The Complete Aeschylus, Volume I: The Oresteia

by Aeschylus

  In this way, the history of the house of Atreus not only replicates but refines the history of the house of Uranus. The Agamemnon depicted Zeus’ succession by sheer force—the victory of the triaktêr. The end of Eumenides shows Zeus triumphing through persuasion (“Zeus who guides / men’s speech won out,” Eumenides 1135–36 / 973) and proving himself indeed the savior who comes third and last. The great triple movement of the Oresteia encompasses two contests, two libations of blood precisely matched; then comes a third, a libation to Zeus Savior, no longer bloody, that brings the cycle of blood for blood to an end at long last. The fundamental significance of the trilogic form in which Aeschylus has given us this story of crime and revenge lies in the sense of closure—and of opening—that comes in this hard-won resolution. The trilogy ends, the world has made a new beginning—and the rest is up to us.

  PETER BURIAN

  ON THE TRANSLATION

  In The Journal of Cardan, a meditation on (among other things) the inescapable role of impersonal conventions in the expression of personal experience, J. V. Cunningham makes several comments that illuminate for me the experience of translating the Oresteia. In a long passage about the tension in any good work of art between convention, or norms of expectation, and subjective experience, he says, “To be successful in this [artistic] enterprise is to integrate the subjectively primary, the immediate, with the objectively communicable, the mediate, to the alteration of both by their conformation to each other.” There’s more than one way to apply these remarks to the act of translation. The translator could be thought of as the subjectively primary, the irreducibly unique, the immediate, and the text as the objectively communicable. By passing, so to speak, the original text through his or her very nervous system, the translator is “objectifying” his or her subjectivity even as the text itself, the objective, is colored and modified by the translator’s own irreducibly unique relation to it. In a way the text is translating the translator at the same time as the translator is translating the text.

  We can also think of the text in its original language as the irreducibly unique or primary, as that which is, by definition, sealed off and isolated, at least to most readers who cannot speak or read that language, just as the new language into which the text is being translated can be thought of as the objectively communicable, the mediate, as that which makes the original accessible to readers.

  What is useful in adapting Cunningham’s remarks to the act of translation is the recognition of a reciprocal metamorphosis between translator and text, old and new language. In the ideal translation both are transformed by their relation to each other: the strangeness of the original is made familiar enough to be available in a new language, and the new language itself, the familiar, is made strange by capturing the original’s exotic glow.

  Of course no translation could fully realize this ideal. As the saying goes, much is always lost, and, in the case of the Oresteia, the losses are probably too numerous to count. As John Herington has written, “There is much we can, or at least might, do with English. We can make speakable and actable verses; sometimes, with luck, we can even make singable songs; and to that extent we can match the effects of the ancient originals. What we cannot do is to reproduce a dialect which was never spoken outside the theater but was mostly as remote from the language of the streets as the tragic masks and costumes were from the dress of the streets.” The richness and variety of Aeschylus’ quantitative meters, his verbal, metaphorical density, and the links in tragic poetry of particular meters with particular modes of discourse and levels of feeling, make the music of the ancient poetry nearly impossible to reproduce in English. I was guided in my metrical choices by a desire to mark off the speech and dialogue passages from those of song and chant. I tried to make the lines as sayable or singable as possible without compromising the stylistic elevation and remoteness of the original from “the language of the streets.” To make the lines more sayable to English and American ears, I cultivated an idiomatic though still somewhat formal diction, on the one hand; yet on the other I established the long sentence as a sort of syntactic norm to give some flavor of the rhetorical intensity and strangeness of Aeschylus’ tone and style.

  For the speeches, dialogue, and stychomythia, I used blank verse, that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The Greek iambic trimeter becomes, in English, iambic hexameter, because there are four syllables per iambic foot in Greek but only two syllables per iambic foot in English. Iambic hexameter is notoriously hard to write in English because the line tends to break up either into a pentameter unit with an extra foot attached, or into two units of trimeter, or two of tetrameter and dimeter. The line, as a line of verse, is hard to sustain, and even harder to hear. Blank verse, the staple of English verse drama, provides more flexibility and variety of movement as well as more linear coherence. For the choral odes, I used a looser but still discernible iambic cadence in a variety of lines and stanzaic patterns: for the passages in marching anapests, I composed in eight-line units (sometimes divided into stanzas, sometimes not), in which the pattern of line lengths is 4, 2, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 4. By often playing long sentences off against these tetrameter and dimeter lines, I attempted to give some hint of the forward motion created by the Greek anapestic pattern without having to resort to anapestic lines, which in English sound less like Aeschylus and more like Dr. Seuss. For the choral songs, I relied on a wide variety of line lengths (from hexameter to monometer) in which the iambic beat is sometimes more sometimes less emphatic. In general, I tried to find a vital equivalent in English for the Greek meters, so that the very sound and movement of the verse, the dance of syntax through and across the lines, would come alive as English poetry even as the rhythms (the modulations of the iambic norm) insinuate without adhering to the sound and movement of the original Greek.

