1 00:00:08,960 --> 00:00:16,730 Good afternoon, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Sophocles and targeting another trying to tragedy written by, 2 00:00:16,730 --> 00:00:21,560 or translated by and written by Professor Oliver Chapman. 3 00:00:21,560 --> 00:00:25,760 My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch. 4 00:00:25,760 --> 00:00:30,560 I'm delighted to be welcoming. Oliver had to speak about his book today. 5 00:00:30,560 --> 00:00:37,320 Also on the panel are Dr. Lucy Jackson and Professor Karen leader will be chairing the discussion. 6 00:00:37,320 --> 00:00:48,600 Sophocles, and taking the end of the tragedies is an original and distinctive verse translation of antiquity, De Niro and Electra. 7 00:00:48,600 --> 00:00:57,130 These books in Oliver's version convey the vitality of Sophocles poetry and also the vigour of the pleasing performance. 8 00:00:57,130 --> 00:01:02,590 In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Leader, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel. 9 00:01:02,590 --> 00:01:07,840 This will be followed by a reading by Oliver from the translations. 10 00:01:07,840 --> 00:01:14,380 Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts and questions on the book coming at it from their different disciplines. 11 00:01:14,380 --> 00:01:18,390 We'll then give Oliver the chance to respond to some of the points raised before interest, 12 00:01:18,390 --> 00:01:25,780 entering into what I hope will be a really interesting, broader discussion with questions also from you, the audience. 13 00:01:25,780 --> 00:01:32,380 So is the chat box already says Please do send your questions in as we go through the next hour or so. 14 00:01:32,380 --> 00:01:37,900 It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce this third book at lunchtime of this time from torch. 15 00:01:37,900 --> 00:01:47,070 It's our flagship event series, taking the form of fortnightly bite sized discussions with a range of commentators. 16 00:01:47,070 --> 00:01:54,000 In life before the pandemic, we would have invited you into a room here in Tortuously here in Oxford, and there might have been lunch. 17 00:01:54,000 --> 00:02:00,780 One of the advantages clearly of the situation is that we can all be doing this from wherever we are, including across the world. 18 00:02:00,780 --> 00:02:06,480 Sadly, however, the lunch has got to be virtual. But there's certainly food for thought in what's to come. 19 00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:10,290 Please do take a look at our website and newsletter for the full programme next term. 20 00:02:10,290 --> 00:02:14,700 I'll say a bit more about this at the end of today's discussion. 21 00:02:14,700 --> 00:02:22,110 All that's left for me to do now is to thank you for coming and to introduce our current leader. 22 00:02:22,110 --> 00:02:29,490 Professor, current leader is professor of modern languages at Oxford University and a fellow in German at New College Oxford. 23 00:02:29,490 --> 00:02:35,400 She's published widely on modern German culture and is a prise winning translator and writer. 24 00:02:35,400 --> 00:02:39,930 A prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most especially poetry, 25 00:02:39,930 --> 00:02:46,770 recently winning the English Pen Award and the American Pen Heim Award for her translation of Ulrika Almog Sunday. 26 00:02:46,770 --> 00:02:51,720 She was a while back, a torch extreme knowledge exchange fellow with the Southbank Centre. 27 00:02:51,720 --> 00:02:57,030 And since then, she works with modern poetry in translation poetry in the city. 28 00:02:57,030 --> 00:03:05,090 The Poetry Society and has a brilliant project which I would recommend you go and have a look at online, which is called mediating modern poetry. 29 00:03:05,090 --> 00:03:10,880 Karen, thanks so much for sharing today's panel. I'll hand over to you now and return for questions. 30 00:03:10,880 --> 00:03:18,650 Towards the end. Thank you very much, Ross. 31 00:03:18,650 --> 00:03:25,220 I'm delighted to be here. And with no further ado because I know we've got so much exciting material to cover. 32 00:03:25,220 --> 00:03:33,860 I'd like to introduce, first of all, Oliver Topline, but also Lucy Jackson, and then we'll move to over the top turns reading. 33 00:03:33,860 --> 00:03:39,770 So Professor Oliver Taplin is an emeritus professor of classics at Oxford University, 34 00:03:39,770 --> 00:03:43,310 and his research has focussed on the reception of poetry and drama, 35 00:03:43,310 --> 00:03:50,570 particularly through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times. 36 00:03:50,570 --> 00:04:01,100 He co-founded the Archives of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama and has collaborated on a number of high profile theatre productions in movies, 37 00:04:01,100 --> 00:04:05,540 which becomes important. I think because we've got to remember this is drama where we're talking about. 38 00:04:05,540 --> 00:04:14,590 In recent years, he has turned his attention to translating Greek drama as verse to be spoken and performed. 39 00:04:14,590 --> 00:04:20,440 Dr. Lucy Jackson is assistant professor in classics and ancient history at Durham University. 40 00:04:20,440 --> 00:04:24,610 Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance, 41 00:04:24,610 --> 00:04:29,680 again near Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in 42 00:04:29,680 --> 00:04:36,130 the 16th century and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds. 43 00:04:36,130 --> 00:04:43,720 The most recent publication is the course of drama in the fourth century BCE. 44 00:04:43,720 --> 00:04:52,180 So now I'd like to invite all of the Typekit to present some readings from this wonderful book, 45 00:04:52,180 --> 00:05:10,170 Sophocles, and take any other verse tragedies, other first tragedies, which is out this year with. 46 00:05:10,170 --> 00:05:15,090 Oliver, you muted. Thank you very much, thank you. 47 00:05:15,090 --> 00:05:24,420 I'm on duty now. Thank you, Karen. It's great to have a captive audience me as long as you don't press the leave button down in the right hand corner. 48 00:05:24,420 --> 00:05:31,320 I'm going to read you a brief extracts, a brief extract from each of the three plays in this volume place, 49 00:05:31,320 --> 00:05:35,760 which I've thought of together as being Sophocles female plays. 50 00:05:35,760 --> 00:05:39,390 The other volume has Sophocles four male plays, 51 00:05:39,390 --> 00:05:50,250 so one extract from each play to give you some idea of the kind of registers and the kind of rhythms that I've attempted to bring out. 52 00:05:50,250 --> 00:05:59,040 So first, De Enero De Niro is more familiarly known as Astra Kinney or the women of Trekkies. 53 00:05:59,040 --> 00:06:13,420 But I prefer De ERA so that all who she is the leading woman of the play so that each of the three plays is named after its leading woman. 54 00:06:13,420 --> 00:06:18,520 It's the least known, probably the Sophocles plays, I think it should be much better known. 55 00:06:18,520 --> 00:06:27,190 It's a wonderful play. It brings together in a very modern way, really monstrosity the modern, 56 00:06:27,190 --> 00:06:40,030 monstrous deeds of men and domesticity and settlement and lust and sex is the link between the two that destroys them both. 57 00:06:40,030 --> 00:06:46,720 And to give you the setting for this reading, heritage has been a way, he's been away a long time on various expeditions. 58 00:06:46,720 --> 00:06:51,940 He's now returning victorious and he's sent ahead. 59 00:06:51,940 --> 00:06:57,810 He's the woman who is his latest infatuation and. 60 00:06:57,810 --> 00:07:07,200 She hit De Niro has discovered that he means to keep her keep this young beauty in her house. 61 00:07:07,200 --> 00:07:20,390 And in this extract that I'm going to read, she comes outside to confide in the women of the chorus of what what she means to do about this. 62 00:07:20,390 --> 00:07:25,930 So, Dana, coming out talking to the chorus. 63 00:07:25,930 --> 00:07:34,000 I've slipped out secretly to you, dear women, while our visitor is talking to those captive girls inside before he goes, 64 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:38,830 I want to tell you of the action that I have in hand and seek your sympathy for what I'm going through. 65 00:07:38,830 --> 00:07:43,780 I have you see this in a girl. And yet no more simple girl. 66 00:07:43,780 --> 00:07:54,930 I think a fully harnessed woman. I've taken her on board the way a merchant stole a cargo, but these goods will wreck my peace of mind. 67 00:07:54,930 --> 00:08:02,320 And now the two of us shall lie beneath a single covenant and wait to see which one he will embrace. 68 00:08:02,320 --> 00:08:06,970 Is this the kind of payment that the so-called good and trusty Heracles have 69 00:08:06,970 --> 00:08:11,930 sent me in return for caring for his house through such a stretch of time? 70 00:08:11,930 --> 00:08:16,460 I'm not able to be angry with him when he's afflicted with so virulent a fever. 