What do you think?
Rate this book
384 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 402
"لا يخلق بالطبيب الحاذق أن يرتل تعزيمات سحرية حينما يقتضي الداء استعمال المشرط."
"بالنسبة إلى الإنسان لا توجد مهمة أنبل من مساعدة الآخرين بقدر طاقته ووسائله."
تيرسياس المتنبأ مخاطباً أوديب :
"لم يطحن القدر أحداً بقسوة أشد مما سيفعله القدر معك."
"إسمينا: ... تخيلي الموت البائس الذي سنلقاه, لو أننا عصينا القانون, وتخطينا قرار الحظر وصرنا تحت السلطان المطلق لملك. واعلمي أولا أننا لسنا إلا امرأتين: وال��بيعة لم تجبلنا على النضال ضد الرجال. إنا خاضعنام لسادة, وبالتالي نحن مرغمتان على الامتثال لأوامرهم هذه وما أقسى منها. وفيما يتصل بي أنا, على كل حال, فإني أتوسل إلى الموتى المقيمين تحت التراب أن يكونوا رحماء بي, لأنني إنما أذعن للقوة القاهرة, ومستعدة لإطاعة السلطة القائمة: إن الأفعال التي لا جدوى منها هي حماقات.
أنتيجونا: اطمئني-لن أطلب منك شيئاً بعد الآن- وحتى لو أدرت بعد ذلك أن تفعلي شيئاً, فلن يسرني أبداً أن أشعر بأنك إلى جانبي. فكوني إذن من تشائين أن تكونيه. أما أنا فإني سأدفن فولونيقس, وسأكون فخورة بأن أموت وأنا أفعل ذلك. فعلى هذا النحو سأرقد إلى جواره, حبيبة إلى من هو حبيب لي, مجرمة بجرم مقدس."
"أنتيجونا: أنا من أولئك الذين يحبون, لا من أولئك الذين يكرهون.
كريون: إذن ما دام لا بد لك أن تحبي, فاذهبي تحت التراب لتحبي الموتى؛ أما أنا, فطالما كنت حياً, فلن أجعل امرأة هي التي تسن لي القوانين."
وعلى الرغم من كل شيء أيها الأمير, فإني أفضل أن أخفق لأني تصرفت بأمانة على أن أنتصر نتيحة استخدامي للسفالة."
"الحرب لا تهلك أي شرير عن طيب خاطر- أما الأفاضل, فعلى العكس من ذلك تهلكهم الحرب في كل ضربة."
"إن الموتى هم وحدهم المعفوون من الألم."
Reading Oedipus always makes me edgy. The irony of being so far gone and not even realizing it, "...As if he were my father..." at line 252, or "...his build was not unlike yours..." at line 705.
None but a fool would scorn life that was brief.
In vain we say man is happy, till he goes beyond life's final border, free from pain.
I just made some significant career moves, and it makes me nervous after reading Oedipus. I was a hero where I was - well-loved and respected. But my story isn't finished being told yet. And it won't be until the very, VERY end.
Aias (James Scully)Interestingly enough, this was the first time that I had read Aias (Ajax) or the Women of Trakhis and I really, really enjoyed both of them. While I was familiar with the story of Ajax from The Iliad, I have to say that Sophocles and James Scully really made me realize the physical and psychological toll that warfare and combat has upon a soldier. One has to believe that what is described in Aias can only be classified as "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD). We see the toll that this 'madness' takes upon the family and friends of Ajax, and it is truly heartbreaking. In the Introduction to the volume, Bagg and Scully indicate that excerpts from both Aias and Philoktetes have been performed for members of the American armed services and their families in the context of addressing and dealing with PTSD. Bravo!
Women of Trakhis (Robert Bagg)
Philoktetes (James Scully)
Elektra (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus the King (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus at Kolonos (Robert Bagg)
Antigone (Robert Bagg)
"Hades, who chills each one of us to sleep,That'll wrench your heart-strings. Bagg and Scully have given us a new version of Sophocles that is dramatic, poetic, and lyrical. The language incorporated in these translations is not in the slightest degree flowery or excessive. In my opinion, not one word is wasted, the emotion is right there--in your face--and it just feels right. Read these plays and see what you think.
will guide me down to Acheron's shore.
I'll go hearing no wedding hymn
to carry me to my bridal chamber, or songs
girls sing when flowers crown a bride's hair;
I'm going to marry the River of Pain." (890-895)
ELECTRA: Shallow is one who forgets a parent’sThe confrontation between Electra and her sister (who wants to be prudent) is a nice revisitation of the Antigone/Ismene conflict in Sophocles’s earlier play. Orestes’s fake death, reported by his older confederate to mislead the villainous Clytemnestra, is a masterpiece of action-narrative, justifying the back cover’s reference to Sophocles as a “tragic Homer.” Clytemnestra herself is too petulant to be impressive, though her self-justification (that she killed Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of Iphigenia) is compelling, despite Electra’s correct reply that this does not justify adulterous murder. Not the most impressive Greek play, but worth reading for its heroine.
