"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket."—Robert Brustein, The New Republic
"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody."—Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation
"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase."—Times Education Supplement
"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead."—Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian
"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional."—Commonweal
"Grene is one of the great translators."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times
"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet."—Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review
A Comment on Sophocles' Antigone I generally do not review classics, because I find it impossible to adequately review a genuine classic with the necessary brevity. However, I plan on giving my opinion at some point on books with conflicting Amazon reviews, and it occured to me that readers ought to have a touchstone by which to assess my credibility. There are two types of books which a wide swath of readers may be presumed to have read and so may function as touchstones: popular bestsellers and classics. I made a choice from the latter category.
I note at the outset that, as my title indicates, this is *NOT* a review of Sophocles' Theban triology. It is not even a review of Antigone in its entirety. That review awaits someone with greater insight and eloquence than me to write it. I post this review on this page b/c this is the translation I used.
It is often said that the drama of Antigone consists in the conflict of divine law against human law, or, put in contemporary terms, of natural law against positive law. I believe that interpretation is mistaken. To hold to that interpretation is to see the dispute as Antigone sees it and not as Creon sees it. For various historical reasons, Creon's position no longer seems as plausible to us as it did to Sophocles' audience. It must suffice to mention only one reason here: the divine foundation of the city has lost its self-evidence for us. "We must not lose sight of the fact that, among the ancients, what formed the bond of every society was a worship ... the city was the collective group of those who had the same protecting deities" (Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City).
Creon is not a positivist b/c he does not claim that the law is simply whatever he says it is; he is not Louis XIV. The first words we hear from him eulogize the gods as the guardians of the city (lines 179-81). His basic claim is that in proving traitor to his city Polyneices also proved traitor to the city's gods, and it is not proper that the enemy of the gods be granted burial rites (lines 217-29). When Creon learns that the corpse has been buried against his decree and the Chorus asks if this might be the work of the gods, Creon retorts that it is impossible that the gods could show such consideration for one of their enemies (lines 312-20). Creon, then, is not less pious than Antigone, but his piety is essentially political whereas Antigone's is not. Antigone, of course, sees herself as obeying divine law, and Creon's decree as violative of that law. But to understand the play Antigone, one must understand more than the character Antigone; one must understand the playwrite Sophocles.
Given the contemporary manner of highlighting the basic conflict of the play, I believe one gets closer to the heart of Antigone (the play) if one shifts the focus away from the conflict b/t Creon and Antigone, toward their shared agreement. They share a passionate concern to obey the gods' wills, i.e., divine law. Creon's arguments for the priority of the city anticipate Aristotle's beginning to the Politics: the whole is prior to the part and so the city is prior to both the household and each individual. They are both fighting to do what each perceives to be his or her duty; for both of them, their understanding of who they are is intimately bound up with their understanding of the divine prescriptions. In short, they both, in different ways of course, accept the judgment formulated by Aristotle: "For just as man is the best of the animals when completed, when separated from law and adjudication he is the worst of all." The problem of Antigone, if I had to state it in one sentence, then boils down to the question, What does the law require?
A GREAT greak dramatist but equal to the others Sophocles is really one of the Greatest dramatists of all time, but equal to the others since he doesn't have the psychological penetration of Euripides
Translations Researching translations is never an easy task, and in this case, where you'll have to search on Amazon for the title and the translator to find what you want, it's particularly difficult.
Here's what I've found by comparing several editions:
1. David Grene translation: Seems to be accurate, yet not unwieldy as such. My pick. Language is used precisely, but not to the point where it's barely in English.
2. Fitts/Fitzgerald translation: Excellent as well, though a little less smooth than the Grene one. Certainly not a bad pick.
3. Fagles translation: Beautiful. Not accurate. If you are looking for the smoothest English version, there's no doubt that this is it. That said, because he is looser with the translation, some ideas might be lost. For instance, in Antigone, in the beginning, Antigone discusses how law compels her to bury her brother despite Creon's edict. In Fagles, the "law" concept is lost in "military honors" when discussing the burial of Eteocles. This whole notion of obeying positive law or natural law is very important, but you wouldn't know it from Fagles. In Grene, for example, it is translated to "lawful rites."
4. Gibbons and Segal: Looks great, but right now the book has only Antigone (and not the rest of the trilogy) and costs almost 3x as much. I'll pass. But, from a cursory review, I'm impressed with their work.
5. MacDonald: This edition received some good write-ups, but I wasn't able to do a direct passage-to-passage comparison.
6. Woodruff: NO, NO, NO. Just NO. It's so colloquial it makes me gag. Very accessible, but the modernization of the language is just so extreme as to make it almost laughable. You don't get any sense of the power of language in the play. You just get the story. If you want this to be an easy read, then get Fagles, not this.
7. Kitto: Looks good, though not particularly compelling over either Grene or Fitzgerald (or Gibbons if I wanted to pay so much more).
8. Roche: Practically unreadable the English is so convoluted. Might be the most literal translation, but what's the point unless you are learning Greek and want such a direct translation.
9. Taylor: Way too wordy. Might be more literal, but again, why?
Hope this all helps. Translations can make or break the accessibility of literature. Pick wisely.
Unalterable Course I read the story of Oedipus in high school and several times since. While I find the twists of the story, especially the riddle of the Sphinx fascinating. (A very original puzzle.) I also found it a litte disturbing. I've never cared for the idea that a person's destiny is fixed and unavoidable. The fact that the steps Oedipus took to foil the prophecy, actually placed him on the direct path to fulfilling it was scary. It makes one wonder: Do we really have control over our lives, or are we, as Shakespear put it, actors in someone's grand play? It is a very sad and tragic story. Oedipus was hopelessly caught in a terrible snare. Definitely NOT upbeat. However,in my opinion, any story that can create positive thought and conversation on the inner workings of life is worth reading.
Good For an Introduction to Sophocles The Lattimore/Grene translations of Sophocles balance ease of reading with closeness to the original Greek text nicely. Hugh-Lloyd Jones's translation, which can be found in the Loeb edition of Sophocles's tragedies, is unquestionably superior at rendering the original Greek text, but it can come across as archaic and confusing to high school students or those unversed in Greek literature. Lattimore and Grene, unlike many modern translators, DO feel that they owe more to their readers than the loosest gist of the original text, and they deliver it. All that said, I would advise readers to be cautious of these translations for the following reasons. First, the plays are presented in the chronological order according to the myths they portray - not in the order in which Sophocles wrote them. In other words, even though Antigone was one of the first plays Sophocles produced and Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously, they are presented in order of their dramatic events. This means that they are very likely translated without regard for any evolution of Sophocles's thought or any implicit commentary the poet might have made upon the works of his own youth. Second, in his introduction, Grene states that he sees in Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles's clumsy attempt to cover over the inconsistencies of his Theban Cycle. While this is certainly not all Grene sees in Oedipus at Colonus, the judgement of anyone who takes so irreverent and shallow a view of the last work of the most technically savvy tragedian of the classic age must be called into question. In summary: Buy this book, read it, enjoy it, but if you're going to write an important paper on Sophocles, look at his work in the Greek, or at least in the Lloyd-Jones translation of the Loeb edition.
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