Translating Greek Theatre

Translating Greek Theatre

The days are long gone when Gilbert Murray, as a professor of Greek, could produce translations for Granville-Barker to direct at the Royal Court Theatre. Deliberately archaized, his lyrical translations were accepted by public and actors alike as the right way to do Greek tragedy. The Murray texts moved well, spoke well, evoked a utopian past, and had the weight of academic authority to legitimate their cultural status. Eliot, on behalf of Modernism, demolished the Romantic enterprise. For Eliot, the past could only be salvaged as "fragments . . . shored against my ruins."²¹ The Murray/Granville-Barker project became untenable, both theatrically and philosophically. There was no longer a normative poetic idiom available to the theatre, and the business of translation diversified.

The publishing market currently supports four broad categories of translation:

1. The scholarly crib: for example, the Aris and Phillips parallel-text translations. Liberally embellished with notes, these aspire to literalism. Literalism is a matter of semantics, which it privileges over word order in an inflected language such as Greek. The flow of thought is lost along with rhythm.
2. . The reading version: for example, the Oxford World's Classics or Penguin versions of Euripides. These are designed for the buoyant classical studies readership, for people interested in "the ideas behind the play" or theatrical concepts like characterization. Reading the text aloud in class no longer seems an important pedagogic strategy, so rhythm is not high on the translator's agenda.
3. The poetic version: for example, Robert Fagles's Penguin Sophocles and Aeschylus, or the American Oxford University Press series edited by William Arrowsmith, which teams up poets who know how to write with classicists who know what the Greek really means. In the Arrowsmith concept, there is a risk that the performative falls into a gap in the middle. Robert Fagles is an interesting case because he produces a language that lives as poetry but obdurately resists embodiment.
4. The stage version: for example, the Methuen series edited by Michael Walton. Tested in the crucible of performance, the priority is that these translations should have worked in the theatre, without stepping over the invisible boundary that defines them as "adaptations."

I shall take apart some sample lines from a category 4 text to show what may be involved in making a translation stageworthy. The Raphael/MacLeish version of the Oresteia began life as a radical adaptation for television in 1979 before reemerging in a stage version. Here is the moment when Cassandra starts to prophesy:

No riddles now. I'll tell it plain.
Now my prophecy is no shy bride
Peeping out from her veil: it's a wind
That hurls the morning waves
Full in the Sun's bright face.
I'll speak no more riddles. There's worse to come.²²

The first line is an invention, a necessary piece of signposting to prepare the audience to deal with culturally alien objects, a pair of similes. The second simile is stripped back to less than half-length, and its meaning is transformed accordingly: not a roller wave slowly passing across the sea towards the rising sun, but simple breakers. And there is no need for the actor to reach to the bottom of his or her lungs to create a big utterance about a big wave. Modern tastes are definitely for minimalism and spare language. One result of carving the language into bite-sized chunks has been to separate the "worse to come" from the rolling wave to which it refers, so the flow of thought is lost. Whatever detail they may have sacrificed, Raphael and MacLeish preserve the two vital ingredients for stageability: clarity and rhythm. Their work is disciplined by the requirement of never letting the audience's attention slip. In the debit column, two other items need mention. First is the switch from the mode of song to the mode of speech, which here accompanies Cassandra's promise of plain speaking. The operatic dimension of Greek tragedy is...