Translating Greek Tragedy: Some Practical Suggestions (workshop)

In the first half of the twentieth century it was common practice to translate an unspecified theos as “God,” in an attempt to bring out a supposed commonality between Greek religious thought and the monotheism of their own times. But in the last half-century the significant advances in understanding polytheism have shown why creating such supposed commonality is at best misleading, if only because it might lead a reader to assume that Greek gods shared with the Judeo-Christian deity a commitment to further the general welfare of mankind.

The play that has come down to us in the manuscript tradition as Oidipous tyrannos is best known in English as Oedipus the King, a translation of the Latin Oedipus Rex. In one respect, Rex is a reasonable translation: the idea of “king” was anathema for centuries in the Roman Republic, but tyrannos has resonances in Greek that rex in Latin and “tyrant” in English lack. Rendering it as “king” instead of “tyrant” obscures a crucial dramatic development which is clear in Greek but not translatable into English without the help of notes.

This paper aims to examine the ways that anachronism is currently feared, used, avoided and understood in Anglophone translations of Greek tragedy, and to interrogate current assumptions about anachronism.

This paper investigates changes in the metrical choices made by translators when dealing with the iambic trimeter of tragic speeches and dialogue.

Classical Greek exclamations, as words with a very wide range of possibilities for representation in modern English, provide an interesting basis for a discussion of translation tastes and principles; particularly as related to the perennial question of how loosely a translator should render the original language in an effort to achieve roughly analogous literary effects.