71 00:08:16,460 --> 00:08:24,580 Yet what woman could bear living with her and share in one man's making love? 72 00:08:24,580 --> 00:08:33,640 I'm aware how youth for one of us is coming into bloom and fade in from the other and how men's eyes will turn from that. 73 00:08:33,640 --> 00:08:48,950 I want to pick the flower. So my fear is that while Heracles will be name my husband, he shall really be the younger woman's male. 74 00:08:48,950 --> 00:08:55,670 So I'll now read you a piece from Electra. 75 00:08:55,670 --> 00:09:02,820 If we can change the slide. And we know thank you. 76 00:09:02,820 --> 00:09:11,220 This is so that that speech from India has a kind of restrained resentment behind it. 77 00:09:11,220 --> 00:09:17,430 I mean, it's it's deeply emotional and jealous, but at the same time, 78 00:09:17,430 --> 00:09:24,210 she's she's holding holding back in order to reveal what it is that she's going to do. 79 00:09:24,210 --> 00:09:31,230 And I hope you heard the kind of iambic pulse that there is beneath beneath the the lines. 80 00:09:31,230 --> 00:09:37,650 Now this extract from Electra also iambic pulse, but from a much, much more emotional scene. 81 00:09:37,650 --> 00:09:47,790 And I think you'll see why I have not gone through a regular line length because the advantage of varying 82 00:09:47,790 --> 00:09:54,270 the length of line and varying the endings of lines between strong and weak syllables is very clear here. 83 00:09:54,270 --> 00:09:59,750 This is the most famous scene in the play in many ways. 84 00:09:59,750 --> 00:10:08,330 The electorate has been waiting years for her brother arrestees to come home and avenge the murder of that their father, Agamemnon. 85 00:10:08,330 --> 00:10:14,360 She doesn't know that he's come back in in disguise and there is a pretence. 86 00:10:14,360 --> 00:10:23,810 There's a plot by which he's pretend it's been pretended that he's dead, and he has now arrived with an urn, which is meant to contain his ashes. 87 00:10:23,810 --> 00:10:28,040 And the lecturer laments over this and the most terrible, heart rending lament. 88 00:10:28,040 --> 00:10:36,800 And he stands there. The person she's lamenting for through is unable to know what to do until the end. 89 00:10:36,800 --> 00:10:45,390 So here is the very end of electoral lament over the. 90 00:10:45,390 --> 00:10:54,720 But our bad fortune, yours and mine has taken all of that and sent you to me in this form instead of your dear flesh and blood. 91 00:10:54,720 --> 00:11:05,100 This ash and futile shadow are so pitiful your body sent on such a dreadful journey and you have destroyed me. 92 00:11:05,100 --> 00:11:13,860 Dearest brought destruction on my brother. So now please let me in receive me into this. 93 00:11:13,860 --> 00:11:21,900 Your home, the nothing me into your nothing place, so I may dwell with you below for all the time. 94 00:11:21,900 --> 00:11:26,610 But when you were up here, I used to share in everything with you. 95 00:11:26,610 --> 00:11:37,560 And now I longed to die so that I'll never be deprived of being with you, even in the grave. 96 00:11:37,560 --> 00:11:46,410 And then antigeni, of course, I mean, the best known of all of Sophocles plays perhaps the best known of all Greek tragedies. 97 00:11:46,410 --> 00:11:53,790 I'll read you a piece of lyric that's to say this is what's usually known as a choral ode. 98 00:11:53,790 --> 00:11:59,190 I'll read you two stanzas. They both have the same metre. 99 00:11:59,190 --> 00:12:07,450 They come after the great confrontation scene between Crane and Antigeni, where they confront each other and talk. 100 00:12:07,450 --> 00:12:21,370 Across each other, they miss each other with it, with their assets, the stances and then the lyric the chorus dwell on the kind of destruction, 101 00:12:21,370 --> 00:12:30,220 the kind of disaster that can hang around a house, a family once things go wrong. 102 00:12:30,220 --> 00:12:40,540 And for the metres of my courses, I've not tried to replicate in any way the Greek me to which is works on a very different metric in any case. 103 00:12:40,540 --> 00:12:46,930 I just found my own rhythms fee for each, for each pair of stanzas. 104 00:12:46,930 --> 00:12:56,410 And I've generally speaking made made use of rhyme, except that I use a lot of half rhyme, quarter rhyme, para rhyme. 105 00:12:56,410 --> 00:13:03,670 And in this particular one, because it's about the way that things have become disjointed have gone wrong in this kind of chain of disaster. 106 00:13:03,670 --> 00:13:09,940 I don't even really use rhyme so much as what one might call sound patterns between the closing words of lines. 107 00:13:09,940 --> 00:13:14,890 And then there are some internal runs within the lines until the last line of each stanza. 108 00:13:14,890 --> 00:13:20,650 So here are these two stanzas, which ideally I'd love to have them set to music. 109 00:13:20,650 --> 00:13:33,260 They should. They should be sung. They shouldn't be spoken. But that's that's a dream. 110 00:13:33,260 --> 00:13:37,760 Happy the life that lived, all untainted by taste of bad, 111 00:13:37,760 --> 00:13:43,340 utter disaster pours on the family and the house shaken by gods from above just the 112 00:13:43,340 --> 00:13:49,940 way the rolling wave stirred by a north wind storm moves sweeping above the gloom, 113 00:13:49,940 --> 00:13:57,820 churning up from the bed of the ocean, the black silt cloud cloud on the headlands shore. 114 00:13:57,820 --> 00:14:07,960 The ranks of the Breakers rule. From long ago, the pains of this dynasty pile upon pains constantly from the dead. 115 00:14:07,960 --> 00:14:15,650 So the family cannot get freed. Always, some gold bears down so they never can break the chain. 116 00:14:15,650 --> 00:14:20,060 Oedipus House was bright with the light of its latest route. 117 00:14:20,060 --> 00:14:35,040 Now that has been cut through by the blade of the gods below, bloodied by foolish speech and by thoughts beyond reasons which. 118 00:14:35,040 --> 00:14:45,670 Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for that. 119 00:14:45,670 --> 00:14:47,510 It was wonderful to hear it. 120 00:14:47,510 --> 00:14:58,160 You talked about, you know, the importance of qualities of the sound and hopefully getting them formed and even some some of these passions. 121 00:14:58,160 --> 00:14:59,150 But it was wonderful to hear it. 122 00:14:59,150 --> 00:15:10,460 And I think more important and I have the honour to to kick off and to respond and then I shall pass to Dr. Missy Jackson. 123 00:15:10,460 --> 00:15:22,770 But by way of a kind of immediate three swerves or apologists or tropes of the outsider, I should say, of course, that I am not a classicist. 124 00:15:22,770 --> 00:15:32,540 I generally work on the contemporary I, although I have translated some dead classics myself, where I guess some of the questions might be the same. 125 00:15:32,540 --> 00:15:37,010 But also I'm not imbued with the scholarly context, of course. 126 00:15:37,010 --> 00:15:41,360 I don't read ancient Greek and nor do I generally work with drama. 127 00:15:41,360 --> 00:15:47,390 So I feel that on most levels, I come at some questions from these texts as an outsider. 128 00:15:47,390 --> 00:15:53,180 But of course, I'm fascinated as a translator by the many micro decisions that go up to make 129 00:15:53,180 --> 00:15:57,530 as it were a finished product and and a and a way of addressing the text. 130 00:15:57,530 --> 00:16:05,900 So I hope that my thoughts here have coalesced really into much less a statement as it were or response. 131 00:16:05,900 --> 00:16:12,620 But four and a half questions really, with some preamble coming from this outside perspective. 132 00:16:12,620 --> 00:16:18,990 And you. And the first is the position of the translator in your introduction, your prologue. 133 00:16:18,990 --> 00:16:29,480 Rather, you say that this version that you've done these versions might now be considered might once 134 00:16:29,480 --> 00:16:38,420 have been considered rather free and might now be considered as rather close to the originals. 135 00:16:38,420 --> 00:16:41,120 And that prompted me to think about, of course, 136 00:16:41,120 --> 00:16:51,320 the context in which we translate and how much we position ourselves as translators, not only as a general translator, 137 00:16:51,320 --> 00:17:00,460 but you're in a particular position, of course, which is the scholarly translator who sits between the academy under the general audience. 138 00:17:00,460 --> 00:17:07,790 And that prompted me to think you mention Heaney and Harrison, of course, to great models as I'm Carson as well, of course there. 139 00:17:07,790 --> 00:17:16,040 But I wondered really whether you compare the translations with these other translations at all as it were out 140 00:17:16,040 --> 00:17:22,460 there in the world of sort of public translations as it were not academic translations in the strictest sense, 141 00:17:22,460 --> 00:17:28,100 in the strictest sense, but also how you respond to these translations, 142 00:17:28,100 --> 00:17:33,260 which are in the world where the translator doesn't know the original language. 143 00:17:33,260 --> 00:17:39,020 I also think it might be rather a benefit not to know the original language when translating. 