Good afternoon, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Sophocles and targeting another trying to tragedy written by,
or translated by and written by Professor Oliver Chapman.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at Torch.
I'm delighted to be welcoming. Oliver had to speak about his book today.
Also on the panel are Dr. Lucy Jackson and Professor Karen leader will be chairing the discussion.
Sophocles, and taking the end of the tragedies is an original and distinctive verse translation of antiquity, De Niro and Electra.
These books in Oliver's version convey the vitality of Sophocles poetry and also the vigour of the pleasing performance.
In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Leader, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel.
This will be followed by a reading by Oliver from the translations.
Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts and questions on the book coming at it from their different disciplines.
We'll then give Oliver the chance to respond to some of the points raised before interest,
entering into what I hope will be a really interesting, broader discussion with questions also from you, the audience.
So is the chat box already says Please do send your questions in as we go through the next hour or so.
It's a great pleasure to be here to introduce this third book at lunchtime of this time from torch.
It's our flagship event series, taking the form of fortnightly bite sized discussions with a range of commentators.
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.
One of the advantages clearly of the situation is that we can all be doing this from wherever we are, including across the world.
Sadly, however, the lunch has got to be virtual. But there's certainly food for thought in what's to come.
Please do take a look at our website and newsletter for the full programme next term.
I'll say a bit more about this at the end of today's discussion.
All that's left for me to do now is to thank you for coming and to introduce our current leader.
Professor, current leader is professor of modern languages at Oxford University and a fellow in German at New College Oxford.
She's published widely on modern German culture and is a prise winning translator and writer.
A prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most especially poetry,
recently winning the English Pen Award and the American Pen Heim Award for her translation of Ulrika Almog Sunday.
She was a while back, a torch extreme knowledge exchange fellow with the Southbank Centre.
And since then, she works with modern poetry in translation poetry in the city.
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.
Karen, thanks so much for sharing today's panel. I'll hand over to you now and return for questions.
Towards the end. Thank you very much, Ross.
I'm delighted to be here. And with no further ado because I know we've got so much exciting material to cover.
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.
So Professor Oliver Taplin is an emeritus professor of classics at Oxford University,
and his research has focussed on the reception of poetry and drama,
particularly through performance and material culture in both ancient and modern times.
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,
which becomes important. I think because we've got to remember this is drama where we're talking about.
In recent years, he has turned his attention to translating Greek drama as verse to be spoken and performed.
Dr. Lucy Jackson is assistant professor in classics and ancient history at Durham University.
Her research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman theatre and performance,
again near Latin translations of Greek drama and the reception of classical theatre in
the 16th century and translation studies and theory in the ancient and modern worlds.
The most recent publication is the course of drama in the fourth century BCE.
So now I'd like to invite all of the Typekit to present some readings from this wonderful book,
Sophocles, and take any other verse tragedies, other first tragedies, which is out this year with.
Oliver, you muted. Thank you very much, thank you.
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.
I'm going to read you a brief extracts, a brief extract from each of the three plays in this volume place,
which I've thought of together as being Sophocles female plays.
The other volume has Sophocles four male plays,
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.
So first, De Enero De Niro is more familiarly known as Astra Kinney or the women of Trekkies.
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.
It's the least known, probably the Sophocles plays, I think it should be much better known.
It's a wonderful play. It brings together in a very modern way, really monstrosity the modern,
monstrous deeds of men and domesticity and settlement and lust and sex is the link between the two that destroys them both.
And to give you the setting for this reading, heritage has been a way, he's been away a long time on various expeditions.
He's now returning victorious and he's sent ahead.
He's the woman who is his latest infatuation and.
She hit De Niro has discovered that he means to keep her keep this young beauty in her house.
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.
So, Dana, coming out talking to the chorus.
I've slipped out secretly to you, dear women, while our visitor is talking to those captive girls inside before he goes,
I want to tell you of the action that I have in hand and seek your sympathy for what I'm going through.
I have you see this in a girl. And yet no more simple girl.
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.
And now the two of us shall lie beneath a single covenant and wait to see which one he will embrace.
Is this the kind of payment that the so-called good and trusty Heracles have
sent me in return for caring for his house through such a stretch of time?
I'm not able to be angry with him when he's afflicted with so virulent a fever.
Yet what woman could bear living with her and share in one man's making love?
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.
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.
So I'll now read you a piece from Electra.
