Few moments in Greek drama are as moving as the chorus’s description, in the Agamemnon, of Iphigeneia, about to be sacrificed at Aulis by Agamemnon, pleading for her life “with prayers and cries to her father” and then, even more poignantly, after she has been brutally gagged, “hurling at the sacrificers piteous arrows of the eyes.” But Hughes’s rather suburban Iphigenia cries, “Daddy, Daddy,” and simply weeps (“her eyes swivel in their tears”). Such choices remind you of how much the extreme figurative language that Aeschylus gives his characters has regularly confounded, not to say embarrassed, translators. The Watchman at the opening of the Agamemnon is so terrified of the adulterous, man-emulating queen that he can’t even talk to himself about it: “A great ox stands upon my tongue,” he mutters ominously. The line has tremendous archaic heft and power, something that cannot be said for Hughes’s “Let their tongue lie still—squashed flat.”
No doubt because of the many opportunities Ovid’s Metamorphoses affords for crafting images of the animals into which so many characters are transformed, the most successful of Hughes’s late-career translations is his Tales from Ovid. But even here the poet fails to realize how important Ovid’s form is. In his Introduction, Hughes makes due reference to the Hellenophile poet’s “sweet, witty soul,” but he’s clearly far more interested in what he sees as the Metamorphoses’ subject: “a torturous subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque.” He manages, in other words, to find the Seneca in Ovid. And yet the pleasure of Ovid’s epic lies precisely in the delicate tension between all those regressive, grotesque, nature-based metamorphoses and the “fully civilized” verses in which they are narrated: a triumph of Culture over Nature if ever there was one. Hughes’s Ovid is often very effective, but it is not sweet and witty.
It’s tempting to think that Hughes found Euripides’ Alcestis interesting precisely because this work—the tragedian’s earliest surviving play—presents so many problems of both form and content. With its unpredictable oscillations in tone and style, it seems positively to invite abandonment of formal considerations altogether. “A critic’s battlefield,” the scholar John Wilson wrote in his introduction to a 1968 collection of essays on the play. The war continues to rage on.
Alcestis was first performed in 438 B.C. in Athens at the Greater Dionysia, an annual combined civic and religious festival, including a dramatic competition, that must have resembled a cross between the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and the Oscars. The drama was presented as the fourth play in a tetralogy—the final spot, that is, in which amusingly bawdy “satyr plays” were normally presented, presumably to alleviate the pity and fear triggered by the three tragedies that had preceded it onstage. (The three that preceded Alcestis, two of which seem to have dealt with the sufferings of passionate women, are lost.) And yet, this fourth play—in which Queen Alcestis voluntarily dies in place of her husband, King Admetos, when the appointed day of his death is at hand, only to be brought back from Hades by Herakles in the play’s bizarre finale—unsettlingly mixes elements of high tragedy with its scenes of comic misunderstandings, elaborate teasing, and drunken hijinks.
The first, “tragic” half of the short drama begins with a somber expository prologue by Apollo, followed by a debate between Apollo and Death, who has come to claim Alcestis and who is warned that he won’t, in the end, get his way. We are then plunged into the mortal world and a mood of unrelenting gloom: a heartrending scene of Alcestis’s slow death; her farewells to her children (whom she relinquishes to her husband on the condition that he not neglect them) and to her husband (who vows never to remarry); her impassioned outburst, addressed to her marriage bed, as she sees death approaching; her funeral procession, which is interrupted by a violent argument between Admetos and his aged father, Pheres (who along with his elderly wife refused to die in his son’s place when given the chance to do so); and a grief-stricken Admetos’s return to his empty house after the funeral.
The second, “comic” half presents the spectacle of the rambunctious Herakles’ arrival at the house of mourning (he is en route to yet another of his Labors); Admetos’s excruciatingly diplomatic efforts to keep up his reputation as a good friend and legendary host (he doesn’t want Herakles to know Alcestis has died lest his guest feel unwelcome); a drunken, feasting Herakles’ discovery of the truth, and his subsequent vow to bring his friend’s wife back; and the hero’s rescue of Alcestis after a wrestling match with Death himself, which takes place beside Alcestis’s tomb. The play ends with the eerie spectacle of a triumphant Herakles, like the father of a bride, handing over the veiled and silent figure of Alcestis to Admetos without, at first, telling Admetos who the woman is—teasing him in order to prolong the suspense. She never speaks again during the course of the play.