144 00:17:39,020 --> 00:17:42,830 I don't any longer do that. I have done that occasionally. 145 00:17:42,830 --> 00:17:52,700 But of course, you're imbued with the context and your scholarly introduction notes allow you to be both a scholar and a translator. 146 00:17:52,700 --> 00:17:58,280 In this edition, I'm I was fascinated the way how the two versions of yourself, 147 00:17:58,280 --> 00:18:05,690 your two positions work together coalesced contradicted each other, perhaps on occasions. 148 00:18:05,690 --> 00:18:14,690 So the position of the translator and the second area, 149 00:18:14,690 --> 00:18:27,510 which really struck me in which I was fascinated by and which you alluded to in your introduction, is a question of the technical. 150 00:18:27,510 --> 00:18:31,190 Of course, this is something every translates to has to face. 151 00:18:31,190 --> 00:18:38,540 And you quote Joseph Brodsky, I think really helpfully saying that a translation is a search for an equivalent, 152 00:18:38,540 --> 00:18:45,620 not for a substitute and hence your interest in the the first translation. 153 00:18:45,620 --> 00:18:52,130 And I thoroughly agree. Hoagland, the great translator, the German poet and great translator, also from the great, 154 00:18:52,130 --> 00:19:01,160 talked about finding a material that was foreign and analogies something that spoke to the spirit but which 155 00:19:01,160 --> 00:19:09,410 acknowledged in its foreignness also that the moment of its its own being particularly was interested in the form. 156 00:19:09,410 --> 00:19:12,770 Of course, because its verse, I'm so pleased you did verse. 157 00:19:12,770 --> 00:19:19,580 I've just emerged from a huge first translation myself of a kind of epic, so I'm very thinking about this. 158 00:19:19,580 --> 00:19:25,810 A great have been thinking about this. A great deal. M your choice not to go through iambic pentameter. 159 00:19:25,810 --> 00:19:36,440 This is, say, Emily Wilson did in her translation. And obviously, if the odyssey, but to find something that sits not quite comfortably in English, 160 00:19:36,440 --> 00:19:43,460 it seems to me and I hope you don't take that as a criticism. But these primitives, for example, of the Greek and the. 161 00:19:43,460 --> 00:19:45,770 Varying line lengths in English. 162 00:19:45,770 --> 00:19:52,110 There's a dynamism about them, but I'm interested in the decision not to go for something that we immediately recognised. 163 00:19:52,110 --> 00:19:57,410 Consommateur. But to go for something that's in between slightly unsettled. 164 00:19:57,410 --> 00:20:07,400 You talked about a post that's basically iambic. And also then these fantastic pieces and lyrical dialogues, which you mentioned there. 165 00:20:07,400 --> 00:20:13,400 We got a snippet of one which all rhymes or use paradigm and a very contemporary. 166 00:20:13,400 --> 00:20:21,050 It seems to me really contemporary in the use of the paradigm and that the soundscapes rather than close rhyme. 167 00:20:21,050 --> 00:20:29,180 It leads to a related issue, which is that it struck me as a very Anglo-Saxon translation, really pacey. 168 00:20:29,180 --> 00:20:39,620 And I think the choice of Anglo-Saxon words led to that so quite far from from a sort of latinate or Greek rhythm in that sense. 169 00:20:39,620 --> 00:20:43,730 And I wondered if you that skewed to the dramatic presentation, 170 00:20:43,730 --> 00:20:51,270 whether you were conscious of that with you doing it when you're doing it or whether it came out as it were in your in your approach. 171 00:20:51,270 --> 00:20:57,140 And that leads to a kind of larger sense question about thoroughness. 172 00:20:57,140 --> 00:21:06,500 And this raises questions of how far in the translation there is or how far it's domesticated into a into a recognisable form. 173 00:21:06,500 --> 00:21:07,440 And as I've hinted, 174 00:21:07,440 --> 00:21:17,390 and I think you wanted your translation sits somewhere between recognising the surprise of the foreign ness and allowing it to be there, 175 00:21:17,390 --> 00:21:24,200 but also setting enough within the range of vocabulary that we feel comfortable, but then are constantly surprised. 176 00:21:24,200 --> 00:21:31,490 Now, of course, this could be seen as against a backdrop of translation theory. 177 00:21:31,490 --> 00:21:36,740 Shyamala talks about this various translators. 178 00:21:36,740 --> 00:21:43,130 Translation theorists have sense. Do you deal with translation theory? 179 00:21:43,130 --> 00:21:46,700 I say straightaway, I don't. I never do really, apart from teaching it. 180 00:21:46,700 --> 00:21:48,890 But when I'm translating, it's me and the text. 181 00:21:48,890 --> 00:21:58,940 But I'd be very interested as to whether you think about questions of proneness or domestication abstractly, or whether it's about micro choices. 182 00:21:58,940 --> 00:22:07,850 And in the in the text itself. And that brings me to a kind of next area, really. 183 00:22:07,850 --> 00:22:13,250 You wrote really helpfully about the afterlives life of these plays and the reason 184 00:22:13,250 --> 00:22:19,860 they're so profoundly important in modern culture have continued to be across the 185 00:22:19,860 --> 00:22:24,800 century as being about that kind of mixture of the combination of the immediate and 186 00:22:24,800 --> 00:22:28,250 the remote is what you call it with links with what we've just been talking about, 187 00:22:28,250 --> 00:22:35,330 of course, but also that capacious enough in a sense for people to be called on time again to respond to them, 188 00:22:35,330 --> 00:22:40,650 keep translating them and keep re thinking them. 189 00:22:40,650 --> 00:22:49,580 Am I I suppose what interested me very much is in a few places, and just then you sort of said it again. 190 00:22:49,580 --> 00:22:56,480 You talk about a 21st century perspective, for example, in Dian Ara, 191 00:22:56,480 --> 00:23:03,530 the character herself has often been thought of, you explain, as unlikeable or deceitful or stupid. 192 00:23:03,530 --> 00:23:12,990 But on the contrary, she strikes us very strongly from the 21st perspective centric perspective as understandable and forgivable and immediate. 193 00:23:12,990 --> 00:23:16,790 And I was interested in whether you think of these characters as psychologically 194 00:23:16,790 --> 00:23:25,190 complete and whole and whether Greek audiences would have thought in that way at all. 195 00:23:25,190 --> 00:23:35,060 Um, Antigone two, of course, very powerfully, when Ismay says to her, you were in love with what's not possible. 196 00:23:35,060 --> 00:23:39,920 It seemed to me in a profound character insight there. 197 00:23:39,920 --> 00:23:44,240 So all these coherent characters and psychological question. 198 00:23:44,240 --> 00:23:47,840 But secondly, again, what comes out in a 21st century reading? 199 00:23:47,840 --> 00:23:54,110 I think psychology is a 21st century saying. I think we're interested in that, but also power the limits of power. 200 00:23:54,110 --> 00:24:00,530 And it seems to me you really just nailed crayon so brilliantly with a very contemporary vocabulary, 201 00:24:00,530 --> 00:24:06,800 things not happening on my watch or to the dilemmas of power. 202 00:24:06,800 --> 00:24:16,170 And the final thing. The last thing, I suppose, is gender, which I wanted to raise, which links with issues of authority and psychology, of course. 203 00:24:16,170 --> 00:24:21,200 And the last production I saw of Antigone was Juliette Binoche, 204 00:24:21,200 --> 00:24:36,900 up in Edinburgh in the kind of fascinating production 2015 Ivo from Hoover, where she very much talked about Kryon as a as a misogynist. 205 00:24:36,900 --> 00:24:44,050 And it was seen as a very gendered and powerfully gendered intervention into the. 206 00:24:44,050 --> 00:24:49,270 And I wondered where you stood, of course, Emily Wilson, when she translated, you know, very complicated, 207 00:24:49,270 --> 00:24:55,050 where got hailed as the first female translator, which isn't true, but had a gendered intervention in the text. 208 00:24:55,050 --> 00:25:00,700 And I was fascinated that you chosen these female texts and set them against the male text. 209 00:25:00,700 --> 00:25:07,000 And so I'm wondering really whether there is a kind of female language at play here in these texts, 210 00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:14,020 distinctive in your mind from male language in the earlier place, which you translated. 211 00:25:14,020 --> 00:25:19,660 And finally, I noticed the words my asthma and sickness and illness and contagion come up again and again. 212 00:25:19,660 --> 00:25:27,950 And I wondered whether that is something, of course, that reading now we particularly notice and seems to be incredibly striking to us. 213 00:25:27,950 --> 00:25:32,690 So the context? And so perhaps there are more affordable questions. 214 00:25:32,690 --> 00:25:39,730 I've noticed I've had more time, so I'm going to pass on to Professor Lucy Jackson, 215 00:25:39,730 --> 00:25:45,370 who I'm sure will bring a more classical point of view to back on these wonderful texts. 216 00:25:45,370 --> 00:25:51,130 Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. 