If we can change the slide. And we know thank you.
This is so that that speech from India has a kind of restrained resentment behind it.
I mean, it's it's deeply emotional and jealous, but at the same time,
she's she's holding holding back in order to reveal what it is that she's going to do.
And I hope you heard the kind of iambic pulse that there is beneath beneath the the lines.
Now this extract from Electra also iambic pulse, but from a much, much more emotional scene.
And I think you'll see why I have not gone through a regular line length because the advantage of varying
the length of line and varying the endings of lines between strong and weak syllables is very clear here.
This is the most famous scene in the play in many ways.
The electorate has been waiting years for her brother arrestees to come home and avenge the murder of that their father, Agamemnon.
She doesn't know that he's come back in in disguise and there is a pretence.
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.
And the lecturer laments over this and the most terrible, heart rending lament.
And he stands there. The person she's lamenting for through is unable to know what to do until the end.
So here is the very end of electoral lament over the.
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.
This ash and futile shadow are so pitiful your body sent on such a dreadful journey and you have destroyed me.
Dearest brought destruction on my brother. So now please let me in receive me into this.
Your home, the nothing me into your nothing place, so I may dwell with you below for all the time.
But when you were up here, I used to share in everything with you.
And now I longed to die so that I'll never be deprived of being with you, even in the grave.
And then antigeni, of course, I mean, the best known of all of Sophocles plays perhaps the best known of all Greek tragedies.
I'll read you a piece of lyric that's to say this is what's usually known as a choral ode.
I'll read you two stanzas. They both have the same metre.
They come after the great confrontation scene between Crane and Antigeni, where they confront each other and talk.
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,
the kind of disaster that can hang around a house, a family once things go wrong.
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.
I just found my own rhythms fee for each, for each pair of stanzas.
And I've generally speaking made made use of rhyme, except that I use a lot of half rhyme, quarter rhyme, para rhyme.
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.
I don't even really use rhyme so much as what one might call sound patterns between the closing words of lines.
And then there are some internal runs within the lines until the last line of each stanza.
So here are these two stanzas, which ideally I'd love to have them set to music.
They should. They should be sung. They shouldn't be spoken. But that's that's a dream.
Happy the life that lived, all untainted by taste of bad,
utter disaster pours on the family and the house shaken by gods from above just the
way the rolling wave stirred by a north wind storm moves sweeping above the gloom,
churning up from the bed of the ocean, the black silt cloud cloud on the headlands shore.
The ranks of the Breakers rule. From long ago, the pains of this dynasty pile upon pains constantly from the dead.
So the family cannot get freed. Always, some gold bears down so they never can break the chain.
Oedipus House was bright with the light of its latest route.
Now that has been cut through by the blade of the gods below, bloodied by foolish speech and by thoughts beyond reasons which.
Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for that.
It was wonderful to hear it.
You talked about, you know, the importance of qualities of the sound and hopefully getting them formed and even some some of these passions.
But it was wonderful to hear it.
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.
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.
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.
But also I'm not imbued with the scholarly context, of course.
I don't read ancient Greek and nor do I generally work with drama.
So I feel that on most levels, I come at some questions from these texts as an outsider.
But of course, I'm fascinated as a translator by the many micro decisions that go up to make
as it were a finished product and and a and a way of addressing the text.
So I hope that my thoughts here have coalesced really into much less a statement as it were or response.
But four and a half questions really, with some preamble coming from this outside perspective.
And you. And the first is the position of the translator in your introduction, your prologue.
Rather, you say that this version that you've done these versions might now be considered might once
have been considered rather free and might now be considered as rather close to the originals.
And that prompted me to think about, of course,
the context in which we translate and how much we position ourselves as translators, not only as a general translator,
but you're in a particular position, of course, which is the scholarly translator who sits between the academy under the general audience.
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.
But I wondered really whether you compare the translations with these other translations at all as it were out
there in the world of sort of public translations as it were not academic translations in the strictest sense,
in the strictest sense, but also how you respond to these translations,
which are in the world where the translator doesn't know the original language.
I also think it might be rather a benefit not to know the original language when translating.
I don't any longer do that. I have done that occasionally.
But of course, you're imbued with the context and your scholarly introduction notes allow you to be both a scholar and a translator.
In this edition, I'm I was fascinated the way how the two versions of yourself,
your two positions work together coalesced contradicted each other, perhaps on occasions.