Pitiless end. Give me instead
The sorrowful nightingale, she who sings
Its Itys—forever distraught:
Emissary of Zeus.
Good-bye, sea-skirted isle of Lemnos:The Women of Trachis: This one is almost Euripidean in its sympathy and complexity. It is the story of how Deianeira, trying to win back the love of her womanizing husband, the hero Hercules, after he captures a younger bride, accidentally kills him by sending him a shirt bequeathed to her by the centraur Nessus. Nessus, unbeknownst to her, had poisoned it to revenge himself on Hercules for wounding him as he attempted to rape Deianeira. The second half of the play, full of the very slowly dying Hercules’s complaints, is not interesting, but Deianeira’s resigned, intelligent, and forthright reflections on the fatality of love are quite moving, as is her eventual suicide:
Breeze me away on a faultless voyage
To whatever haven Fate will waft me,
To whatever purlieus the wish of my friends
And the universal god of happenings brings me.
You are talking to a womanOedipus the King: What is left to say about Oedipus? It is a masterfully constructed play, full of symbolic economy (references to eyes and vision are pervasive) and, every time I experience it, it is unbearably suspenseful in its dramatic irony. Everybody from the ancient audience to the post-Freudian reader knows Oedipus’s story before he does, rendering the play a master-class in sympathy with sublime catastrophe. Even though this play allows its spectators a god’s-eye-view, we know that we, no less than the tragic hero, are caught in the toils of fate and must one day submit. Few moments in literature are more moving than Jocasta’s farewell: “Good-bye, my poor deluded, lost and damned! / There’s nothing else that I can call you now.” (Not son, not husband.) Oedipus’s tragic flaw, I note, is a trust in himself (borne of solving the Sphinx’s riddle without realizing its implications for all mortals). When he refers to himself, earlier in the play, as “a stranger to the story” of Laius’s murder, we know that the terrible story is in fact about him and no one else. Seeing himself as a rational foe of the monstrous (perhaps also, implicitly, the sexual, the feminine, and the deadly), he does not recognize the monstrous in himself. But the sublimity of his self-trust comes from his pursuing his investigation to the end of the line, until he finds a truth so horrifying to look upon that he must strike at the organs of perception, thereby becoming precisely the decrepit man at evening, going on three legs, referred to in the Sphinx’s riddle. I recall that Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, were able to mount their attack on the entirety of Western civilization by treating Odysseus (about whom Sophocles is so ambivalent) as its founding representative—Odysseus, the polytropic man, who always wins by cheating. Of course, there would have been a hint of self-praise in selecting Oedipus as representative of Enlightenment. But Oedipus is the ultimate in self-scrutiny and self-criticism, as the modern West might say of itself, if only it weren’t too self-critical to congratulate itself so. In any case, Oedipus may investigate himself and punish himself, but it does not make him (or us) any less a monster. This truth—that knowledge is its own good but no salvation—suggests the limits of any Enlightened perspective.
who is neither perverse nor ignorant
of the ways of men
and knows the inconstancy of the human heart.
Anyone who has a boxing match with Eros is a fool.
The god of love does exactly what he likes—
even with the gods.
If he rules me,
then why not another woman in the same way.
Some emissary maybe from heaven came;There is loud conflict, with the blind and vulnerable Oedipus in marvelous command of language as he rebukes his enemies—including Creon and his son, Polyneices. As Roche observes, “his years of suffering have raised him to a holy dignity as the recognized vehicle of divine justice.” The drama gives way to the mysterious ritual of its conclusion, a kind of authorial prayer for grace on the lip of the grave. Meanwhile, the chorus of Athenian elders concludes, at the play’s end, as Sophocles nears his own death and a weeping Antigone walks offstage to her fate,
or was the adamantine floor of the dead
gently reft for him with love?
The passing of this man was painless
with no trace of pain nor any loud regret.
It was of mortal exits the most marvelous.
Come, then, cease your cryingA wisdom much out of fashion—and not actually comforting—but fortifying.
Keep tears from overflowing
All’s ordained past all denying.
Come, tomb, my wedding chamber, come!There is much to admire in this brief play, from the chorus’s extraordinary oration on human power and limitation to the brief but perfectly evocative roles for Haemon (a Romeo avant la lettre, as Roche points out in his introduction) and the prudent (or cowardly) Ismene. I do not think this play can bear the weight of its political interpretation—as a staging of the rival claims of family and state—since both family and state are so utterly disordered in this story of the house of Oedipus. But as a drama about human despair and perversity, about the irresistible urge some of us—the fatally stubborn Creon no less than death’s bride, Antigone—feel to take our lives to their ultimate conclusions in some spectacular gesture, it is unrivaled.
You sealed off habitations of the grave!
My many family dead, finished, fetched,
in a final muster to Persephone.