217 00:25:51,130 --> 00:25:56,200 And thanks everyone for being here, thank you for inviting me to to talk about this. 218 00:25:56,200 --> 00:26:05,260 It's a real delight, if not slightly surreal, to be speaking because I was not only taught tragedy, but I was also taught translation. 219 00:26:05,260 --> 00:26:12,160 Bye bye, Oliver. And so to be have the opportunity to to kind of almost read back all of the learning that I 220 00:26:12,160 --> 00:26:19,000 have had from him in wonderful ways with this latest translation of his is is a real treat. 221 00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:28,480 So I want to thank you all. Almost picking up on what Karen just sort of ended with thinking about the subject of these plays, 222 00:26:28,480 --> 00:26:35,140 I think it is a really wonderful thing for these three women plays to be put together that great plays in their own right, 223 00:26:35,140 --> 00:26:39,970 a great place to be featuring and to be returning to for some of us. 224 00:26:39,970 --> 00:26:48,130 But they are really great place to have as a triptych, I think, as Oliver notes in in his introduction. 225 00:26:48,130 --> 00:26:51,070 These are plays with women very much at their centre. 226 00:26:51,070 --> 00:27:01,090 This is one of the one of the reasons why Greek tragedy is particularly popular nowadays because it has these fantastic, weighty female parts, 227 00:27:01,090 --> 00:27:08,770 but also something that I particularly noticed in light of some some classical scholarship recently is they feature not just women, 228 00:27:08,770 --> 00:27:16,480 but women being with other women as well. Sisters, mothers and daughters. 229 00:27:16,480 --> 00:27:22,870 And and that, I think is particularly interesting and lends itself to some very immediate commentary. 230 00:27:22,870 --> 00:27:29,560 In political theory, there's lots of collaboration going on now between classics and political theory and the idea of sisterhood. 231 00:27:29,560 --> 00:27:36,970 So in antiquity, with with antiquity and his many in the electorate between a letter and Christmas is a really hotly debated topic at the moment. 232 00:27:36,970 --> 00:27:42,880 So this is this is not just a wonderful addition to have, but it's also very timely, I think. 233 00:27:42,880 --> 00:27:51,460 And the way that these three plays talk to each other should provoke and prompt lots of interesting conversations. 234 00:27:51,460 --> 00:27:59,950 What I like and again, this is something that Karen noted already is that's in these translations. 235 00:27:59,950 --> 00:28:02,710 We don't shy away from the strangeness of Greek tragedy. 236 00:28:02,710 --> 00:28:08,110 Again, this is something that Olive will know from his decades of scholarship on Greek tragedy. 237 00:28:08,110 --> 00:28:14,530 But they do sit in in between a world of that's very familiar and is also mythical and very far away. 238 00:28:14,530 --> 00:28:22,450 And I certainly really appreciate that nowadays this sort of and that these translations stand against an impulse, 239 00:28:22,450 --> 00:28:28,480 maybe to make something very familiar for new audiences or old audiences to make it perhaps slightly 240 00:28:28,480 --> 00:28:36,250 more easily to to easy to consume or completely domesticate to use the translation theory. 241 00:28:36,250 --> 00:28:43,240 These are plays that's in the Greek to the end for their original audiences posed difficult questions. 242 00:28:43,240 --> 00:28:48,820 They were they were something for us to get our brains around, as well as our mouths to get amounts mounts around them. 243 00:28:48,820 --> 00:28:58,540 These are plays for speaking, and I really liked how how they were throughout these, these touches, which made you kind of just think again, 244 00:28:58,540 --> 00:29:02,710 not quite an alienation effect in the sort of Brechtian way, 245 00:29:02,710 --> 00:29:10,660 but phrases that were both beautiful but out of the ordinary, as well as cramming me full of full of rage. 246 00:29:10,660 --> 00:29:18,490 This, of course, also lends itself sometimes to sort of its looks like other echoes that couldn't be can be predicted. 247 00:29:18,490 --> 00:29:23,050 This is a tiny question that I had, but one of the things that I'm taking, he says, is she. 248 00:29:23,050 --> 00:29:30,700 She says that she's been cancelled from her own wedding. And nowadays, when we have all of this discourse about cancellation, 249 00:29:30,700 --> 00:29:38,770 whether that's that was an intended effect or it is one of these moments when just depending on your own approach to it is something Oh, 250 00:29:38,770 --> 00:29:46,060 where where am I now? So being able to exist in a in a kind of place of tension while reading these plays, 251 00:29:46,060 --> 00:29:53,770 I think is it really wonderful and very valuable and something that that these translations excel in? 252 00:29:53,770 --> 00:29:58,840 I came at this, as Karen said, from a classics perspective, but also from a teaching perspective. 253 00:29:58,840 --> 00:30:02,890 And also, I'm a I'm a something of a choral nut myself. 254 00:30:02,890 --> 00:30:06,280 I'm always interested in the chorus of Greek tragedy and barren strangeness, 255 00:30:06,280 --> 00:30:14,400 so I thought I would look particularly at these translations from those two perspectives. 256 00:30:14,400 --> 00:30:27,210 I was I was really delighted, but but not at all surprised at how the the the choral songs the lyrics were were rendered in these translations. 257 00:30:27,210 --> 00:30:35,880 To take one example, I this was set on a course that I taught last year the opening choral song in Diane Ara. 258 00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:41,880 There's a very it almost has a very, very famous opening image of of a kind of starry night. 259 00:30:41,880 --> 00:30:50,310 And I know for a fact that this is the word Iola used in the Greek is has it has a heritage of its own because 260 00:30:50,310 --> 00:30:58,470 it's it turns up in a weird way in the Martin crimps cruel and tender as this sort of very important adjective, 261 00:30:58,470 --> 00:31:03,930 a way of describing a mood almost at the beginning of the play. 262 00:31:03,930 --> 00:31:10,050 And having read gazillions of translations of this opening ode in the last year, 263 00:31:10,050 --> 00:31:16,590 I was so delighted to feel how fresh this version was and wasn't surprised at all. 264 00:31:16,590 --> 00:31:26,640 But to use glimmering as a way of translating this. This very shifty words in the ancient Greek I thought was was just wonderful. 265 00:31:26,640 --> 00:31:32,160 The whole that whole load, it felt fresh and crunchy at the same time. 266 00:31:32,160 --> 00:31:38,230 It was a bit like treading out in some of the snow that we've had recently gave that feeling of Oh, this is this is something new. 267 00:31:38,230 --> 00:31:42,510 So that was a real, a real delight. 268 00:31:42,510 --> 00:31:50,730 I thought delightful, too, was the way that the the language in the correlates really reverberates out to the rest of the play. 269 00:31:50,730 --> 00:31:59,580 I like the chorus is often problematic for the readers and also for people, audiences for how to understand what they are. 270 00:31:59,580 --> 00:32:05,700 I think Oliver's formulation of of what the choral role is that they kind of look at what is happening. 271 00:32:05,700 --> 00:32:11,610 They get us to look at what is happening and take it on is absolutely right. 272 00:32:11,610 --> 00:32:17,580 But I also then appreciate how these odes feed into the rest of the play and pick up images 273 00:32:17,580 --> 00:32:23,700 or echoes that then complicate how we're meant to be thinking about what's going on. 274 00:32:23,700 --> 00:32:29,820 So an image of a yoke in what's often referred to as the the ode to man again, 275 00:32:29,820 --> 00:32:36,990 once fully translated ode to human, as I'm now going to refer to Oliver Ode to humans. 276 00:32:36,990 --> 00:32:42,600 That image of a yoke picks up something that Koreans already said about what it is to govern, 277 00:32:42,600 --> 00:32:48,660 that it's about joking people to your will, which is already kind of interesting way of framing things. 278 00:32:48,660 --> 00:32:54,150 But when we hear it then echoed again in that in that famous ode, 279 00:32:54,150 --> 00:33:05,040 it immediately gets me anyway as a as a as an audience member, as a as a reader complicating who that ode is really aimed at. 280 00:33:05,040 --> 00:33:09,780 There seems to be a very clear message about how wonderful humans are of that wonderful invention. 281 00:33:09,780 --> 00:33:16,620 And then at the end of the road, a question mark is raised about whether whether all of that is entirely good. 282 00:33:16,620 --> 00:33:21,750 And that being brought into context, we carry on, I think is just fantastic as I knew I would. 