So the position of the translator and the second area,
which really struck me in which I was fascinated by and which you alluded to in your introduction, is a question of the technical.
Of course, this is something every translates to has to face.
And you quote Joseph Brodsky, I think really helpfully saying that a translation is a search for an equivalent,
not for a substitute and hence your interest in the the first translation.
And I thoroughly agree. Hoagland, the great translator, the German poet and great translator, also from the great,
talked about finding a material that was foreign and analogies something that spoke to the spirit but which
acknowledged in its foreignness also that the moment of its its own being particularly was interested in the form.
Of course, because its verse, I'm so pleased you did verse.
I've just emerged from a huge first translation myself of a kind of epic, so I'm very thinking about this.
A great have been thinking about this. A great deal. M your choice not to go through iambic pentameter.
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,
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.
Varying line lengths in English.
There's a dynamism about them, but I'm interested in the decision not to go for something that we immediately recognised.
Consommateur. But to go for something that's in between slightly unsettled.
You talked about a post that's basically iambic. And also then these fantastic pieces and lyrical dialogues, which you mentioned there.
We got a snippet of one which all rhymes or use paradigm and a very contemporary.
It seems to me really contemporary in the use of the paradigm and that the soundscapes rather than close rhyme.
It leads to a related issue, which is that it struck me as a very Anglo-Saxon translation, really pacey.
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.
And I wondered if you that skewed to the dramatic presentation,
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.
And that leads to a kind of larger sense question about thoroughness.
And this raises questions of how far in the translation there is or how far it's domesticated into a into a recognisable form.
And as I've hinted,
and I think you wanted your translation sits somewhere between recognising the surprise of the foreign ness and allowing it to be there,
but also setting enough within the range of vocabulary that we feel comfortable, but then are constantly surprised.
Now, of course, this could be seen as against a backdrop of translation theory.
Shyamala talks about this various translators.
Translation theorists have sense. Do you deal with translation theory?
I say straightaway, I don't. I never do really, apart from teaching it.
But when I'm translating, it's me and the text.
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.
And in the in the text itself. And that brings me to a kind of next area, really.
You wrote really helpfully about the afterlives life of these plays and the reason
they're so profoundly important in modern culture have continued to be across the
century as being about that kind of mixture of the combination of the immediate and
the remote is what you call it with links with what we've just been talking about,
of course, but also that capacious enough in a sense for people to be called on time again to respond to them,
keep translating them and keep re thinking them.
Am I I suppose what interested me very much is in a few places, and just then you sort of said it again.
You talk about a 21st century perspective, for example, in Dian Ara,
the character herself has often been thought of, you explain, as unlikeable or deceitful or stupid.
But on the contrary, she strikes us very strongly from the 21st perspective centric perspective as understandable and forgivable and immediate.
And I was interested in whether you think of these characters as psychologically
complete and whole and whether Greek audiences would have thought in that way at all.
Um, Antigone two, of course, very powerfully, when Ismay says to her, you were in love with what's not possible.
It seemed to me in a profound character insight there.
So all these coherent characters and psychological question.
But secondly, again, what comes out in a 21st century reading?
I think psychology is a 21st century saying. I think we're interested in that, but also power the limits of power.
And it seems to me you really just nailed crayon so brilliantly with a very contemporary vocabulary,
things not happening on my watch or to the dilemmas of power.
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.
And the last production I saw of Antigone was Juliette Binoche,
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.
And it was seen as a very gendered and powerfully gendered intervention into the.
And I wondered where you stood, of course, Emily Wilson, when she translated, you know, very complicated,
where got hailed as the first female translator, which isn't true, but had a gendered intervention in the text.
And I was fascinated that you chosen these female texts and set them against the male text.
And so I'm wondering really whether there is a kind of female language at play here in these texts,
distinctive in your mind from male language in the earlier place, which you translated.
And finally, I noticed the words my asthma and sickness and illness and contagion come up again and again.
And I wondered whether that is something, of course, that reading now we particularly notice and seems to be incredibly striking to us.
So the context? And so perhaps there are more affordable questions.
I've noticed I've had more time, so I'm going to pass on to Professor Lucy Jackson,
who I'm sure will bring a more classical point of view to back on these wonderful texts.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Karen.
And thanks everyone for being here, thank you for inviting me to to talk about this.
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.
Bye bye, Oliver. And so to be have the opportunity to to kind of almost read back all of the learning that I
have had from him in wonderful ways with this latest translation of his is is a real treat.
