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Title: Sophocles: The Complete Plays by Paul Roche, E. A. Sophocles ISBN: 0-451-52784-4 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Agony, despair, suffering, misery...It's all good.
Comment: If tragedy is, as Aristotle described, the imitation (that is, representation) of great people whose downfall induces a sense of pity and fear in the audience, Sophocles's plays are exemplary illustrations of the genre. The Sophoclean hero suffers, agonizes, despairs because of cruel fate or, more likely, some mistake he or she has made as a result of a character flaw such as pride or anger. Thus the tragedy of "Ajax" is not only that the title character kills himself in shame over having lost out to Odysseus on being awarded Achilles's armor, the ownership of which would have been proof of his heroic deeds in battle, but that his shame might have been alleviated had he known that Odysseus greatly respected his heroism. Similarly, in "Antigone," Creon, king of Thebes, suffers the loss of his wife and son over his stubborn insistence to enforce a law founded on his pride.
Sophocles portrays "noble" sufferers too. In "Electra," the title heroine plots to kill her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, but she has a good reason -- revenge for killing her father Agamemnon and bounding her to a life of slavish submission. The title hero of "Philoctetes" is marooned on an island through no fault of his own, and furthermore becomes the target of trickery when Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles's son, show up with the intent to obtain a magic bow in his possession which they need to win the Trojan War. Heracles's wife Deianeira, in "The Women in Trachis," catches her husband in the act of intended infidelity; her reaction is to send him a cloak she thinks is a talisman to keep him faithful to her, when in reality it is poisoned. That Electra's plans are fulfilled, Philoctetes receives sympathy, and Deianeira kills herself in grief shows the range of emotions that lead to the end of a Sophoclean tragedy.
The most masterful of these plays is "Oedipus the King," which seeks to maximize pity and fear in the audience by portraying some of the most tragic circumstances imaginable -- a hero who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother as was prophesied, and then, to his horror, discovers their identities. Does Oedipus, like Deianeira, kill himself in grief? No, that would be too merciful. Instead, he gouges out his eyes in self-punishment and lives to continue suffering, as an abject vagrant in "Oedipus at Colonus."
In this Signet Classics edition, Paul Roche translates these plays in verse rather than prose, which preserves their poeticality, improves their clarity, and significantly increases the enjoyability of reading them. This is the perfect edition for getting acquainted with one of the great Greek dramatists.
Rating: 4
Summary: A little too much like the modern Bible
Comment: I enjoyed this translation, and I recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. Its strength is that it is very easy to read in large part because Roche structured the lines as he felt they would have been spoken. He includes some interesting appendices on production, etc, and he has just the right number of footnotes to help us keep up, but not be slowed down.
My beef is that comparing it to other translations I have read is like comparing the clunky dumbed down modern translations of the Bible to the King James Version. Still, the language and the wisdom do sometimes soar together.
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Title: Euripides: 10 Plays by Paul Roche, Euripides, Euripedes ISBN: 0451527003 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Mythology : Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton ISBN: 0446607258 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Aeschylus I: Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides) by Aeschylus, David Grene, Richmond Alexander Lattimore ISBN: 0226307786 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: December, 1983 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Oresteia by Aeschylus, Christopher Collard ISBN: 0192832816 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Clouds, the Birds, Lysistrata, the Frogs by Aristophanes, William Arrowsmith ISBN: 0452007178 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: November, 1984 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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