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| ISBN-13: | 9780691130248 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/19/2008 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Selected Poems Odes and Fragments
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13024-8
Introduction Despite (or because of) his accomplishments and stature as a dramatist, mythographer, and political thinker, we inhabitants of a later world do not usually think of Sophokles first as a poet. Yet if we read all seven tragedies and the fragments of Sophokles, we can begin to sense the overall range of his preoccupations as a poet. In addition to Sophokles' extraordinary and unique way of putting perception, idea and feeling into words, indirectly but very strongly he expresses sympathy for human beings whose great powers, courage, and potential come to brokenness, suffering, and grief. Sophokles, the poet, ponders the harmony or dissonance between human and divine justice. He acknowledges uncertainty, doubt, and fear in the human stance toward the divine. He evidently relishes the sheer variety of language, from spoken immediacy to ceremonial song; and in his odes, a special diction and density of poetic language heighten the power of feeling and our sense that, in a way, fate itself lives within language. Language may sometimes be fate.
Reading Sophokles' odes apart from the plays in which they serve a powerful dramatic purpose could seem reductive; but in reading them separately as poems, we begin to see aspects of Sophokles that are not otherwise so apparent when the odes are read only within the plays-especially in translations that havebrought over very little of the poetic texture and movement of the odes. These aspects, these meanings, are more available to us if the odes are translated as poetry-by which I mean, in shapes that evoke their original poetic structure, in lines that can be read as lines, and in language chosen not primarily to explain what the Greek original says, but for the sake of keeping up with the quick movement of Sophokles' imagery, the unfolding of thought in his syntax, and the progress of feeling in his voicing and narrating. As much as Sophokles can be a dramatic psychologist in his dialogue and plots-revealing motives, loyalties, assumptions, conflicts-he can be a poetic psychologist, too, following the thought and feeling that move by association.
As a poet, in some ways Sophokles seems least visible to us. Translators and stage directors have worked freely with his plays in order to produce versions that are readable and playable-that is, dramatically satisfying-in terms of the ideas about drama and language of their own times; scholars have produced editions and versions that give the student copious information about, and great insight into, the Greeks and the Greek language. But we do not read poems only for information, or even for insight; we also read poems in order to let our feeling and thinking move, turn, leap by means of poetic figures and forms; we also read for pleasures of language, and to experience the poet's stance toward the world. The poetic translator needs to create some sense of Sophokles the poet.
The richly woven textures of Sophokles' language and the beauty of his poetic structures can never be conveyed fully in translation into modern languages, because his odes, especially, cannot be rendered into any diction and form that adequately represent the complexity and effects of the original Greek. And perhaps no translation of a complete play can produce a very strong impression of Sophokles the poet, if only because many translators seem to be trying to keep the odes from getting in the way of the play. The Greeks could enjoy the rhythm of the interruption of a plot by the odes, which provided moments of reflection and feeling, which created suspense. And they could hear and enjoy the remarkable poetic compression and intricate textures and repeated rhythms of Sophokles' choral odes. But we can no longer hear anything like that even in our own language. The Greeks heard linguistic broadband, so to speak, and while we can listen to several things at once in the midst of our busiest moments, we do not know how to listen to everything that is meaningful, all at once, in a rich poetic text.
The ancient Greeks responded to the tragedies as great, complex poetic performances in several poetic modes, and loved the lines. While Sophokles himself might not have thought of his odes as poems that should be heard or read apart from the plays in which they are sung, I believe that when the poems are read by us this way-we who are informed by a very different sense of poetry than that of Sophokles-then we only gain in our sense of Sophokles' powers and achievement. I do not ask for the odes to be read instead of the plays, but only for the odes to be read as poems-here and also within the plays. To be read as poems means, in translation, to be read as instances of poetic thinking, and for their value as the work of a single temperament, rather than primarily for their dramatic effect. We read Browning's dramatic monologues as "Browning"; we perceive something of the authorial mind of Browning even in the great differences between his various masks in those poems; we read certain remarkable passages in Shakespeare as "Shakespeare," not only as the characters "Hamlet," "Othello," or "Lear."