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,
I think it is a really wonderful thing for these three women plays to be put together that great plays in their own right,
a great place to be featuring and to be returning to for some of us.
But they are really great place to have as a triptych, I think, as Oliver notes in in his introduction.
These are plays with women very much at their centre.
This is one of the one of the reasons why Greek tragedy is particularly popular nowadays because it has these fantastic, weighty female parts,
but also something that I particularly noticed in light of some some classical scholarship recently is they feature not just women,
but women being with other women as well. Sisters, mothers and daughters.
And and that, I think is particularly interesting and lends itself to some very immediate commentary.
In political theory, there's lots of collaboration going on now between classics and political theory and the idea of sisterhood.
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.
So this is this is not just a wonderful addition to have, but it's also very timely, I think.
And the way that these three plays talk to each other should provoke and prompt lots of interesting conversations.
What I like and again, this is something that Karen noted already is that's in these translations.
We don't shy away from the strangeness of Greek tragedy.
Again, this is something that Olive will know from his decades of scholarship on Greek tragedy.
But they do sit in in between a world of that's very familiar and is also mythical and very far away.
And I certainly really appreciate that nowadays this sort of and that these translations stand against an impulse,
maybe to make something very familiar for new audiences or old audiences to make it perhaps slightly
more easily to to easy to consume or completely domesticate to use the translation theory.
These are plays that's in the Greek to the end for their original audiences posed difficult questions.
They were they were something for us to get our brains around, as well as our mouths to get amounts mounts around them.
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,
not quite an alienation effect in the sort of Brechtian way,
but phrases that were both beautiful but out of the ordinary, as well as cramming me full of full of rage.
This, of course, also lends itself sometimes to sort of its looks like other echoes that couldn't be can be predicted.
This is a tiny question that I had, but one of the things that I'm taking, he says, is she.
She says that she's been cancelled from her own wedding. And nowadays, when we have all of this discourse about cancellation,
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,
where where am I now? So being able to exist in a in a kind of place of tension while reading these plays,
I think is it really wonderful and very valuable and something that that these translations excel in?
I came at this, as Karen said, from a classics perspective, but also from a teaching perspective.
And also, I'm a I'm a something of a choral nut myself.
I'm always interested in the chorus of Greek tragedy and barren strangeness,
so I thought I would look particularly at these translations from those two perspectives.
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.
To take one example, I this was set on a course that I taught last year the opening choral song in Diane Ara.
There's a very it almost has a very, very famous opening image of of a kind of starry night.
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
it's it turns up in a weird way in the Martin crimps cruel and tender as this sort of very important adjective,
a way of describing a mood almost at the beginning of the play.
And having read gazillions of translations of this opening ode in the last year,
I was so delighted to feel how fresh this version was and wasn't surprised at all.
But to use glimmering as a way of translating this. This very shifty words in the ancient Greek I thought was was just wonderful.
The whole that whole load, it felt fresh and crunchy at the same time.
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.
So that was a real, a real delight.
I thought delightful, too, was the way that the the language in the correlates really reverberates out to the rest of the play.
I like the chorus is often problematic for the readers and also for people, audiences for how to understand what they are.
I think Oliver's formulation of of what the choral role is that they kind of look at what is happening.
They get us to look at what is happening and take it on is absolutely right.
But I also then appreciate how these odes feed into the rest of the play and pick up images
or echoes that then complicate how we're meant to be thinking about what's going on.
So an image of a yoke in what's often referred to as the the ode to man again,
once fully translated ode to human, as I'm now going to refer to Oliver Ode to humans.
That image of a yoke picks up something that Koreans already said about what it is to govern,
that it's about joking people to your will, which is already kind of interesting way of framing things.
But when we hear it then echoed again in that in that famous ode,
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.
There seems to be a very clear message about how wonderful humans are of that wonderful invention.
And then at the end of the road, a question mark is raised about whether whether all of that is entirely good.
And that being brought into context, we carry on, I think is just fantastic as I knew I would.
I'm running beyond my time because there were so many wonderful things that I wanted to talk about in this.
But as a last point, again echoing something that Karen said, but also really drilling down into what is happening in the Greek meta,
that is something that is absolutely wonderfully rendered, not in trying to find exactly the same rhythm,
but finding this really pacey, pulse driven transverse translation for for some of these odes,
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.