The hodgepodge of moods, styles, and themes suggested by even this cursory summary has made interpretation of this strange work particularly thorny. To cite John Wilson further:
Even the genre to which the play belongs is disputed—is it a tragedy, a satyr play, or the first example of a tragicomedy? Who is the main character, Alcestis or Admetos? And through whose eyes are we to see this wife and this husband? Is Alcestis as noble as she says she is? And is Admetos worthy of her devotion, or does he deserve all the blame that his father, Pheres, heaps upon him? And is the salvation of Alcestis a true mystery, a sardonic “and so they lived happily ever after,” or simply the convenient end of an entertainment?
These questions continue to puzzle classicists, despite radical shifts in the way we read classical texts. Since Wilson wrote in the 1960s, no literary-critical school has influenced classical scholarship so much as feminist studies has; and the Alcestis has proved an especially rich vehicle for scholars interested in demonstrating the extent to which literary production in classical Greece reflected the patriarchal bias of Athenian society during its cultural heyday. “The genre of the Alcestis,” the classicist Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz has written in a stimulating if perhaps too ideologically rigid study of Euripides’ handling of female characters, “…depends on gender. On the surface, it is comic: death leads to life, and a funeral resolves into a wedding. But is it a happy ending for Alcestis as well as for Admetos? Although funeral and wedding may seem to be opposites, they come to much the same thing for this woman.”
You don’t have to be a feminist hard-liner to have your doubts about Admetos. Even at the very beginning of the drama, as Alcestis lies dying within the house, the king’s self-involvement takes your breath away. It is true that the laments he utters in his exchange with the dying Alcestis are all fairly conventional (“Don’t forsake me,” “I am nothing without you”), and yet their cumulative effect is unsettling: gradually, it strikes you that for Admetos this domestic disaster is all about him. Alcestis’s death, he cries, is “heavier than any death of my own”—an appeal for sympathy that’s a bit much, considering that she’s dying precisely because he was afraid to. He’s Periclean Athens’s answer to the guy in the joke about the classic definition of chutzpah—the one who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.
Admetos makes the dying Alcestis several somewhat excessive promises: among them, a vow to ban all revelry for a full year, and an oath never to take another woman into his house. Yet by the end of the play he will have broken both: first when he allows Herakles to be feted with wine and music, and then when he accepts, as a man might accept a new bride, the anonymous veiled woman into his household—before he knows she’s Alcestis. Most bizarrely, he declares that he will have an artisan fashion a statue of Alcestis, which he will take to bed and caress as if it were she—a “cold pleasure,” to be sure, but one that will help to assuage his loss. For some critics, this has a fetishistic, doth-protest-too-much quality; whatever you make of it, it’s striking that, having promised to mourn Alcestis forever, her husband begins, before she even dies, to seek comfort (however cold) for himself.
So the hus
band is a weak man in the first part of the play. But he must be so, since whatever “tragic”—or, for that matter, dramatic—development Euripides’ play has depends on Admetos’s evolution—on his starting out as a less than admirable man who comes to realize that the existence he has purchased with his wife’s life isn’t worth having precisely because he has lost her. “Now I understand,” he exclaims at the play’s climax, right before Herakles enters with the resurrected Alcestis. Even so, this king is no hero: Alcestis’s miraculous return from the grave yanks her husband back from the brink of truly tragic self-knowledge, the kind he’d have acquired if he had had to live with his loss, as characters in “real” tragedies do. (When they don’t kill themselves, that is.)