Even in ancient times, choral odes from the plays might be sung as entertainment, apart from the plays. Presumably at least some of those listening might know, or know of, the tragedy to which the song belonged. But perhaps not always. And the effect could be powerful. Plutarch tells of how, when the Athenians lost their disastrous war against the Spartans, in the battles in Sicily, at least a few of the Athenian soldiers avoided execution or slavery because of their ability to recite Euripides, "for it seems that the Sicilians were more devoted to his poetry than any other Greeks living outside the mother country." This was in 413 bce, and Euripides, whose works were more popular than those of Sophokles or Aiskhylos, was still alive; Plutarch says some of those who eventually returned to Athens thanked Euripides in person for having saved their lives. If this anecdote were not enough to give us a sense of how powerful a medium poetry was in ancient Greece, there is another, even more relevant to my presentation of translations of tragic odes in this volume. Plutarch also writes that (in 404 bce) when the Spartan conquerors of Athens were deciding what to do with the city and its inhabitants, and entertaining the possibility of razing the city and enslaving its entire population, "the principal delegates [from the Spartan military allies] met for a banquet, [and] a man from Phocis sang the opening chorus from Euripides' Electra, which begins with the lines: 'Daughters of Agamemnon / I have come, Electra, to your rustic court.' At this the whole company was moved to pity and felt that it would be an outrage to destroy so glorious a city, which had produced such great men."
So why not give Sophokles a small book solely for some of his poems in translation? To my knowledge, no translator has ever presented to English-language readers a selection of Sophokles' poems-that is, choral odes from surviving plays-all translated with a consistent aesthetic of attention to the language, rhythm, and structure of the originals. Nor, so far as I know, has anyone ever translated a selection of his fragments in order to draw out of them some of the Sophoklean qualities of poetic thinking, keenness of language, and representation of world, feeling, action, and thought.
II
With other Athenian Greek poets of the fifth century bce, especially Aiskhylos and Euripides, the other tragic poets whose works survive, Sophokles created and developed tragic drama as in effect a performance poem in several poetic modes, and for multiple voices. The tragedies not only inaugurated western drama, and in so doing brought myth and song into relation with dramatized speech, but also gave heightened use to the choral ode. In fact, tragic drama may have developed out of the performance of choral odes, so tragedy in fifth-century-bce Athens is poetic in origin as well as in form. Meanwhile, the choral ode, an old and well-established poetic genre, remained very much alive; it continued to be performed on ritual and celebratory occasions at a variety of festivals by many different groups, some far larger than the dramatic choruses.
Fifth-century Athenian tragedies combined dialogue and song; ritual and performance; religious and civic occasions. The tragedies included costume, musical accompaniment, and dance; contests of ideas; characters distinguished from each other psychologically as well as by status, power, and their roles in the plot; a mythology immensely rich in story and in meaning; and different kinds of language, from fast-paced, high-stakes arguments called stichomythia, to the special poetic diction of the choral odes. Also, the odes were performed differently from the dialogue: they were sung, not spoken; they were danced while sung; and they were voiced by a group, the chorus, not by an individual actor. I call the tragedies performance poems because they consist of verse, some of it spoken, some of it sung or chanted. The messenger speeches are a kind of miniaturized epic narrative. The set speeches and stichomythia dialogue make poetic and dramatic use of the contests of rhetoric and argument so characteristic of ancient Greek public life. The tragedians wrote not only the choral odes that are sung and danced between episodes in the plays, but also occasional choral passages to be sung as lyric dialogue between the chorus and a tragic character, when heightened emotional intensity saturated a scene. So in addition to the superb stagecraft of Sophokles' tragedies, above all Oidipous Tyrannos-the ancient play that has arguably most fascinated the modern world-there is superb poetry throughout his plays as well. Yet most translations of Greek tragedies represent primarily the sense and dramatic force of speech and song, not their poetic qualities. The choral ode, in fact, is the most problematic element for modern translators, directors, actors, and audiences. This translation, however, pursues the virtues of the odes as poems, apart from their dramatic function, and apart from the problems of staging them as musical and danced anthems.