Thinking about Greek tragedy is always fun, but it's even more fun when you have a good translation that adds layers to that
complication for what we can think about and get from these tragedies today.
So thank you very much, Oliver, for that, and I'll I'll hand back over to Karen.
Well, thank you so much, Lisa. I'm fascinated that.
There was a sort of stereo effect going on, and we both picked up some of the same things, but from very different perspectives.
And so now we have some time to bring back all of that and to ask them to respond to some of the things.
We've said this so much to talk about, but I think I would like to kick off.
But honestly, you can always kick off somewhere else.
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
sense of how you position yourself between and how consciously that was done between the strange and the familiar.
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,
but also to the fact of the translation itself, even down to the nitty gritty of the diverse forms.
I think both of us agreed very much. But it's a powerful PC and very immediate translation.
And I could hear it in people's mouths and I could hear people acting and singing this.
But also it holds that strangeness, and I'm very interested in how you achieve that.
How consciously achieved it, how you worked at it and the choices you made.
Yes. Well, thank you. I was very taken with your talking about micro translating because in a sense, you know, in in.
I found the notions of domestication of harmonisation very useful talking about other people's translations.
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.
You want to. Make it accessible, accessibility, you know, is is absolutely crucial.
So you can't translate in such a way that people have to look at footnotes the whole time.
But at the same time, you've got to be able to surprise. You've got to be able to shop.
You've got to be able to jolt.
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.
There are a lot of lot of monosyllables. And yet somehow, by using monosyllables and not not using the the.
When I think of as normal French language, well,
no polysyllabic language you can you can often actually get a get a jolt and and and waking up in that way.
So the fact is, I think that while I'm aware of a certain amount of translation Siri,
I think I go in for what a friend once called practise led theory rather than theory practise.
Afterwards, I can look at it, but it's actually in the natural process, which is terribly difficult to analyse.
It is a million micro choices. Every single word has to be a choice.
Even the smallest words.
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.
And you now have become part of links with the questions just come in from Rebecca Watts.
You will go formally to the audience in a second,
but I just noticed it because it was what I was thinking of, that you're part of the reception history now.
With this choice of words and future translators, will we'll look to that to take it as an authority,
take it as an intervention, take it as part of a history all over the place of the translator in this in this continuum?
And yes, well, I mean, it's about restored to even think that anybody is going to be reading it in 10 years time.
That alone? Twenty five years time. But it is interesting you you asked Karen right at the beginning.
Did I look at other people's translations? And the answer is no, actually.
I mean, of course, I know Seamus Heaney as translation. I know and constant translation.
It actually happened. I was giving a seminar on translation practise at A.
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.
And there I was taught, and then there in the audience was Anne Carson.
You can imagine that that was rather terrifying. And somebody asked, Well, do you look at other people's translations?
When are you constantly? I got other translations in front of you to compare.
And rather rather terrified. I said, Well, no, I don't.
And force the. And Carlson said she didn't, either. So, but so no, I don't.
I don't look at other people's translations as I go along.
So I'm not aware actually of when I'm sharing words with with other people and when I'm finding my own eye.
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,
I say it out loud to myself as I do it, but I'd like to hear other people saying it as well.
And I love Lucy is pointing out and cancelled,
which was actually I don't think that news of cancelled was so current when I translated it three or four years ago.
And once, though in and my translation of Ajax, what I asked, I use the word Twitter before then.
Fortunately, I was able to change it to something else because the word Twitter became so, so familiar in a different context.
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,
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.
I mean, I've all I've heard you talk about this. How you explain things to kind of melt down and settle in.
And and so certainly not looking at translations while you're doing it.
But to what extent do you feel that kind of what is it?
I'm not a geologist, the kind of the sediment that's been building up of of not just your work as a scholar,
but you're teaching of translation and all of the talks that happen at the AP.
That's where I remember the Martin crimp thing from one of the events that were done then.
Yes, he came. Yes, yes. And then how you well, that's interesting.
And I mean, Karen raised this point. To what extent being a scholar translator chain changes things?
And I think you're right that in some ways the the weight of scholarship is a drag sometimes.
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.
And I can't I can't get away from that. No, it's been my it's been my job.
But I think what you're saying, Lucy, is right that it's kind of sediment hit.
As as I translate, I don't think scholarship. I think I think sound, I think movement and I do think accessibility.
I want people to be able to hear it.