As it is, Admetos gets to eat his cake and have it, too. “Many readers will feel [his grief] does not change him enough,” the Harvard classicist Charles Segal tartly observed in one of several penetrating essays he wrote on this play. Richmond Lattimore, who translated the Alcestis for the University of Chicago Greek Drama series nearly half a century ago, was moved, similarly, to question Admetos’s character, using the bemused rhetorical-question mode into which those who have grappled with the Alcestis keep falling, no doubt because the work’s violent wobbling between genres makes any definitive pronouncement seem foolhardy. “If a husband lets his wife die for him,” Lattimore asked, “what manner of man must that husband be?”
Hughes’s Alcestis adaptation invites us to believe that this is, in fact, the wrong question to be asking. His version is wholly unconcerned with Admetos’s flaws, not least because in his version, Admetos has no flaws. Everything in Euripides that suggests we ought to question the husband’s character has here been excised; instead, it’s God who gets the rough treatment. It’s a striking alteration.
The cleanup job begins early on. In Euripides’ play we learn that Apollo, in gratitude for being well treated chez Admetos, has promised the mortal king that he will be able to avoid his death if he can find someone to die in his place; Admetos tries all his loved ones in turn until finally his wife agrees to die for him. But in Hughes’s version, Admetos is spared the embarrassing (indeed, damning) task of begging his relatives—and wife—for volunteers; here, it’s Apollo who “canvasses” for substitutes. In fact, Apollo doesn’t even have to ask Alcestis, as in Euripides’ play Admetos most certainly does: she just volunteers. (It’s interesting that Hughes’s heroine is more faithful to her counterpart in the original than his Admetos is; and when he gives her lines that Euripides didn’t—as when, in her farewell to her daughter, she pathetically exclaims, “She will not even know what I looked like”—the drama is enhanced.)
Similarly, Hughes smoothes away any sign of what Charles Segal calls the “unthinking self-centredness of the husband.” He erases the solipsistic whininess from Admetos’s laments at the beginning of the play. The breathtakingly self-involved utterances that Euripides puts in Admetos’s mouth, well translated by Lattimore—“sorrow for all who love you—most of all for me / and for the children” and “Ah, [‘goodbye’ is] a bitter word for me to hear, / heavier than any death of my own”—here become the considerably less galling “Fight against it, Alcestis. / Fight for your children, for me” and “Good-bye!—don’t use that word. / Only live, live, live, live.” (For American readers, at least, the latter will have an unfortunate Auntie Mame-ish ring.)
Most strikingly, Hughes eradicates any sense of the strange excessiveness of Admetos’s promise to build a replica of his wife, which in the new version becomes a dismissive, indeed incredulous, rhetorical question: “What shall I do, / Have some sculptor make a model of you? / Stretch out with it, on our bed, / Call it Alcestis, whisper to it? / Tell it all I would have told you? / Embrace it—horrible!—stroke it! / Knowing it can never be you…” Hughes’s subtle rewriting inverts the whole point of the scene. The original hints disturbingly at the husband’s readiness to accept a substitute for the dead wife; the new version emphasizes the husband’s steadfast fidelity. (To further deflect blame from Admetos, Hughes makes his father, Pheres, particularly disgusting. Here the old man not only refuses to die for his son, but “screeches” and “wails” at the younger man to “Die…clear off and die.”)
Hughes’s alterations, ostensibly minor, ultimately sap the strength of Euripides’ dramatic climaxes. In the original, the culminating scene in which a veiled, voiceless Alcestis returns home to her husband on Herakles’ arm owes much of its eeriness precisely to Admetos’s deathbed promise, which has prepared us for the idea, however odd, that the king will settle for an inhuman facsimile of his dead wife; and lo and behold, at the “happy” ending we see him holding hands with something that could well be such a dummy. But since Hughes has dispensed with Admetos’s vow, the climax loses all of its creepy potential. Once again, the translator’s embarrassment about the grand, bizarre qualities that so often characterize tragic action and diction takes its toll in dramatic effectiveness.