The odes translated in this volume (to all of which I have given titles) are drawn from Oidipous Tyrannos, Antigone, Oidipous at Kolônos, Aias, Philoktetes, and Trakhiniai. (The odes in Elektra do not at all lend themselves to being read independently of that play.) The odes were sung and danced in performance by men (fifteen, in Sophokles' tragedies) making up a chorus that might be either male or female, depending on the play. A leader of the chorus might sing some passages solo. What a chorus sings or chants in the odes, or says, chants, or sings in dialogue with characters, does not represent the point of view of Sophokles himself. The role of the chorus is that of another dramatic voice-contesting, yielding, asking, praying-in a dramatic relationship with the main characters. Typically the Sophoklean chorus, while distinct in identity from the audience and with its own allegiances, interests, and particular status (for example, a chorus of old men in Antigone and in Oidipous Tyrannos, or young unmarried women in Trakhiniai), nevertheless offers the audience one point of identification, among others. But the chorus has a poetic role, too-they perform the intensity of language that is characteristic of a highly wrought ode, and this intensity is itself a key element in the spectacle-at times, the most important. (In notes at the end of this volume, I describe briefly the dramatic context of each ode.)
I have translated those complete odes from the surviving plays that have a kind of structural completeness on their own. I have also included two speeches that can be read as dramatic monologues- one by the tragic hero Aias (Ajax, in the Latinized form), which seems almost like an uncanny anticipation of much later poets, from Shakespeare to Robert Browning, and the other by Oidipous at the end of his life, on the effects of the passage of time-expressing sentiments that are not foreign to us.
This volume includes all five odes from Oidipous Tyrannos, presented as a poem sequence. Many of us already know the plot of this tragedy, so we can follow the action that is only implicit in the odes. Furthermore, the odes clearly mark the stages of feeling of the whole drama: desperate hope for deliverance from plague; loyalty to Oidipous despite authoritative accusations against him; acknowledgment of the folly of offending the gods; more hope, now foolish and blind; and the realization that if even the heroic Oidipous has brought, however unwittingly, horrific moral pollution into his city, then "nothing that's of mortal men is fortunate." Read in sequence, the five odes enact this emotional arc.
Every ode creates an occasion that is part of the play-sometimes very obliquely-but also different from the play. Charles Segal writes that the "odes are set off from the dialogue by meter, dialect, the musical accompaniment, and dance; they also use a far greater proportion of dense poetical language, gnomic utterances, and mythical paradigms." The gnomic or proverbial utterance-expressing something familiar-fits the Greek poet's impulse to relate the subject or occasion of a choral ode to the timeless realm of general, customary, mythological, or divine truths.
None of the choral odes is lyric poetry in our sense of that genre. Greek lyric poetry was simply poetry accompanied by a lyre-that is, poetry as song (the Greek word for song, aoidê, was contracted to ôidê, and from this word our word "ode" ultimately derives). Greek poetry included much public performance on public themes: a political satire, an exhortation, a hymn to a god, praise of a famous man, a mythic narrative, a drinking song, an epigram, an erotic song, a song of victory, or a dirge. All choral poems were public, and even personal poems-such as love poems by Sappho-were not as private in ancient Greece as they are in the modern world, since they were not only read privately but also performed publicly for audiences small or large. Because choruses (on all occasions) sing their poems as public performances, the odes in the tragedies sometimes invite us to respond to a claim of-in the words of Charles Segal-"a privileged moral authority, which derives from a heightened awareness of the political or social implications of an action, the ways of the gods, the nature of the world order, or the numinous powers of nature or of passion (such as Eros or Aphrodite) that may redirect or destroy human lives." Although we cannot experience or even completely imagine a poetry so wholly public, with public uses no longer present in our culture, the vividness and energy of language in Sophokles' odes, as well as the movement of feeling and thought, invite us to stand within each poem and move with it, as the dancing chorus do, to recite it and breathe it, to join in its (e)motion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Selected Poems
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
DESIRE
Aphrodite of Kypros [fragment 941] 25
On Eros and Aphrodite [Antigone 781-800] 26