And understand it, while at the same time, as we've been saying all along,
that doesn't mean making it simple and making it easy and domesticating, in fact, in many ways the opposite.
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,
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,
and it creates a possibility of thinking about these texts together.
But I, as a translator, was more interested in whether you found links between them on the linguistic level,
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.
I'm very fascinated to hear in it for you what they perhaps started as and what they ended up has actually.
Yes. Yes, that's true. That's very interesting. And I thought, you know what you were asking about psychology was interesting.
I mean, it seems to me, you know what? I'm going to talk big here.
What tragedy does is draw its audience into the inside the skins of the people who are undergoing these terrible dilemmas and sufferings that
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,
but draws them into a kind of into their world and.
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,
somehow for some reason felt it important to get inside the skin of a women to get get get into the into a gendered,
a gendered way of seeing the world. And of course, that's what I've had to try to do.
I mean, you know, here I am the least fashionable translator, an elderly white male.
I mean, how bad can it get? And by that, but.
I found it. I found it personally actually quite a powerful experience to try and try and
understand the women of these tragedies and to make and to make them understandable.
But whether I've actually made lexical choices, it's it's the micro-level again, I think.
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.
But I haven't actually consciously sorted my vocabulary into into male ways of putting things in female ways, of putting out things.
It's not as schematic as that. No, I'm sure that's right.
I think translations never going to, because now we're coming up against a time when we open to the audience.
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?
Well, I mean, there was so much of both of you said such interesting things that a lot out of a longer conversation.
One thing that's certainly out of what Lucy said it.
It is true that actually, I found the translation of the choruses the most challenging and the most interesting,
and also the place where I've actually felt most creative.
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.
You know, you're not just following, you're also making.
And I found that the translation of the lyrics, of course, is not translated the other time as well.
That has has been the thing that I find most rewarding.
And I like to think that maybe it's also what readers and performers might find most rewarding.
Can I say straight away, I did get to say this thing?
Oh, brilliant. Well, we're unanimous, but I think it's time to bring the audience in.
And at this point, I think I can do that back to us, who will feel some more general questions.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you. What an amazing discussion so far.
This is great fun and it's really, really interesting and clearly, well, I've got my own questions,
but I'm here to put forward audience questions, at least to start with. So I will do.
And there's some great questions here to the I want to start actually with the second one because
it seems to me to pick up on the discussion that's already happened a bit between the four of you.
The question is from Keith and says the famous debate scene between Antigeni and his men parallels and possibly alludes
to a similar scene in what is calling the women of truck is where two sisters similarly argue about similar issues.
So again, it's about how much you see these plays in relation to each other.
Do you think of these scenes as in dialogue with each other when you're translating?
I don't think I do. Actually, it's an interesting question, and that is the pairs of sisters, for example,
that Lucy alluded to the sisters and antigeni in the pair of sisters in Electra.
But. On the whole, I think I think of each play as a container, a container, a container to play.
And one thing that I certainly haven't done is and I've deliberately tried to get away
from is this notion that people have of the Sophocles what they call the theman trilogy.
It's not a truth at all. The three quite separate plays, the two Oedipus plays and then take a knee and.
Actually, Oedipus, a colonist does does have a relationship to the other players, but but I think on the whole,
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.
And of course, you got to remember with Sophocles composed 120 plays, he composed 90 tragedies, probably.
And we got seven of them. Yeah, yeah. OK, thank you.
They have another question going in a slightly different direction, although there's quite a few questions asking this sort of scholarship.
How much do you need to know? How much do you not need to know sort of in that in that field?
And there's another question from Keith, which is the famous messenger speech at the beginning.
It's highly comical and almost periodic.
Do you are you conscious of rendering or basically, how do you make room for comedy and parody in a in a tragedy?
So this is the the god who in antiquity?
Yes. Or do you not think of it as comic and periodic?
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.
They were comedies. Yeah, but comedy is not the same as as comic in the sense of the word.
He does. He speaks to the different register quite differently, and I think I'd hope I put that out.
Yep, yep. But also, insofar as there are comic elements in in Greek tragedy, I think it's a hero school romance.
You know that that the dark is darker. Yeah.
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,
who says, Well, I'm very sorry and taken here, but at least I'm safe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Another question is about kind of the relationship between sort of knowing and not knowing Greek.
So Geeta Ramanathan has asked, Is it actually possible to translate these Greek facts without a scholarly background?
