Oresteia: A Norton Critical Edition

by Aeschylus, Joshua Billings (Editor), Oliver Taplin (Translator)

Overview

“This vivid and accessible translation captures the drama of Aeschylus’ poetry and the excitement of the action in performance.” —VICTORIA WOHL, University of Toronto

“This critical edition provides a lavish and fulsome picture of ancient Greek tragedy’s most significant surviving document.” —JOHANNA HANINK, Brown University

Ranked #2 Translation of 2018 by Open Letters Review

This Norton Critical Edition includes:         

• Oliver Taplin’s new translation of the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek tragedy—a trilogy of revenge and murder within the royal family of Argos—with explanatory annotations by the editors.       
• Ancient backgrounds and responses from Homer, Stesichorus, Pindar, Euripides, and Sophocles. ·        
• Fourteen wide-ranging critical essays on the Oresteia, from G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche to Oliver Taplin and Peter Wilson.     
• A Glossary of Technical Terms and Proper Names and a Selected Bibliography.

About the Series  

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393923285
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joshua Billings is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is the author of Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy.

Oliver Taplin is emeritus professor of classics at the University of Oxford. His books range from The Stagecraft of Aeschylus to Pots & Plays. He has recently published translations of Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Other Tragedies.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

(Outside the royal palace at Argos.)

WATCHMAN

You Gods in heaven—
You have watched me here on this tower
All night, every night for twelve months,
Thirteen moons—
Tethered on the roof of this palace
Like a dog.
It is time to release me.
I've stared long enough into this darkness
For what never emerges.
I'm tired of the constellations—
That glittering parade of lofty rulers
Night after night a little bit earlier
Withholding the thing I wait for—
Slow as torture.
And the moon, coming and going—
Wearisome, like watching the sea
From a deathbed. Like watching the tide
In its prison yard, with its two turns
In out in out.
I'm sick of the heavens, sick of the darkness.
The one light I wait for never comes.
Maybe it never will come—
A beacon-flare that leaps from peak to peak
Bringing the news from Troy—
'Victory! After ten years, Victory!'
The one word that Clytemnestra prays for.
Queen Clytemnestra — who wears
A man's heart in a woman's body,
A man's dreadful will in the scabbard of her body
Like a polished blade. A hidden blade.
Clytemnestra reigns over fear.
I get up sodden with dew.
I walk about, to shift my aches.
I lie down — the aches harden worse.
No dreams. No sleep. Only fear—
Fear like a solid lump of indigestion
Here, high in my belly — a seething.
Singing's good forfear
But when I try to sing — weeping comes.
I weep. There's no keeping it down.
Everything's changed in this palace.
The old days,
The rightful King, order, safety, splendour,
A splendour that lifted the heart—
All gone.
You Gods,
Release me.
Let that flame come leaping out of the East
To release me.
Where did that light come from? In pitch darkness
That point — that's new.
Down there, near what must be the skyline,
In the right place! It just appeared!
A flickering point. And getting bigger. A fire!
The beacon!
Tell the Queen—
It's the beacon.
It's flaring up! It's shaking its horns.
Troy has fallen.
The King is coming home.
Agamemnon is coming. Troy has fallen!
Now the Queen can rejoice
And I'll be the first to dance — Troy has fallen.
The gods have blessed our master.
They've blessed me too.
They've made me the bearer of the news.
Only let them bring the King home safely.
Let me prostrate myself at his feet
And then — what follows,
Better not think about it.
Only the foundations of this house
Can tell that story. Yes,
The tongue that could find
The words for what follows — that tongue
Would have to lift this house's foundations.
Those who know too much, as I do, about this house,
Let their tongue lie still — squashed flat.
Under the foundations.

(Cry of triumph from Clytemnestra inside palace. She
enters: casts incense on altars, etc. Enter Elders of Argos:
the Chorus. Dawn.)