Eros, Impossible to Thwart [fragment 684] 27
The Mighty Kyprian [Trakhiniai 497-530] 28
THE HUMAN LOT
On Man [Antigone 332-75] 33
The Human Lot [fragments]* 36
On Song [fragment 568] 42
What Sophokles Wrote on Women Was Preserved by Men [fragments]* 43
Fragments of Thamyras 45
On Sleep [Philoktetes 828-32] 47
THE ODES OF OIDIPOUS TYRANNOS
The Chorus Plead for Divine Aid against Plague [151-215] 51
But What Does the Seer Teiresias Prove against Oidipous? [463-511] 54
On Purity, Insolence, and Punishment [863-910] 57
A Dance of Hope [1086-1109] 60
Oidipous the Cursed [1186-1222] 62
THE END OF THE FAMILY OF LABDAKOS
On the Long Life of Oidipous [Oidipous at Kolônos 1211-48] 67
On Fate and the Last of the Family [Antigone 582-625] 69
Oidipous on the Passage of Time [Oidipous at Kolônos 607-23] 72
On Behalf of Oidipous [Oidipous at Kolônos 1557-78] 73
HOMELAND EARTH, SEA, AND SKY
In Praise of Kolônos [Oidipous at Kolônos 668-719] 77
The Fullness of the World [fragments]* 80
The Sea [fragments]* 83
To Dionysos [Antigone 1115-52] 86
THE FATE OF THE HERO
On the Madness of Aias [Aias 596-645] 91
Aias's Meditation before Suicide [Aias 646-85] 93
On the Afflicted Philoktetes [Philoktetes 169-90] 95
On Herakles [Trakhiniai 94-140] 97
Notes 101
Index of First Lines 127
What People are Saying About This
The brilliance of Reginald Gibbons's translations of Sophocles lies in an empathetic leap of imagination that has allowed him to situate these ancient poems at an intersection where the passion of outcries, songs, and declamations encounters the elegance of the written word.
— Stuart Dybek, author of "I Sailed with Magellan"
Reginald Gibbons gives us Sophocles' poetry sprung free from plot and dramatic action. Elemental, swift, kaleidoscopic, the odes and fragments are forcefully present in Gibbons's spare style, and they can take one's breath away. Here is a distillate of Sophocles, strangely new and strangely familiar.
— Rosanna Warren, author of "Departure: Poems"
"The brilliance of Reginald Gibbons's translations of Sophocles lies in an empathetic leap of imagination that has allowed him to situate these ancient poems at an intersection where the passion of outcries, songs, and declamations encounters the elegance of the written word."—Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan"Reginald Gibbons gives us Sophocles' poetry sprung free from plot and dramatic action. Elemental, swift, kaleidoscopic, the odes and fragments are forcefully present in Gibbons's spare style, and they can take one's breath away. Here is a distillate of Sophocles, strangely new and strangely familiar."—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems"For years now, Reginald Gibbons has been writing some of the best poetry in America, and at the same time he has distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant and accomplished translators of Greek tragedy. In this beautiful and indispensable book, he renders the poetry of Sophocles as no one has done before. In Gibbons's hands, the complex power and musical precision of Sophoclean song and verse radiate a verbal and imagistic energy that feels both ancient and immediate."—Alan Shapiro, author of Old War: Poems"Attuned to the nuances of the original, Gibbons's verse delivers a Sophoclean stateliness of bearing in an idiom that is supple enough to communicate the heat of Eros, the horror of war, and the awe inspired by the natural world."—Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry: Poems"To read these dramatic odes as poems is invigorating and invites us to see Sophocles in a new way. And making poems out of the fragments and including them alongside the odes is a brilliant stroke, providing instances of the Sophoclean lyric imagination. These translations are remarkably true to the Greek."—Stephen Scully, Boston University
For years now, Reginald Gibbons has been writing some of the best poetry in America, and at the same time he has distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant and accomplished translators of Greek tragedy. In this beautiful and indispensable book, he renders the poetry of Sophocles as no one has done before. In Gibbons's hands, the complex power and musical precision of Sophoclean song and verse radiate a verbal and imagistic energy that feels both ancient and immediate.
— Alan Shapiro, author of "Old War: Poems"
To read these dramatic odes as poems is invigorating and invites us to see Sophocles in a new way. And making poems out of the fragments and including them alongside the odes is a brilliant stroke, providing instances of the Sophoclean lyric imagination. These translations are remarkably true to the Greek.
— Stephen Scully, Boston University
Attuned to the nuances of the original, Gibbons's verse delivers a Sophoclean stateliness of bearing in an idiom that is supple enough to communicate the heat of Eros, the horror of war, and the awe inspired by the natural world.
— Brooks Haxton, author of "They Lift Their Wings to Cry: Poems"