And asks, for example, how would you compare your translation with Hughes, for example, that uses version, in other words?
Because again, this picture with what Karen said, in the way you've answered this already in terms of the drag of scholarship,
but somebody has to tell you what the Greek means to begin with, don't they?
Well, I mean, obviously it can be done with Seamus Heaney when he translated both facilities and then.
And he said that he had three or four versions open in front of him and he
would kind of go between them and somehow distil it distilled it out of that.
And some of the best translations have been done by people who don't know the source language.
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.
So it is a different thing. But but.
As I say, when I when I translate, I don't I'm not thinking scholarly questions the whole time.
I have to worry about the text, of course. And are you thinking about it?
I mean, you're clearly thinking about English because one of the questions says is your work.
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?
And again, in a way you've already addressed that with the presence of Twitter or of cancel,
or as Karen said at the end of my asthma, sickness, contagion.
I mean, presumably, I mean, there's the question for all three of you, really.
How does working as a translator or thinking about foreign text make you think differently about English?
Yes. Well, I think I think I think it's healthy, it's healthy, it's quite it's quite positive,
actually the effect on my how one thinks of one's own language.
I think it enables you to find new ways of expression and and new forces and rhythms within it.
Not so much periodisation, I don't think. I mean, I don't think I ever.
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.
I mean, if you if you use an OK word in the sense you foreigners.
Yeah, Karen, you're nodding vigorously, aren't you to say more about how this relates to English?
Yeah, no, no. I think a lot about this. I think, you know, close engagement with a foreign language and changes your possibilities,
your brother or your own expression in English, it pathways or possibilities which didn't exist before.
And I think and I remember going to a production of all seven of history's Shakespeare's
history plays over one weekend and I came out talking and I I'm talking to be done.
But more seriously,
it opens your language to possibilities and it refines your language and it makes your own language richer and various commitments to make.
But I would also like to put in a plug for the scholarly translator.
I think, you know, there's a question at the moment so which I call the celebrity translation.
I don't mean to be derisive about Hughes or any or anybody,
but that triangulation that he talks about in terms of any with his his translations in front of him, that's in my head.
You've heard about this penumbra around every word, which is the scholarly background.
You brought it down, you know, into a kind of pebble of knowledge and various things in that word.
And then you don't have all the footnotes, you know, telling of what it's about. You're doing it already.
And so I, you know, praise for the scholarly translators, let's say.
Yep, yep. Yep. Maybe, Lucy, did you want to add to this?
Well, only to psychologically move away from language, but again, comment on a choice made in this translation,
particularly apparent in the diner, which is how to translate e.g. cries of pain.
That is something that often gets talked about in the classroom because the ancient Greek has these particular ways of communicating that with,
you know, pop idol and things and the conversations that I didn't have my students often
hilariously very buttoned up shy students who don't want to be enacting cries of pain.
I say, Well, what would you say if this was in English? What is the way that we communicate that?
And it does sort of take them a while to think, Well, yeah, how to being eaten alive by a poisoned cloak?
Well, what would I do? So, so in that sense,
it does open up more conversations about how how we express ourselves as well and really
an invitation to perform in a in a dry and dusty philology Greek translation class.
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.
Yes. I felt like some translations. And I think even that and and sometimes transliterated the Greek, the Greek prime.
Lo what the relationship between the phonetics of the of our transliteration and the and the cry,
as it might have been made by in the Greek theatre is it remains an open question.
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.
I felt. Actually, was better for the reader, for the listener to fill that in.
There are one or two more questions, but I'd like to ask one of my own if I may,
and it relates to the very first passage that you read and in fact, the last word of the first passage.
And that's the word mail. Yeah, 'cause it struck me as such an amazing decision to put mail at the end.
Can you explain it, please? Please explain the thinking that goes into that decision as opposed to mine or, you know, blow.
I mean, there's obviously another bloke, but mail is such a strong word to put there at the end of that little sequence.
Well, thank you, overdramatising that I mean, it seems to me a real jolt, exactly the same response I had to ring.
My interest is that there I did also have another passage in mind actually a passage in Europe of these policies where the nurses,
the nurse says to the Federer says to Federer uses the Greek word is the word for man.
And so says I'll be calling his.
I'll be called. [INAUDIBLE] be called my husband, but she'll be called his.
No, let me get this right. [INAUDIBLE] be a husband.
