Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy by Yopie Prins (review)

Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy is a stunning book: sparklingly innovative, deeply researched, and highly readable. Yopie Prins examines nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century English and American women translators of Greek tragedy (Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Sophocles's Electra, Euripedes's Hippolytus and The Bacchae), asking why women were drawn to the difficulties of studying the ancient Greek language despite significant educational and cultural obstacles. Translation, in this sense, is meant literally as well as loosely—"transcriptions, transliterations, transformations, and transpositions" (xiii)—and centers on a highly conceptual approach to the Greek language, as "women performed classical literacy," with all of its difficult gender, class, and educational contexts, "by writing through and around and between the letters of the Greek alphabet" (xiv). In a rich and engaging series of interlinked chapters, the analysis moves self-consciously but deftly between England and America, amateur translators and the rise of women's access to higher education in the Classics, and the strange suspension Prins identifies across multiple women translators between knowing and not knowing Greek (where Virginia Woolf's 1925 essay "On Not Knowing Greek" is pivotal). The argument hinges on the tension between the literality of the Greek letters and their performativity in multiple acts of translations (including, in this definition, many fascinating theatrical adaptations); indeed, Prins contends that women's encounters with Greek tragedy inherently involved a series of performative poses and actions of classical literacy in terms of interconnecting class, gender, and racial categories.

The book begins with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, although the chapters move widely among well-known and lesser known English and American women translators (such as A. Mary F. Robinson, Virginia Woolf, Annie Adams Fields, Jane Harrison, Janet Case, Hilda Doolittle [H. D.], Anna Swanwick), Barrett Browning in many ways haunts the argument. The introduction begins with Barrett Browning as a thirteen-year-old, composing her "First Greek Ode May 4th, 1819 To Summer." Examining the manuscript version of that ode, Prins calls attention to the "strange alphabet" signified by the handwriting, and to how the dead Greek language is reanimated, but with a productive uncertainty based on the very problem of translating a dead unspoken language into the world and vice versa (3). This is a problem to which this book repeatedly turns. Barrett Browning's fascination for Greek is traced through other examples from her juvenilia, and then in Aurora Leigh (1856), a work that embodies for Prins the "spell of Greek" in Barrett Browning's poetry but also the tension embodied by the woman writer as an amateur scholar of Greek, in contrast to nineteenth-century male classical scholars and philologists who viewed Greek as a language to master (7). The stakes are high for women writers translating Greek, not only because classical learning is a mark of acculturation and poetic acumen, but also because of the inherent difficulty of working in Greek. Prins emphasizes the "idea of Greek" for women writers as they fall under the "spell" of the literal Greek letters, and are captured by the strangeness and impossibility of knowing Greek; women translators of Greek performed this "not knowing" of Greek as they also paradoxically desired it (12). Prins articulates this tension in theoretical terms based in archival work, and she also discusses several specific historical contexts for women's encounters with Greek as a culture that she terms "Ladies' Greek": the professionalization of women writers; the rise of higher education institutions for women, and the place of performances of Greek tragedy in colleges for women; Hellenism as a language for homoeroticism and transgressive female desire; and the rise of women's transatlantic networks of translators and performers of Greek tragedy.

This is not, however, a straightforward feminist recovery project. The book eschews biographical approaches to its selective literary history of translators, preferring instead to work within singular as well as plural understandings of "Ladies' Greek" to trace the "pain and pleasure of learning Greek" as a...