The Complete Plays of Sophocles Read online

  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 o
ut 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.