[INAUDIBLE] be called my husband, but [INAUDIBLE] be called her. Man, but I thought that it was more explicitly sexual than that.
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.
So yes, I made a very deliberate if you like, almost a sexualization of that.
And I think there is more erotic and more more more more explicit evocation
of the sexual dimension in Dannemora than in almost any other Greek tragedy.
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,
whereby in a sense the obvious thing to have done would have been and said, man,
which then puts this in the kind of blues world of, you know, I've lost my man to, et cetera.
And but then lose is precisely so.
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.
But it's yeah, but it was a jolt for me.
Karen, you said as well for you? Yeah. Oh, absolutely not.
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.
Just right. You have that and you have a couple of other things.
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.
So I loved it, and I am really interested that there is a background to it and that proves what I'm saying
about the scholarly background and Slater's insight just coalescing for that brilliant moment.
Yep. Yep, yep. The the sorry, there's one more little question here, I've lost it now, where is it?
Dum dum dum. It's not a little question. Oh yes, here we. Because it's in the other bit of the trap.
It's about the sacred and the different languages of the sacred and different in different languages.
So Rebecca says, how does it feel?
Basically, to recreate or co-create the religious dimension of Greek tragedy?
To open a question is that. Yeah. I mean, that's really that's really difficult because, you know, I've seen say with.
She.
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,
whether in paradise or whether in [INAUDIBLE] or whatever.
At any rate, some kind of awful God's love or whatever an afterlife that is somehow more important than this life,
which is very definitely not the Greek way of of seeing things of seeing eschatology.
So it's it's somewhat something where the equivalence that Karen was talking about is very, very hard to capture.
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.
There's a danger, even in the talk of what's going to happen after death in the Antigone.
And also, even with things like the word altar, I always remember Tony Harrison in his restored translation translates altar as God stone,
he deliberately says, because he doesn't want to use the word altar because of him, because of its its churchy resonance.
That's the kind of micro choice that one's making all the time in translating from from another culture.
But that's not just we're not just talking about ancient Greek culture by any means.
Mm-Hmm. It's a very interesting and difficult area.
Yeah. Somebody is talking about from other countries.
Rebecca, again, is that man and husband and human are also issues in translating Genesis from the Hebrew.
In other words,
these are not obviously these are not questions specific to Greek transposition or equivalents or so on so much as we want to, actually.
Cameron was asking about about gender and don't ask Emily Wilson and so on.
It is interesting how I mean the Greek word anthropol. is not gendered.
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.
It's not. It's not only is it about humans and not about men, but it is also not an ode to them.
Actually, it's an ode about them, about human achievement and how it can go right and how it can go wrong.
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.
And this and that and bringing out like in the Oedipus this, the generations of humans always translate the generations of men.
Yeah, yeah. One last thing because we've just about run out of time.
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.
I wonder if you have a particular kind of music in mind, in other words, that we talking and I do want to say,
are there particular musical contemporary musical forms or is there is there a notional music that you hear when you're translating this?
No. Well, I don't know if I do accept. The the the words must be audible.
I think that's terribly important, there was hope there was a musical version done of Seamus Heaney is antigeni and
actually I sat next to him in the Globe Theatre in London when it was first performed,
you couldn't hear the words and that must be absolutely agonising for him.
So if you remember that, perhaps if if you've got Greek singing in the streets in 5th century Athens,
that the chances are that they're singing the latest thing they heard in the tragedy the other week,
or that Athenian prisoners in Sicily won that one their freedom by being able to
sing that remember the songs of Europe it is and sing them to the to their captors.
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.
Mm-Hmm. That's as far as I'd go. Otherwise, I hand it over to the composer.
You can find the composer and the choreographer, then I would be happy.
OK, well, maybe that's our next task. Okay.
I think we've got to wrap it up there. But before we do, I should just like to say thank you.
First of all, to both Lucy and Karen for terrifically interesting, engaged, insightful, informative responses to all of his work.
But most of all goes to Oliver for the work, for the tremendous energy that you're bringing to this.
And also, as Karen says, you know the skill of the scholar,
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.
Thank you also to everyone for the questions and for coming along.
And my last thing to say is join us in a couple of weeks time on March the 3rd,
when we'll be with Shashi Dasgupta talking about Charles Dickens and the properties of fiction.
Our guests have disappeared. Thank you, everyone. See you next time.
Bye. Thank you. Then.