Chicago Tribune
Accessible, but not prosaic, vivid but not overstated, poetic but not inflated...Rudall has done an excellent job.
Chicago Sun-Times
Rudall features a sharp, vivid precision edge...immediate and accessible.
South Bend Tribune - Julie York Coppens
A spare, contemporary translation.
Chicago Reader
Rudall's text...admirably recasts Euripides' play in modern American English.... Rudall avoids all the annoying, dusty Victorianisms of 19th century translators.
The Birmingham News - Michael Kuckwara
The language of Medea is full of vacillation.
Chicago Tribune
Accessible, but not prosaic, vivid but not overstated, poetic but not inflated...Rudall has done an excellent job.
Chicago Sun-Times
Rudall features a sharp, vivid precision edge...immediate and accessible.
Helene P. Foley
Euripides’s influential and provocative Medea continues to be read, performed, adapted, and reinterpreted in multiple contexts across the globe. Taplin’s accessible and performable, yet vivid and poetic translation makes the play available to a modern audience while doing justice to both its complexities and its horrific power.
Times Literary Supplement - Francesca Middleton
Taplin’s volume offers the raw bones of a brilliant production.
Donald J. Mastronarde
Taplin translates Medea into clear and contemporary English while reflecting well the different registers and tones that create the subtle texture of Greek tragedy. His version is eminently speakable, but also highly faithful to the original Greek, making it ideal for instructors and readers who want to study closely the specific metaphors and terms that carry the classic themes of this influential drama.
Froma Zeitlin
Taplin’s eminently readable version of this harrowing tragedy justifies his reputation as one of our foremost experts in dramatic criticism, whose pioneering efforts in illuminating ancient stagecraft remain indispensable today.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Lively. . . . Tragedy's (and comedy's) alternation of speech and song provide the . . . fundamental rhythmic dynamic, and a good translator will use different registers to capture this alternation. Here, Taplin is very successful, and many passages in the odes convey both the intensity of the lyric mode and the contrast with the spoken rhythm that precedes and follows.
From the Publisher
"The purpose of translation is to set a play free. This is just what Robin Robertson does. In his lucid, free-running verse, Medea's power is released into the world, fresh and appalling, in words that seem spoken for the first time." Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize
"This version of Medea is vivid, strong, readable, and brings triumphantly into modern focus the tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks." John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize
"Robertson is master of the dark and wounded, the torn complexities of human relations, and Medea offers a perfect match for his sensibilities. This is an urgent, contemporary,and eloquent translation." A.L.Kennedy, winner of the 2007 Costa Book of the Year
"Robin Robertson has given us a Medea fit for our times; his elegant and lucid free translation of Euripides' masterpiece manages the trick of sounding wholly contemporary but never merely 'modern' and will be an especially lucky discovery for those encountering the play for the first time." Don Paterson, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award
"[O]ne of the main virtues of this fine translation is Robertson's ear for the verbal brutality committed by the estranged Medea and Jason on one another during their confrontations....closer examination reveals how much thought has gone into its making...These subtleties support Robertson's claim, in the introduction, that his main concern was 'to provide an English version that is as true to the Greek as it is to the way that English is spoken now'.... [Robin Robertson's translation] certainly deserves to be staged. It would provide a more attractive basis for a performance text of the original play than anything else currently on offer." Edith Hall, Times Literary Supplement
South Bend Tribune
A spare, contemporary translation.
Julie York Coppens
The Birmingham News
The language of Medea is full of vacillation.
Michael Kuckwara