283 00:33:21,750 --> 00:33:28,150 I'm running beyond my time because there were so many wonderful things that I wanted to talk about in this. 284 00:33:28,150 --> 00:33:38,400 But as a last point, again echoing something that Karen said, but also really drilling down into what is happening in the Greek meta, 285 00:33:38,400 --> 00:33:45,480 that is something that is absolutely wonderfully rendered, not in trying to find exactly the same rhythm, 286 00:33:45,480 --> 00:33:55,020 but finding this really pacey, pulse driven transverse translation for for some of these odes, 287 00:33:55,020 --> 00:34:05,610 it provides so much material for thought and for teaching with, and I'm so glad that these these are now available as a resource for us. 288 00:34:05,610 --> 00:34:13,080 Thinking about Greek tragedy is always fun, but it's even more fun when you have a good translation that adds layers to that 289 00:34:13,080 --> 00:34:17,100 complication for what we can think about and get from these tragedies today. 290 00:34:17,100 --> 00:34:29,380 So thank you very much, Oliver, for that, and I'll I'll hand back over to Karen. 291 00:34:29,380 --> 00:34:34,840 Well, thank you so much, Lisa. I'm fascinated that. 292 00:34:34,840 --> 00:34:42,400 There was a sort of stereo effect going on, and we both picked up some of the same things, but from very different perspectives. 293 00:34:42,400 --> 00:34:50,590 And so now we have some time to bring back all of that and to ask them to respond to some of the things. 294 00:34:50,590 --> 00:34:56,200 We've said this so much to talk about, but I think I would like to kick off. 295 00:34:56,200 --> 00:34:58,270 But honestly, you can always kick off somewhere else. 296 00:34:58,270 --> 00:35:07,520 If you if you won't see and overrule me with this idea that that both of us finished with in a way which is the 297 00:35:07,520 --> 00:35:20,020 sense of how you position yourself between and how consciously that was done between the strange and the familiar. 298 00:35:20,020 --> 00:35:27,400 Both your position as a sort of scholarly translator who knows the full extent of that strange other from which you're bringing the text, 299 00:35:27,400 --> 00:35:34,780 but also to the fact of the translation itself, even down to the nitty gritty of the diverse forms. 300 00:35:34,780 --> 00:35:41,160 I think both of us agreed very much. But it's a powerful PC and very immediate translation. 301 00:35:41,160 --> 00:35:46,840 And I could hear it in people's mouths and I could hear people acting and singing this. 302 00:35:46,840 --> 00:35:53,410 But also it holds that strangeness, and I'm very interested in how you achieve that. 303 00:35:53,410 --> 00:35:58,750 How consciously achieved it, how you worked at it and the choices you made. 304 00:35:58,750 --> 00:36:10,990 Yes. Well, thank you. I was very taken with your talking about micro translating because in a sense, you know, in in. 305 00:36:10,990 --> 00:36:18,220 I found the notions of domestication of harmonisation very useful talking about other people's translations. 306 00:36:18,220 --> 00:36:30,580 And and yet I actually find in my own, in my own practise that it somehow breaks down that as as you, I think brought out you want you want both. 307 00:36:30,580 --> 00:36:37,520 You want to. Make it accessible, accessibility, you know, is is absolutely crucial. 308 00:36:37,520 --> 00:36:43,400 So you can't translate in such a way that people have to look at footnotes the whole time. 309 00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:48,710 But at the same time, you've got to be able to surprise. You've got to be able to shop. 310 00:36:48,710 --> 00:36:51,110 You've got to be able to jolt. 311 00:36:51,110 --> 00:37:00,620 And I I was interested in what you pointed out, Karen, that on the whole, I've used I haven't used a lot of Latinate language. 312 00:37:00,620 --> 00:37:11,120 There are a lot of lot of monosyllables. And yet somehow, by using monosyllables and not not using the the. 313 00:37:11,120 --> 00:37:13,910 When I think of as normal French language, well, 314 00:37:13,910 --> 00:37:24,350 no polysyllabic language you can you can often actually get a get a jolt and and and waking up in that way. 315 00:37:24,350 --> 00:37:30,140 So the fact is, I think that while I'm aware of a certain amount of translation Siri, 316 00:37:30,140 --> 00:37:38,780 I think I go in for what a friend once called practise led theory rather than theory practise. 317 00:37:38,780 --> 00:37:47,730 Afterwards, I can look at it, but it's actually in the natural process, which is terribly difficult to analyse. 318 00:37:47,730 --> 00:37:54,140 It is a million micro choices. Every single word has to be a choice. 319 00:37:54,140 --> 00:37:57,760 Even the smallest words. 320 00:37:57,760 --> 00:38:07,480 And that fits with Lisa's question in a sense, doesn't it, about about the micro level, for example, this one word that she picked up. 321 00:38:07,480 --> 00:38:13,420 And you now have become part of links with the questions just come in from Rebecca Watts. 322 00:38:13,420 --> 00:38:16,300 You will go formally to the audience in a second, 323 00:38:16,300 --> 00:38:21,460 but I just noticed it because it was what I was thinking of, that you're part of the reception history now. 324 00:38:21,460 --> 00:38:27,100 With this choice of words and future translators, will we'll look to that to take it as an authority, 325 00:38:27,100 --> 00:38:36,880 take it as an intervention, take it as part of a history all over the place of the translator in this in this continuum? 326 00:38:36,880 --> 00:38:44,170 And yes, well, I mean, it's about restored to even think that anybody is going to be reading it in 10 years time. 327 00:38:44,170 --> 00:38:52,120 That alone? Twenty five years time. But it is interesting you you asked Karen right at the beginning. 328 00:38:52,120 --> 00:38:55,870 Did I look at other people's translations? And the answer is no, actually. 329 00:38:55,870 --> 00:39:01,600 I mean, of course, I know Seamus Heaney as translation. I know and constant translation. 330 00:39:01,600 --> 00:39:07,750 It actually happened. I was giving a seminar on translation practise at A. 331 00:39:07,750 --> 00:39:19,810 And it was a passage of day and year. In fact, though a different passage, the one with Nessus gives her a ride over the river and and is is shot by. 332 00:39:19,810 --> 00:39:24,440 And there I was taught, and then there in the audience was Anne Carson. 333 00:39:24,440 --> 00:39:31,390 You can imagine that that was rather terrifying. And somebody asked, Well, do you look at other people's translations? 334 00:39:31,390 --> 00:39:36,550 When are you constantly? I got other translations in front of you to compare. 335 00:39:36,550 --> 00:39:41,830 And rather rather terrified. I said, Well, no, I don't. 336 00:39:41,830 --> 00:39:47,320 And force the. And Carlson said she didn't, either. So, but so no, I don't. 337 00:39:47,320 --> 00:39:49,570 I don't look at other people's translations as I go along. 338 00:39:49,570 --> 00:39:55,450 So I'm not aware actually of when I'm sharing words with with other people and when I'm finding my own eye. 339 00:39:55,450 --> 00:40:07,570 It's in some ways it's quite lonely. And in other ways, it's a it's a shame that it's lonely because I every phrase I use, I obviously read to myself, 340 00:40:07,570 --> 00:40:15,240 I say it out loud to myself as I do it, but I'd like to hear other people saying it as well. 341 00:40:15,240 --> 00:40:17,850 And I love Lucy is pointing out and cancelled, 342 00:40:17,850 --> 00:40:24,000 which was actually I don't think that news of cancelled was so current when I translated it three or four years ago. 343 00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:32,490 And once, though in and my translation of Ajax, what I asked, I use the word Twitter before then. 344 00:40:32,490 --> 00:40:44,400 Fortunately, I was able to change it to something else because the word Twitter became so, so familiar in a different context. 345 00:40:44,400 --> 00:40:51,780 Lucy, did you want to come in there? Well, I suppose I want to draw in on that because you mentioned in in your translator's note again, 346 00:40:51,780 --> 00:41:00,960 kind of just fully embracing it the role of intuition. Do you use the word intuition I don't know about and you've spoken. 347 00:41:00,960 --> 00:41:06,660 I mean, I've all I've heard you talk about this. How you explain things to kind of melt down and settle in. 348 00:41:06,660 --> 00:41:10,170 And and so certainly not looking at translations while you're doing it. 349 00:41:10,170 --> 00:41:13,710 But to what extent do you feel that kind of what is it? 350 00:41:13,710 --> 00:41:19,170 I'm not a geologist, the kind of the sediment that's been building up of of not just your work as a scholar, 351 00:41:19,170 --> 00:41:24,840 but you're teaching of translation and all of the talks that happen at the AP. 352 00:41:24,840 --> 00:41:28,710 That's where I remember the Martin crimp thing from one of the events that were done then. 353 00:41:28,710 --> 00:41:33,430 Yes, he came. Yes, yes. And then how you well, that's interesting. 354 00:41:33,430 --> 00:41:42,420 And I mean, Karen raised this point. To what extent being a scholar translator chain changes things? 355 00:41:42,420 --> 00:41:52,860 And I think you're right that in some ways the the weight of scholarship is a drag sometimes. 356 00:41:52,860 --> 00:42:01,560 You know, I mean, some of the best translations, of course, by people who who who don't have that because they're liberated in a sense. 