  But there’s a more important reason why I chose a finely articulated meter for this translation of the Oresteia. Broadly speaking, the trilogy is about justice as a sort of cosmic balance that inevitably and inexorably rights itself both by means of and despite the evil deeds of characters who claim to act on justice’s behalf. If justice is an eternal norm, then unjust human action is a distortion of or departure from the norm. It is the norm itself, however, that defines the distortion as distortion, that measures the extent of the departure. In a sense, this cosmic justice is never more present or active than when it’s being warped by some particular evil act and then invoked to justify that evil. This tension between norm and variation on the metaphysical level is echoed in the tension on the metrical level between the underlying but ever recurring norm of the iambic cadence and the rhythmical variations playing constantly around it, variations that the norm itself makes audible as expressive variations even as the variations modify our perception of that norm, muting it at one moment, emphasizing it the next. Since the Aeschylean universe operates on principles consistent with the principles of metrical composition, I felt that the most inclusive way to do “justice” to the Oresteia was to cast the trilogy in a clear but flexible accentual-syllabic line, a line in which repetition and surprise, norm and variation were constantly in play, constantly resisting and defining one another, each becoming what it is, working its own destiny out, in and through its relation to the other.

  I relied primarily on both H. W. Smyth’s prose translation, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ translation and commentary. I also found Garvie’s commentary to The Choerophori indispensable. But the most important and crucial influence on what I’ve done has been my collaboration with Peter Burian. This work has been painstakingly slow yet thoroughly exhilarating. It is ironic that throughout this process, while I, the poet, worried over issues of historical precision, Peter, the scholar, consistently urged me to push the translation further away from the prose or proselike translations and line-by-line commentaries on which I relied. Our poetic and scholarly sensibilities consistently met, clashed, informed, and refreshed each other over matters as small and absolutely crucial as tone, metrical c
hanges, particular metaphors, and line breaks. Our work on the great tapestry scene between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is perhaps exemplary of the kind of dymanic this collaborative process entailed.

  Clytemnestra asks Agamemnon to enter the palace by walking over tapestries her handmaidens have spread before him. Agamemnon at first resists, reminding Clytemnestra that such honors should be reserved only for gods, not men. In Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ rendering, Agamemnon says: “I tell you to honor me with honors human not divine. Apart from footwipers and embroideries the voice of fame resounds.”

  In my initial version of these lines, Agamemnon says: “Honor me like a man, not like a god. / The voice of fame speaks otherwise and elsewhere, / apart from tapestries.” Peter was quick to point out that I had stayed too close to Lloyd-Jones, that all I had done, in effect, was to run a thin electrical current through his version. In the same spirit of fidelity, Peter encouraged me to make the text over into something that was more my own, that more freely engaged a more flexible range of idiom. The result was, I believe, closer in spirit to the ancient text: “Revere me like a man, / not like a god. True fame speaks for itself, / it doesn’t need to throw its voice like some/ventriloquist into mats and tapestries.”

  Every aspect of this process, from the initial, tentative, often embarrassing attempts at finding an idiom and a music that’s analogous to the poetry of the original, to the hardnosed exchanges with Peter, during which we tested the poetic and scholarly resilience of every line, of every word and phrase, to the multiple revisions in which, at times, I can hear the haunting and challenging echo of Aeschylus’ voice in my voice, has dramatized for me the truth of T. S. Eliot’s sense that “good translation is not merely translation, for the translator is giving the original through himself, and finding himself through the original.” Eliot describes the duality of voice in good translation. In my work with Peter, the translator’s voice, already doubled with that of Aeschylus, is doubled again in the interplay of scholar and poet.

  ALAN SHAPIRO

  AGAMEMNON

  CHARACTERS

  WATCHMAN of the palace at Argos

  CHORUS of old men of Argos

  CLYTEMNESTRA Queen of Argos

  HERALD of the Argive army

  AGAMEMNON King of Argos, leader of the Greek forces at Troy

  CASSANDRA Trojan captive, daughter of King Priam and priestess of Apollo

  AEGISTHUS cousin of Agamemnon, lover of Clytemnestra

  SERVING WOMEN

  ARMED ATTENDANTS

  Line numbers in the right-hand margin of the text refer to the English translation only, and the Notes on the text beginning at page 189 are keyed to these lines. The bracketed line numbers in the running heads refer to the Greek text.

  The scene is Argos. The stage building represents the royal palace of Agamemnon. The watchman appears on the roof of the palace, lies down, and gazes out into the night.