In the original, what leads us to a fleeting suspicion that Herakles’ companion is, in fact, nothing more than a statue is the figure’s total silence during a lengthy exchange between Admetos and Herakles—a muteness that clearly disturbs the other characters and, precisely because we’re afraid the silent woman might be just a simulacrum, a revenant, ought to disturb us, the audience, too. In Euripides, an agitated Admetos turns to Herakles and demands: “But why does she just stand there, voiceless?” Fred Chappell’s rendering for the Penn Series, otherwise marred by gimmicks (each scene is introduced by musical directions in Italian, as if it were an opera: “allegro calmando; poi accelerando”), nicely conveys Admetos’s agitation: “But why does my Alcestis stand so silent?” In Hughes’s version, an ever-polite Admetos blandly murmurs, “Will she speak?” You wonder whether he cares.
On the face of it, at least part of the reason for Hughes’s shifting of emphasis—and any suspicion of moral weakness—away from Admetos is that he wants his adaptation to be a grand dramatic and poetic statement about the triumph of the human spirit, about mortality and the victory of love over death. The husband and wife are idealized, whereas there’s a lot of complaining about “God” and his pettiness and cruel indifference to human suffering (“As usual, God is silent”). To bolster this cosmic interpretation of the original, Hughes adds, in the Herakles scene, elaborate riffs on Aeschylus’s antiauthoritarian Prometheus Bound, with its questioning of Zeus’s justice, and on Euripides’ own profoundly antireligious Madness of Herakles (in which the hero, freshly returned home from his labors, is temporarily maddened by a vengeful goddess and in his delusion murders his wife and children). And Hughes’s dark mutterings about “nuclear bomb[s] spewing a long cloud / of consequences” and the accusatory descriptions of God as “the maker of the atom” who is served by “electro-technocrats” suggest as well that the poet had not given up his preference for primitive Nature over cold Culture.
Yet even as Hughes ups the thematic ante in his adaptation, formal problems seriously undercut his ambitions. Perhaps inevitably when dealing with Alcestis, the translation is, even more than his others, marred by the poet’s inability to find a suitable tone. In what looks like an attempt to convey the tonal variety of Euripides’ hybrid drama, Hughes experiments more than previously with slangy, playful diction. The results can be odd, and often betray the dignity of the original where it is, in fact, dignified. “You may call me a god. / You may call me whatever you like,” Hughes’s Apollo says in his prologue speech, which in the original is crucial for setting the mournful tone of the entire first half. It’s a bizarre thing for Apollo to say: characters in Greek tragedies get zapped by thunderbolts for far less presumptuous haggling with divinities. (Alcestis begins, in fact, with a dire reference to Zeus’s incineration of the hubristic Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, who dared to raise the dead—the first allusion to the all-important theme of resurrection.) Apollo goes on: “The dead must die forever. / That is what the thunder said. The dead / Are dead are dead are dead are de
ad / Forever….” You suspect Hughes is trying here to convey the thudding infinite nothingness of death, but bits like this are unfortunate reminders that the translator was also a prolific author of children’s books. The intrusion of comic informality is hard enough to adjust to in Euripides’ Alcestis, where the biggest moral problem is a husband’s gross inadequacies; but it’s a disaster in Hughes’s Alcestis, where the big moral problem is God’s gross inadequacies.
Hughes, it should be said, wasn’t the first widower poet for whom the opportunity to translate the Alcestis served as the vehicle for a corrective shift in emphases. In Robert Browning’s long historical poem Balaustion’s Adventure (the subtitle is “Including a Transcript of Euripides”), which was composed after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, a poetess comes to Athens from Rhodes to meet Euripides, and then sets about adapting Alcestis. But her version—and, by extension, the Browning version—turns out to be a redemptive one. In it, “a new Admetos” rejects out of hand Alcestis’s offer to die in his place: “’Tis well that I depart, and thou remain,” he tells his wife, with whom, indeed, he gets to enjoy a fairy-tale posterity. (“The two,” Browning writes, “lived together long and well.”) Hughes’s adaptation renovates Euripides along comparable lines. If the ancient dramatist’s Alcestis forces us to ask, “If a husband lets his wife die for him, what manner of man must that husband be?” then the contemporary poet’s Alcestis asks, “If God lets people die, what manner of god must He be?” In Hughes, as in Browning, there are no guilty husbands—no profound delving into the emotional (if not moral) squalor that often goes with being the survivor. There are just guilty abstractions.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 13