357 00:42:01,560 --> 00:42:06,660 And I can't I can't get away from that. No, it's been my it's been my job. 358 00:42:06,660 --> 00:42:14,720 But I think what you're saying, Lucy, is right that it's kind of sediment hit. 359 00:42:14,720 --> 00:42:25,080 As as I translate, I don't think scholarship. I think I think sound, I think movement and I do think accessibility. 360 00:42:25,080 --> 00:42:31,210 I want people to be able to hear it. 361 00:42:31,210 --> 00:42:34,870 And understand it, while at the same time, as we've been saying all along, 362 00:42:34,870 --> 00:42:44,700 that doesn't mean making it simple and making it easy and domesticating, in fact, in many ways the opposite. 363 00:42:44,700 --> 00:42:53,880 Let me pick up something else that Lucy raised a little said featured in my response, which is this question of bringing the three texts together, 364 00:42:53,880 --> 00:43:02,520 at least it was really helpful that took to remind me in a sense that bringing them together was a political act actually and a scholarly act, 365 00:43:02,520 --> 00:43:07,590 and it creates a possibility of thinking about these texts together. 366 00:43:07,590 --> 00:43:14,310 But I, as a translator, was more interested in whether you found links between them on the linguistic level, 367 00:43:14,310 --> 00:43:21,900 whether they were distinct from the male plays, in a sense. So they're two, I think, in a two perspectives on this question of the women's plays. 368 00:43:21,900 --> 00:43:30,060 I'm very fascinated to hear in it for you what they perhaps started as and what they ended up has actually. 369 00:43:30,060 --> 00:43:35,430 Yes. Yes, that's true. That's very interesting. And I thought, you know what you were asking about psychology was interesting. 370 00:43:35,430 --> 00:43:40,410 I mean, it seems to me, you know what? I'm going to talk big here. 371 00:43:40,410 --> 00:43:52,830 What tragedy does is draw its audience into the inside the skins of the people who are undergoing these terrible dilemmas and sufferings that 372 00:43:52,830 --> 00:44:02,070 draws them into understanding them into into which I don't want you to sympathise or empathise because it's more it's more complicated than that, 373 00:44:02,070 --> 00:44:08,800 but draws them into a kind of into their world and. 374 00:44:08,800 --> 00:44:17,470 That's it. It's extraordinary that the the men who created great tragedy for an audience of men in a very male dominated society and so on, 375 00:44:17,470 --> 00:44:28,880 somehow for some reason felt it important to get inside the skin of a women to get get get into the into a gendered, 376 00:44:28,880 --> 00:44:33,170 a gendered way of seeing the world. And of course, that's what I've had to try to do. 377 00:44:33,170 --> 00:44:38,110 I mean, you know, here I am the least fashionable translator, an elderly white male. 378 00:44:38,110 --> 00:44:43,940 I mean, how bad can it get? And by that, but. 379 00:44:43,940 --> 00:44:50,870 I found it. I found it personally actually quite a powerful experience to try and try and 380 00:44:50,870 --> 00:45:00,530 understand the women of these tragedies and to make and to make them understandable. 381 00:45:00,530 --> 00:45:07,940 But whether I've actually made lexical choices, it's it's the micro-level again, I think. 382 00:45:07,940 --> 00:45:16,790 I mean, you know, when I translate a woman's speech, I I try to translate with a woman's thought, if you know what I mean. 383 00:45:16,790 --> 00:45:24,560 But I haven't actually consciously sorted my vocabulary into into male ways of putting things in female ways, of putting out things. 384 00:45:24,560 --> 00:45:29,000 It's not as schematic as that. No, I'm sure that's right. 385 00:45:29,000 --> 00:45:33,710 I think translations never going to, because now we're coming up against a time when we open to the audience. 386 00:45:33,710 --> 00:45:41,400 But I'm very conscious. Which is there anything you particularly wants to pick up out of our responses that you wanted to respond to before we had? 387 00:45:41,400 --> 00:45:48,160 Well, I mean, there was so much of both of you said such interesting things that a lot out of a longer conversation. 388 00:45:48,160 --> 00:45:52,690 One thing that's certainly out of what Lucy said it. 389 00:45:52,690 --> 00:46:00,470 It is true that actually, I found the translation of the choruses the most challenging and the most interesting, 390 00:46:00,470 --> 00:46:04,280 and also the place where I've actually felt most creative. 391 00:46:04,280 --> 00:46:14,300 I mean, one reason I loved doing translation and I've only had time to do it in retirement is because there is a there is a creativity to it. 392 00:46:14,300 --> 00:46:17,450 You know, you're not just following, you're also making. 393 00:46:17,450 --> 00:46:25,370 And I found that the translation of the lyrics, of course, is not translated the other time as well. 394 00:46:25,370 --> 00:46:29,480 That has has been the thing that I find most rewarding. 395 00:46:29,480 --> 00:46:38,730 And I like to think that maybe it's also what readers and performers might find most rewarding. 396 00:46:38,730 --> 00:46:45,660 Can I say straight away, I did get to say this thing? 397 00:46:45,660 --> 00:46:51,330 Oh, brilliant. Well, we're unanimous, but I think it's time to bring the audience in. 398 00:46:51,330 --> 00:46:58,170 And at this point, I think I can do that back to us, who will feel some more general questions. 399 00:46:58,170 --> 00:47:03,180 Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you. What an amazing discussion so far. 400 00:47:03,180 --> 00:47:08,670 This is great fun and it's really, really interesting and clearly, well, I've got my own questions, 401 00:47:08,670 --> 00:47:12,960 but I'm here to put forward audience questions, at least to start with. So I will do. 402 00:47:12,960 --> 00:47:18,570 And there's some great questions here to the I want to start actually with the second one because 403 00:47:18,570 --> 00:47:26,250 it seems to me to pick up on the discussion that's already happened a bit between the four of you. 404 00:47:26,250 --> 00:47:33,270 The question is from Keith and says the famous debate scene between Antigeni and his men parallels and possibly alludes 405 00:47:33,270 --> 00:47:40,870 to a similar scene in what is calling the women of truck is where two sisters similarly argue about similar issues. 406 00:47:40,870 --> 00:47:45,870 So again, it's about how much you see these plays in relation to each other. 407 00:47:45,870 --> 00:47:54,140 Do you think of these scenes as in dialogue with each other when you're translating? 408 00:47:54,140 --> 00:48:02,600 I don't think I do. Actually, it's an interesting question, and that is the pairs of sisters, for example, 409 00:48:02,600 --> 00:48:07,820 that Lucy alluded to the sisters and antigeni in the pair of sisters in Electra. 410 00:48:07,820 --> 00:48:21,840 But. On the whole, I think I think of each play as a container, a container, a container to play. 411 00:48:21,840 --> 00:48:25,620 And one thing that I certainly haven't done is and I've deliberately tried to get away 412 00:48:25,620 --> 00:48:29,970 from is this notion that people have of the Sophocles what they call the theman trilogy. 413 00:48:29,970 --> 00:48:39,610 It's not a truth at all. The three quite separate plays, the two Oedipus plays and then take a knee and. 414 00:48:39,610 --> 00:48:46,510 Actually, Oedipus, a colonist does does have a relationship to the other players, but but I think on the whole, 415 00:48:46,510 --> 00:48:52,730 it's an interesting question, but I don't I don't think I do think of the the scenes as into playing across plays. 416 00:48:52,730 --> 00:48:59,170 And of course, you got to remember with Sophocles composed 120 plays, he composed 90 tragedies, probably. 417 00:48:59,170 --> 00:49:02,990 And we got seven of them. Yeah, yeah. OK, thank you. 418 00:49:02,990 --> 00:49:10,700 They have another question going in a slightly different direction, although there's quite a few questions asking this sort of scholarship. 419 00:49:10,700 --> 00:49:17,230 How much do you need to know? How much do you not need to know sort of in that in that field? 420 00:49:17,230 --> 00:49:24,250 And there's another question from Keith, which is the famous messenger speech at the beginning. 421 00:49:24,250 --> 00:49:27,550 It's highly comical and almost periodic. 422 00:49:27,550 --> 00:49:35,830 Do you are you conscious of rendering or basically, how do you make room for comedy and parody in a in a tragedy? 423 00:49:35,830 --> 00:49:39,700 So this is the the god who in antiquity? 424 00:49:39,700 --> 00:49:46,040 Yes. Or do you not think of it as comic and periodic? 425 00:49:46,040 --> 00:49:55,010 No, no, I don't think I do think of it as. Right? I mean, a comic is complicated because of course, there was in the same drama festivals. 426 00:49:55,010 --> 00:50:03,770 They were comedies. Yeah, but comedy is not the same as as comic in the sense of the word. 427 00:50:03,770 --> 00:50:09,140 He does. He speaks to the different register quite differently, and I think I'd hope I put that out. 428 00:50:09,140 --> 00:50:21,500 Yep, yep. But also, insofar as there are comic elements in in Greek tragedy, I think it's a hero school romance. 