the audience and she declares that there will be celebrations and sacrifices throughout the city as Agamemnon and his army return. [ citation needed]The murder of Agamemnon, from an 1879 illustration from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church The following year, in 2016, playwright Zinnie Harris premiered her adaptation, This Restless House, at the Citizen's Theatre to five-star critical acclaim. [31] Chronology of adaptations [ edit ] Kells, J. H. (1966). "More Notes on Euripides' Electra". The Classical Quarterly. Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association. 16 (1): 51–54. doi: 10.1017/S0009838800003359. JSTOR 637530. S2CID 170813768.

Oresteia | Penguin Random House Higher Education The Oresteia | Penguin Random House Higher Education

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by AeschylusA sense of anxiety is beautifully realised here. At the mercy of impulses both innate, and driven – by the god Apollo – Bernstein yields the fleeting suggestion of Hamlet, if only by definition of existential uncertainty. Apollo’s tribunal defence of Orestes against the Furies in the Areopagus is cravenly inconsistent but the judgement is never in doubt; Bernstein remains resolutely aware of the capriciousness of the entire pantheon of Greek gods, and of the subjection of the earthly players in a drama of bloody revenge.If Bernstein doesn’t stray far from the path of convention, his reworking of this cornerstone of the Tragic oeuvre adds a new, and highly accessible, richness to a story which has been told and re-told over two and a half millennia of depressingly consistent human endeavour. But even if Taplin loses some of the original’s linguistic complexity, he has created an English version full of sonic and metaphorical wealth, as when the Chorus sings of an obscure fate that should be spoken, but is not: Bury, J. B.; Meiggs, Russell (1956). A history of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.347–348, 352.