CHORUS

Ten years ago
The sons of Atreus,
Menelaus and Agamemnon,
Both divine Kings,
Assembled a thousand ships
Crammed with the youth of Hellas
And sailed across the sea to punish Priam.

Two brothers, ravenous for war,
Their hunger for war
Went up
Like the screaming
Of eagles, two eagles in agony
Over a crag
Where their nest has been robbed-
Beating the air
With broad oars,
Climbing the currents
They bewail, in helpless fury,
Their lost labours.
Their brood gone,
They lament
Their vigilance that failed.
Anguish tears their throats.
They scream it in heaven — and in heaven
Some god hears it—
Zeus or Pan
Or Apollo hears
And pities it,
And sends a remorseless fury
To hunt the culprit down
And pluck the guilt from his bowels.

So now Zeus — protector
Of the sacred trust
Between the guest and the host—
Sends the two sons of Atreus
To rip the boasting tongue
From between the lips of Paris
And Helen from his bed.
Greece and Troy with bellowing effort
Lock their limbs
In that accursed marriage, and labour
At the killing.
Spear-shafts splinter
In twisting bodies,
Strong men kneel
In their own blood
Under weights of darkness
And what is happening
Cannot be otherwise.
Cannot not happen.
Fate holds every man
Of these two embattled armies
By the scruff of the neck
And jams his face, helpless,
Into what has to happen.
Priam pours libations
To lubricate the favour of the heavens
In vain.
He burns perfumed offerings on altars
To soften their pity
In vain.
The gods above and the gods below
Ignore him.
No bribes,
Nothing that passes under the roof of a temple
Or under the roof of the mouth,
Can appease heaven's anger
Or deflect its aim.
We were too old.
Second childhood
Propped on sticks
Kept us out of the battle.
We stayed here
On the scrap heap
Playing with our dreams,
The playthings of dreams.

(Chorus sees Clytemnestra.)

Queen Clytemnestra,
What has happened?
What have you heard?
Why have you called for a sacrifice
Throughout Argos—
Every altar
Of every god
Is ablaze—
From the kitchen-shrines of hearth-goblins
To the high temple of Zeus, god of the summits.
Fortunes in rich oil
Go up in smoke
Smudging the dawn.
Cherished beasts
Drop to their knees
In a flood of blood.
What has happened?
What is happening?
Are we right
To smell hope
In all this?
Or has a worse fear come? Tell us.
Do all these fiery tongues,
These forked and horned offerings,
Declare good news or the opposite? Tell us.
Do they consume the evil of the past
And the dread of what is to come—
All these fears that sicken us—
Or do they thicken the air with something worse?

I am the man to tell this tale.
Old age
Takes away everything
Except a few words the gods have tested,
For the eye
That opens towards the grave
Sees the core of things and is prophetic.
As our two Kings set out,
As their floating forest of spears
Lifted anchor,
Two birds,
Hook-beaked, big-winged birds,
A black bird and a white bird,
Sailed over
On the right — on the right!
Good fortune!
The whole army cheered the good omen—
Victory!

Then those two birds,
The black bird and the white bird,
Flushed and drove and killed
A hare heavy with her twins.
The whole army
Saw them kill the pregnant hare. They saw
The black bird and the white bird
That had brought them promise of victory
Rip the mother's womb and drag from it
The living unborn tenants—
The whole army watched from start to finish
That murder of the unborn.
If evil is in this wind, let it blow over ...

(Continues...)