429 00:50:21,500 --> 00:50:25,220 You know that that the dark is darker. Yeah. 430 00:50:25,220 --> 00:50:37,580 So for the light from the darkness of tyranny having gone so far in defiance of screen is actually brought out by by the lightness of the messenger, 431 00:50:37,580 --> 00:50:42,650 who says, Well, I'm very sorry and taken here, but at least I'm safe. 432 00:50:42,650 --> 00:50:54,740 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Another question is about kind of the relationship between sort of knowing and not knowing Greek. 433 00:50:54,740 --> 00:51:02,480 So Geeta Ramanathan has asked, Is it actually possible to translate these Greek facts without a scholarly background? 434 00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:12,470 And asks, for example, how would you compare your translation with Hughes, for example, that uses version, in other words? 435 00:51:12,470 --> 00:51:19,700 Because again, this picture with what Karen said, in the way you've answered this already in terms of the drag of scholarship, 436 00:51:19,700 --> 00:51:24,260 but somebody has to tell you what the Greek means to begin with, don't they? 437 00:51:24,260 --> 00:51:30,840 Well, I mean, obviously it can be done with Seamus Heaney when he translated both facilities and then. 438 00:51:30,840 --> 00:51:35,300 And he said that he had three or four versions open in front of him and he 439 00:51:35,300 --> 00:51:40,310 would kind of go between them and somehow distil it distilled it out of that. 440 00:51:40,310 --> 00:51:47,630 And some of the best translations have been done by people who don't know the source language. 441 00:51:47,630 --> 00:52:00,440 But as you say, somebody has to tell them so yeah, and they have to have to find their ways of getting access to it somehow. 442 00:52:00,440 --> 00:52:05,500 So it is a different thing. But but. 443 00:52:05,500 --> 00:52:10,750 As I say, when I when I translate, I don't I'm not thinking scholarly questions the whole time. 444 00:52:10,750 --> 00:52:16,600 I have to worry about the text, of course. And are you thinking about it? 445 00:52:16,600 --> 00:52:20,200 I mean, you're clearly thinking about English because one of the questions says is your work. 446 00:52:20,200 --> 00:52:27,610 Does your work as a translator make you think more in a more complicated way about the history of English or the different moments in English? 447 00:52:27,610 --> 00:52:32,800 And again, in a way you've already addressed that with the presence of Twitter or of cancel, 448 00:52:32,800 --> 00:52:37,180 or as Karen said at the end of my asthma, sickness, contagion. 449 00:52:37,180 --> 00:52:40,880 I mean, presumably, I mean, there's the question for all three of you, really. 450 00:52:40,880 --> 00:52:47,750 How does working as a translator or thinking about foreign text make you think differently about English? 451 00:52:47,750 --> 00:52:54,800 Yes. Well, I think I think I think it's healthy, it's healthy, it's quite it's quite positive, 452 00:52:54,800 --> 00:52:58,940 actually the effect on my how one thinks of one's own language. 453 00:52:58,940 --> 00:53:09,710 I think it enables you to find new ways of expression and and new forces and rhythms within it. 454 00:53:09,710 --> 00:53:15,320 Not so much periodisation, I don't think. I mean, I don't think I ever. 455 00:53:15,320 --> 00:53:25,070 I very seldom would use an archaic word. So for as long as an arc is, if you know what I mean, and that's to do with accessibility. 456 00:53:25,070 --> 00:53:30,480 I mean, if you if you use an OK word in the sense you foreigners. 457 00:53:30,480 --> 00:53:36,180 Yeah, Karen, you're nodding vigorously, aren't you to say more about how this relates to English? 458 00:53:36,180 --> 00:53:47,310 Yeah, no, no. I think a lot about this. I think, you know, close engagement with a foreign language and changes your possibilities, 459 00:53:47,310 --> 00:53:53,640 your brother or your own expression in English, it pathways or possibilities which didn't exist before. 460 00:53:53,640 --> 00:54:01,530 And I think and I remember going to a production of all seven of history's Shakespeare's 461 00:54:01,530 --> 00:54:09,770 history plays over one weekend and I came out talking and I I'm talking to be done. 462 00:54:09,770 --> 00:54:10,940 But more seriously, 463 00:54:10,940 --> 00:54:19,020 it opens your language to possibilities and it refines your language and it makes your own language richer and various commitments to make. 464 00:54:19,020 --> 00:54:21,990 But I would also like to put in a plug for the scholarly translator. 465 00:54:21,990 --> 00:54:26,280 I think, you know, there's a question at the moment so which I call the celebrity translation. 466 00:54:26,280 --> 00:54:30,690 I don't mean to be derisive about Hughes or any or anybody, 467 00:54:30,690 --> 00:54:37,980 but that triangulation that he talks about in terms of any with his his translations in front of him, that's in my head. 468 00:54:37,980 --> 00:54:43,320 You've heard about this penumbra around every word, which is the scholarly background. 469 00:54:43,320 --> 00:54:47,880 You brought it down, you know, into a kind of pebble of knowledge and various things in that word. 470 00:54:47,880 --> 00:54:52,020 And then you don't have all the footnotes, you know, telling of what it's about. You're doing it already. 471 00:54:52,020 --> 00:54:56,170 And so I, you know, praise for the scholarly translators, let's say. 472 00:54:56,170 --> 00:55:01,560 Yep, yep. Yep. Maybe, Lucy, did you want to add to this? 473 00:55:01,560 --> 00:55:08,340 Well, only to psychologically move away from language, but again, comment on a choice made in this translation, 474 00:55:08,340 --> 00:55:14,160 particularly apparent in the diner, which is how to translate e.g. cries of pain. 475 00:55:14,160 --> 00:55:21,100 That is something that often gets talked about in the classroom because the ancient Greek has these particular ways of communicating that with, 476 00:55:21,100 --> 00:55:26,430 you know, pop idol and things and the conversations that I didn't have my students often 477 00:55:26,430 --> 00:55:31,080 hilariously very buttoned up shy students who don't want to be enacting cries of pain. 478 00:55:31,080 --> 00:55:37,150 I say, Well, what would you say if this was in English? What is the way that we communicate that? 479 00:55:37,150 --> 00:55:42,840 And it does sort of take them a while to think, Well, yeah, how to being eaten alive by a poisoned cloak? 480 00:55:42,840 --> 00:55:46,170 Well, what would I do? So, so in that sense, 481 00:55:46,170 --> 00:55:51,720 it does open up more conversations about how how we express ourselves as well and really 482 00:55:51,720 --> 00:55:56,650 an invitation to perform in a in a dry and dusty philology Greek translation class. 483 00:55:56,650 --> 00:56:03,480 So I thought it was a really interesting decision that you made to make it stage directions, Oliver and yours rather than try and find her. 484 00:56:03,480 --> 00:56:13,680 Yes. I felt like some translations. And I think even that and and sometimes transliterated the Greek, the Greek prime. 485 00:56:13,680 --> 00:56:19,140 Lo what the relationship between the phonetics of the of our transliteration and the and the cry, 486 00:56:19,140 --> 00:56:23,850 as it might have been made by in the Greek theatre is it remains an open question. 487 00:56:23,850 --> 00:56:33,270 Yes. So in a sense, it's an evasion to put in a state direction and saying cries out, cries out in pain or cries of distress or something. 488 00:56:33,270 --> 00:56:40,940 I felt. Actually, was better for the reader, for the listener to fill that in. 489 00:56:40,940 --> 00:56:43,730 There are one or two more questions, but I'd like to ask one of my own if I may, 490 00:56:43,730 --> 00:56:50,830 and it relates to the very first passage that you read and in fact, the last word of the first passage. 491 00:56:50,830 --> 00:56:59,110 And that's the word mail. Yeah, 'cause it struck me as such an amazing decision to put mail at the end. 492 00:56:59,110 --> 00:57:07,450 Can you explain it, please? Please explain the thinking that goes into that decision as opposed to mine or, you know, blow. 493 00:57:07,450 --> 00:57:14,330 I mean, there's obviously another bloke, but mail is such a strong word to put there at the end of that little sequence. 494 00:57:14,330 --> 00:57:22,960 Well, thank you, overdramatising that I mean, it seems to me a real jolt, exactly the same response I had to ring. 495 00:57:22,960 --> 00:57:31,600 My interest is that there I did also have another passage in mind actually a passage in Europe of these policies where the nurses, 496 00:57:31,600 --> 00:57:38,990 the nurse says to the Federer says to Federer uses the Greek word is the word for man. 497 00:57:38,990 --> 00:57:44,320 And so says I'll be calling his. 498 00:57:44,320 --> 00:57:49,930 I'll be called. [INAUDIBLE] be called my husband, but she'll be called his. 499 00:57:49,930 --> 00:57:55,610 No, let me get this right. [INAUDIBLE] be a husband. 