  WATCHMAN I beg the gods to deliver me at last

  from this hard watch I’ve kept now for a year

  upon the palace roof of the Atreidae,

  dog-like, snout to paws, night after long

  night, studying the congress of the stars,

  the unignorable bright potentates

  that bring down through the night sky to us here

  below, the summer now, and now the winter,

  eternal even as they wane and rise.

  And here I am still watching for the sign,

  10

  the torch flame, flickering news from Troy,

  the bright flare of her capture. These are my orders

  straight from a woman’s hope-stiffened heart that urges

  like a man.

  My bed is hard with restlessness

  by night, and damp with dew by morning, and

  just fear (no dream or sleep) comes near it,

  fear that I’ll fall asleep, that my eyes will be drawn

  down into sleep, as if sleep were a sickness

  I could cure by singing or humming, as I do,

  from time to time some little tune or other,

  20

  and yet the more I sing, the more I have

  to weep for all the troubles of this house

  that excellence no longer orders now.

  Come soon, deliverance from this weight of watching,

  come, fire out of black night flashing toward me,

  come, happy news I’m ever watching for.

  He sees the beacon.

  At last!

  Day-shining flare of night, I welcome you,

  blazing torch that will kindle the torch-lit dance

  we’ll dance in Argos for the sake of this!

  30

  At last! At last!

  I call out loudly to Agammenon’s wife

  to rise from her soft bed and raise a shout

  of triumph all throughout the palace halls

  to celebrate that far blaze, if, in truth,

  as it proclaims, the city of Troy’s been razed.

  I’ll dance a little dance here as a warm-up.

  I’ll count as mine my master’s lucky roll,

  since my watch now rolls a triple six for me.

  Well, only let the king come home at last,

  40

  and I will take his much missed hand in mine.

  About the rest, I’m mum. A great ox stands

  upon my tongue. But, oh, the house, if it

  could only speak, the house would tell a tale

  all right. Me, my words are meant for those

  who know already what I mean to say;

  for those who don’t, I don’t recall a thing.

  The WATCHMAN exits from the rear of the roof. The CHORUS of twelve Argive elders enters the orchestra from the right side.

  CHORUS Ten years since the two kings, Menelaus

  and Agamemnon,

  great sons of Atreus, claimed justice

  50

  from Priam, and in the double name

  of throne and sceptre, by the grace

  of Zeus, from this land launched

  a thousand warships

  bristling with Argives poised for slaughter.

  Radical from the heart came the fierce

  cries, shrill

  as vultures who in agonies

  of sheer grief for their children wheel

  and bank above the robbed nest,

  60

  keening for the long labor, all

  the fretful guarding

  of the young, now entirely destroyed.

  And who is it hears among the high

  Gods—Apollo,

  maybe, Pan or Zeus? Who hears

  the birds wail, the grief-struck

  tenants of the upper air

  and then, at last, late though it is,

  against the

  70

  violators aims the Erinys?

  Just so Zeus, protector of host and guest,

  has sent the sons

  of Atreus against the son

  of Priam, for one woman’s sake,

  one woman claimed by many men,

  that many grapple for, knees buckling,

  driven into dust,

  and the spears shattered in the flickering rite

  before the blazing sacrifice,

  80

  for Danaans

  and Trojans both. The case stands

  where it stands. It rides its irresistible

  momentum to the destined end.

  And no smooth tongue

  of fire, or liquid poured on the ground,

  or tears will now

  dispel the quick edge of sharpened rage.

  But we, too old to do our share,

  abandoned by

  90

  the expedition, wait here at home,

  leaning on staves, weak as children,

  For the fresh force quickening the heart

  diminishes, and the war god

  has deserted,

&nbs
p; and old age is a withered leaf

  propped on three legs and, no stronger

  than a child, goes faltering

  forward in daylight like a dream.

  The CHORUS turns toward the palace, with hands outstretched.

  But you, daughter of Tyndareus,

  100

  Queen Clytemnestra,

  is there some news? What have you heard

  that has persuaded you to send

  messengers around the city

  to order sacrifices on all

  the altars of

  the gods that guard us, the gods we woo—

  the sky gods and the gods below,

  gods of the gates

  and of the marketplace, are all

  110

  ablaze with offerings—first here,

  then there, the torchlights fan

  toward heaven, drawn by the sacred oil’s

  frank persuasion,

  the softest salve from the deepest chamber.

  Reveal to us what you can, or will,

  of these things—be

  the healer of this worry that

  forebodings darken even as hope

  flares from each sacrificial fire,

  120

  hope beating back the heavy inward

  sprawl of unbearable

  sorrow crushing the heart.

  Mastery is mine to sing of the good omens

  Strophe 1