Table of Contents

	Foreword	7
	Acknowledgements	11
	A Reading of 'The Oresteia': The Serpent and the Eagle	13
	Agamemnon	99
	The Libation Bearers	173
	The Eumenides	227
	The Genealogy of Orestes	279
	Select Bibliography	281
	Notes	285
	Agamemnon	285
	The Libation Bearers	305
	The Eumenides	317
	Glossary	331

Editorial Reviews

These two new additions to Oxford's "Greek Tragedy in New Translations" series only add to the luster of the previous releases. Each is firmly packed with insightful introductions, comprehensive and numbered notes, glossaries, and up-to-date bibliographies (the plays' texts take up about half of each volume). The collaboration of poet and scholar in each volume produces a language that is easy to read and easy to speak (compare, for instance, the Watchman's first lines in Shapiro and Burian's Agamemnon with those in Lattimore's 1947 translation). Each volume's introduction presents the play's action and themes with some detail. The translators' notes describe the linguistic twists and turns involved in rendering the text into a modern poetic language. Both volumes are enthusiastically recommended for academic libraries, theater groups, and theater departments.-Larry Schwartz, Minnesota State Univ., Moorhead Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Translators Grene and O'Flaherty present a modern translation of the three plays composing the Oresteia and, with the assistance of director Nicholas Rudall, an abridged stage adaptation which transforms the Oresteia into an effective modern stage play. Includes introductory material. Cloth edition ($32.50). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Though it's tempting to imagine the late English poet laureate's long tortured relationship with the image of (his wife) feminist heroine Sylvia Plath as its subtext, this vivid free-verse translation of Aeschylus' dark and bloody tragic trilogy (comprising Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides) more properly evinces Hughes's wide range of interests and mastery of classic literatures. His nearly conversational rhythms produce an arresting mixture of colloquialism and formality, enlivened by strong imagery (as in the matricidal Orestes' declaration that "This house has been the goblet / That the demon of homicide, unquenchable, / Has loved to drain"), and only infrequently weakened by astonishing woodenness—as in Clytemnestra's cool reply to the Chorus who lament her murder of her husband: "You think I'm an irresponsible woman? / You are making a mistake"). Perhaps not the ultimate "acting edition" it claims to be, but, still, an essential further installment in the always interesting oeuvre of a gifted poet who was also a diligent scholar.

Kirkus Reviews

Witty, brash and steeped in blood . . . this is a big and boisterous account packed with sly wit and the sort of brash lines that wouldn't be out of place in a gangster film.

Evening Standard

brilliantly evokes the sheer strangeness and horror of the play. Rory Mullarkey's translation follows the Aeschylean original faithfully and his lyrics make some attempts to evoke the percussive muscularity of the choruses. . . . I haven't seen anything quite as sickening or as stately as this version of these plays.

Spectator

Rory Mullarkey's adaptation of these three Aeschylus plays . . . is undertaken with a spirit it would be hard to trump. . . . Mullarkey has adapted Aeschylus in a way that never fudges, conceals or distances.

Observer

Peter Meineck's new rendition of the Oresteia is that rare and wonderful thing: a text accessible to the Greekless audience while still preserving the vocabulary of Aeschylus. Those of us who have seen Peter Meineck's performances have long marveled at his ability to turn Greek into clear English, how he does not do 'versions' of the plays, how he does not rewrite the ancients into modern jargon (even his comedies maintain more Aristophanic text than is usual). Here lines that students have always needed explicated stand clear. . . . Helene Foley has provided a fine introduction for this translation. Introduction and translation together provide an exciting text, one that should be widely read, widely used. -Karelisa Hartigan, University of Florida, in The Classical Outlook

. . . a translation for the stage by an experienced man of the theater. Its virtues are very real, and, though Meineck makes them seem easy, very hard to achieve. The idiom is contemporary without yielding to the siren song of gimmicky updating; it manages to be clear without betraying Aeschylus' complexity or sacrificing his intricate imagery. What makes it effective on stage makes it work on the page, too. With the added guidance of Helene Foley's characteristically intelligent Introduction and Meineck's own crisp annotation and full stage directions, this translation offers the most approachable and in many ways most communicative Oresteia now available. It will be the Oresteia of choice for many teachers and their students, as well as for readers interested in what makes Greek tragedy great theater. -Peter Burian, Duke University

From the Publisher