500 00:57:55,610 --> 00:58:06,680 [INAUDIBLE] be called my husband, but [INAUDIBLE] be called her. Man, but I thought that it was more explicitly sexual than that. 501 00:58:06,680 --> 00:58:15,900 And it's definitely very explicitly sexual, the same use of the word man and in your responses to the two passages where that happens. 502 00:58:15,900 --> 00:58:21,270 So yes, I made a very deliberate if you like, almost a sexualization of that. 503 00:58:21,270 --> 00:58:30,450 And I think there is more erotic and more more more more explicit evocation 504 00:58:30,450 --> 00:58:36,750 of the sexual dimension in Dannemora than in almost any other Greek tragedy. 505 00:58:36,750 --> 00:58:42,570 That's interesting, because for me, what it does, I think that's absolutely right and what it's one of those little micro choices, really, 506 00:58:42,570 --> 00:58:47,310 whereby in a sense the obvious thing to have done would have been and said, man, 507 00:58:47,310 --> 00:58:53,640 which then puts this in the kind of blues world of, you know, I've lost my man to, et cetera. 508 00:58:53,640 --> 00:58:56,400 And but then lose is precisely so. 509 00:58:56,400 --> 00:59:03,150 In other words, it puts it in a world where it is about sex and about adultery and who who your man might be or not be. 510 00:59:03,150 --> 00:59:07,770 But it's yeah, but it was a jolt for me. 511 00:59:07,770 --> 00:59:11,640 Karen, you said as well for you? Yeah. Oh, absolutely not. 512 00:59:11,640 --> 00:59:19,380 I have to choose as to stand by questions. I'm so glad you answered it, but I think it's more calling them all over because of the sound happenings. 513 00:59:19,380 --> 00:59:25,500 Just right. You have that and you have a couple of other things. 514 00:59:25,500 --> 00:59:34,680 I read it as mate. First up here that I think we, you know, and again, that's the kind of brutal and sexual thing going on there. 515 00:59:34,680 --> 00:59:41,580 So I loved it, and I am really interested that there is a background to it and that proves what I'm saying 516 00:59:41,580 --> 00:59:47,430 about the scholarly background and Slater's insight just coalescing for that brilliant moment. 517 00:59:47,430 --> 00:59:59,000 Yep. Yep, yep. The the sorry, there's one more little question here, I've lost it now, where is it? 518 00:59:59,000 --> 01:00:04,220 Dum dum dum. It's not a little question. Oh yes, here we. Because it's in the other bit of the trap. 519 01:00:04,220 --> 01:00:09,260 It's about the sacred and the different languages of the sacred and different in different languages. 520 01:00:09,260 --> 01:00:14,870 So Rebecca says, how does it feel? 521 01:00:14,870 --> 01:00:21,610 Basically, to recreate or co-create the religious dimension of Greek tragedy? 522 01:00:21,610 --> 01:00:30,610 To open a question is that. Yeah. I mean, that's really that's really difficult because, you know, I've seen say with. 523 01:00:30,610 --> 01:00:33,410 She. 524 01:00:33,410 --> 01:00:46,010 She is she has a lot about what's going to happen after she dies and that inevitably for modern illness tends to bring in the idea of an afterlife, 525 01:00:46,010 --> 01:00:49,100 whether in paradise or whether in [INAUDIBLE] or whatever. 526 01:00:49,100 --> 01:00:56,480 At any rate, some kind of awful God's love or whatever an afterlife that is somehow more important than this life, 527 01:00:56,480 --> 01:01:02,660 which is very definitely not the Greek way of of seeing things of seeing eschatology. 528 01:01:02,660 --> 01:01:13,250 So it's it's somewhat something where the equivalence that Karen was talking about is very, very hard to capture. 529 01:01:13,250 --> 01:01:22,460 It's very, very hard to to bring in sacred language that does not bring the wrong kind of consequential associations, which is what it was. 530 01:01:22,460 --> 01:01:28,820 There's a danger, even in the talk of what's going to happen after death in the Antigone. 531 01:01:28,820 --> 01:01:38,960 And also, even with things like the word altar, I always remember Tony Harrison in his restored translation translates altar as God stone, 532 01:01:38,960 --> 01:01:46,040 he deliberately says, because he doesn't want to use the word altar because of him, because of its its churchy resonance. 533 01:01:46,040 --> 01:01:53,370 That's the kind of micro choice that one's making all the time in translating from from another culture. 534 01:01:53,370 --> 01:01:57,850 But that's not just we're not just talking about ancient Greek culture by any means. 535 01:01:57,850 --> 01:02:02,780 Mm-Hmm. It's a very interesting and difficult area. 536 01:02:02,780 --> 01:02:08,590 Yeah. Somebody is talking about from other countries. 537 01:02:08,590 --> 01:02:15,370 Rebecca, again, is that man and husband and human are also issues in translating Genesis from the Hebrew. 538 01:02:15,370 --> 01:02:16,270 In other words, 539 01:02:16,270 --> 01:02:25,930 these are not obviously these are not questions specific to Greek transposition or equivalents or so on so much as we want to, actually. 540 01:02:25,930 --> 01:02:30,850 Cameron was asking about about gender and don't ask Emily Wilson and so on. 541 01:02:30,850 --> 01:02:36,290 It is interesting how I mean the Greek word anthropol. is not gendered. 542 01:02:36,290 --> 01:02:45,260 And yet it's usually translated as man, and we refer to this, this song is very, very famous song in the Attic, and she's known as the ode to Man. 543 01:02:45,260 --> 01:02:52,880 It's not. It's not only is it about humans and not about men, but it is also not an ode to them. 544 01:02:52,880 --> 01:03:01,190 Actually, it's an ode about them, about human achievement and how it can go right and how it can go wrong. 545 01:03:01,190 --> 01:03:13,520 But I did. I did find again and again that I I was making sure not to not to gender in places where the Greek was not gendered. 546 01:03:13,520 --> 01:03:27,730 And this and that and bringing out like in the Oedipus this, the generations of humans always translate the generations of men. 547 01:03:27,730 --> 01:03:32,900 Yeah, yeah. One last thing because we've just about run out of time. 548 01:03:32,900 --> 01:03:42,560 You talked about one thing or you have a dream that you're the more well, that some parts of this could be set to music. 549 01:03:42,560 --> 01:03:48,500 I wonder if you have a particular kind of music in mind, in other words, that we talking and I do want to say, 550 01:03:48,500 --> 01:03:57,170 are there particular musical contemporary musical forms or is there is there a notional music that you hear when you're translating this? 551 01:03:57,170 --> 01:04:07,980 No. Well, I don't know if I do accept. The the the words must be audible. 552 01:04:07,980 --> 01:04:13,170 I think that's terribly important, there was hope there was a musical version done of Seamus Heaney is antigeni and 553 01:04:13,170 --> 01:04:17,130 actually I sat next to him in the Globe Theatre in London when it was first performed, 554 01:04:17,130 --> 01:04:21,990 you couldn't hear the words and that must be absolutely agonising for him. 555 01:04:21,990 --> 01:04:32,010 So if you remember that, perhaps if if you've got Greek singing in the streets in 5th century Athens, 556 01:04:32,010 --> 01:04:36,960 that the chances are that they're singing the latest thing they heard in the tragedy the other week, 557 01:04:36,960 --> 01:04:42,930 or that Athenian prisoners in Sicily won that one their freedom by being able to 558 01:04:42,930 --> 01:04:48,540 sing that remember the songs of Europe it is and sing them to the to their captors. 559 01:04:48,540 --> 01:04:57,600 I think I'd I'd I like to think in terms of a kind of music that is that is accessible and memorable, not a kind of music that is difficult. 560 01:04:57,600 --> 01:05:02,770 Mm-Hmm. That's as far as I'd go. Otherwise, I hand it over to the composer. 561 01:05:02,770 --> 01:05:06,880 You can find the composer and the choreographer, then I would be happy. 562 01:05:06,880 --> 01:05:11,500 OK, well, maybe that's our next task. Okay. 563 01:05:11,500 --> 01:05:15,880 I think we've got to wrap it up there. But before we do, I should just like to say thank you. 564 01:05:15,880 --> 01:05:25,930 First of all, to both Lucy and Karen for terrifically interesting, engaged, insightful, informative responses to all of his work. 565 01:05:25,930 --> 01:05:32,230 But most of all goes to Oliver for the work, for the tremendous energy that you're bringing to this. 566 01:05:32,230 --> 01:05:35,680 And also, as Karen says, you know the skill of the scholar, 567 01:05:35,680 --> 01:05:45,910 but also the real sense that this is stuff that needs to be used to be spoken, to be read, to be kind of out there in the world as well. 568 01:05:45,910 --> 01:05:50,890 Thank you also to everyone for the questions and for coming along. 569 01:05:50,890 --> 01:05:56,470 And my last thing to say is join us in a couple of weeks time on March the 3rd, 570 01:05:56,470 --> 01:06:04,390 when we'll be with Shashi Dasgupta talking about Charles Dickens and the properties of fiction. 571 01:06:04,390 --> 01:06:09,070 Our guests have disappeared. Thank you, everyone. See you next time. 572 01:06:09,070 --> 01:06:24,574 Bye. Thank you. Then.