The Complete Euripides by Peter Burian;Alan Shapiro; & Alan Shapiro

Author:Peter Burian;Alan Shapiro; & Alan Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199831166
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

ON THE TRANSLATION

Down three games to zero in the 2004 American League Championship best-of-seven series, the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees four straight times to win the Pennant. The Red Sox became the first team in any sport to win a series after losing the first three games. When asked how they overcame that deficit, Terry Francona, the Boston manager, said they tried to narrow their focus from winning the series, or even winning each game, to winning each inning, each at bat, each pitch. By breaking down the series into games, the games into innings, and the innings into at bats and pitches, the BoSox established small, achievable goals. As a result, he said, they were never overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge they faced.

Francona’s strategy aptly describes how I went about translating The Trojan Women. First of all, I had to forget who it was I was translating. I had to forget that Euripides is one of the greatest poet / playwrights who ever lived, and that of all the surviving tragedies, The Trojan Women is perhaps the purest, and most heart-wrenching expression of the tragic spirit—undeserved and unredemptive suffering. I also had to forget that by and large tragic language is, in John Herrington’s words, “a distinct and easily recognizable composite genre-dialect … a dialect which was never spoken outside the theatre but was mostly as remote from the language of the streets as the tragic masks and costumes were from the dress of the streets.” I narrowed my focus to each sentence, each line, each word. Of course, my situation differed from the situation facing the Red Sox in that from the outset I knew I was going to lose. What I attempted to do, what I hoped to do, was to lose in an interesting and responsible way, in a way that honored my opponent by dramatizing my own intimate understanding of his unique achievement. I took to heart Cervantes’ complaint that reading a translation is “like looking at the Flanders Tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes, but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original luster.”

In this translation, I try to fathom, if not to preserve, the original luster of The Trojan Women. Relying on Shirley Barlow’s prose translation, I cast the spoken passages in blank verse, and the choral and monodic odes in a variety of two- to four-beat accentual lines. I use blank verse because of its flexibility, its capaciousness, and its potential to modulate subtly between formal and informal levels of speech. Blank verse can heighten into lyricism of intense emotion or accommodate and dramatize the rhetorical flourishes of argumentation. It can feel thoughtfully, and think feelingly. To avoid monotony, I vary degrees of stress among accented and unaccented syllables, I substitute anapestic and trochaic feet for iambs here and there, and I play the phrases off against the lines while making sure the line cuts into the sentence at

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