Modern playwrights, from Shakespeare on, have often given different kinds of language to different kinds of speakers. British writers, in particular, have indicated social class or place of origin by the use of dialect. Such differentiation is not entirely absent in ancient Greek theater, but tragic poets tend to give all of their characters the same fairly formal and poetic diction. Characters are differentiated in more subtle ways than in English. For example, Antigone’s lines are more heavily enjambed than Ismene’s; that is, Antigone spills over at the end of one line and plunges into the beginning of the next more often than her sister does. This is a formal way of marking the emotional difference between the two sisters.
Some differences show in the content of speeches. In the same play, Haemon’s and Creon’s arguments are equally platitudinous, full of generalizing cliches, and this differentiates both men from the passionate and peculiar reasoning of Antigone. These subtleties are hard to translate; a Greek platitude may seem brilliantly original in English, and spillover lines hardly catch our attention at all.
As for social class, keep in mind that tragic poets are ardent supporters of democracy, and they are writing for an audience that does not believe that people are better if they come from a higher or wealthier social class. The watchman in Antigone is brilliant, well educated, and every inch a common man. He does not speak like a yokel, and yet some translations make him do so. His style, in fact, is mock-heroic, and he uses it to dance verbal rings around the ponderous mind of the king. The paidagOgos (tutor) in Sophocles’ Electra is either a slave or a servant, yet he has educated Orestes, and he speaks in the language of someone who is highly educated, even, sometimes, pedantic.
Some speakers in ancient tragedy seem to have no character at all. Messengers, when they speak as messengers, rarely have any individual character or personality. They speak like epic poets (see Halleran, chapter 11 in this volume), but they do not do this in mockery (as the watchman does when he banters with Creon). Somewhere in the ancestry of Greek tragedy lies the narrative poetry of epic, and this legacy is clear in the messenger speeches. These are gripping narratives, with the emphasis usually on the story being told, rather than on the quality of the teller.
Choruses are usually supposed to represent some group that is affected by the action of the play, but they are rarely consistently written in character. They may represent the opinions of the people of Athens, even when the play is set somewhere else. The chorus in Bacchae represents foreign women from Asia, but they speak for the sentiments of democratic Athens. Sometimes a chorus seems to speak directly for the playwright during one ode, like the Antigone passage that begins ‘‘Many wonders, many terrors’’ (332). Where a play in English would try to create a definite character for the chorus, for the benefit of the actors, a faithful translator of the Greek must usually be content with the faceless beauty of poetry.
Hyperbaton
The opening lines of Sophocles’ Electra are impossible. Orestes’ tutor is addressing the young man he has cared for and trained since childhood:
O, of commanding the army at Troy, once,
Of Agamemnon, son!
Orestes knows who his father is and what he did. Why is the tutor telling him these familiar truths? And why is he doing it in such a contorted way? Different readers may come to different conclusions, but here are mine.
The explanation for the content of the opener is easy to grasp. The tutor is identifying the young man to the audience, so the lines have a role in exposition. But this is not the full explanation. Sophocles has an eye on dramatic context, as well as on the audience, and in the context of this scene the tutor is reminding Orestes of his duty as a son of the murdered Agamemnon, a duty sharpened by his father’s legacy of greatness.
The contortion is beautiful and suggests an additional meaning. Ancient Greek allows a structure that is nonsense in English. The participle ‘‘commanding’’ would be a noun phrase in English, ‘‘the man who commanded.’’ And because each word has an ending that shows its role in the sentence, Greek readers can see that ‘‘O’’ belongs to ‘‘son’’ and that this one phrase, ‘‘O son,’’ is cut open in order to embrace a reference to the boy’s father. And the reference to the boy’s father is also split open: ‘‘Of commanding the army, Agamemnon’’ is opened to make room for ‘‘at Troy, once.’’ This device of opening one phrase to accept another is common in both Greek and Latin poetry; it is known as hyperbaton - overleaping. The meaning leaps from ‘‘O’’ at the beginning of the sentence to ‘‘son’’ at the end. Greek makes this overleaping easy to follow by marking these two words with the same grammatical case, the vocative (used only for addressing someone). But English does not mark cases so clearly. A translation that preserved the order of ideas in good English would look like this:
My boy, your father commanded the army at Troy;
You are Agamemnon’s son.
To do this, I have had to alter the syntax and make explicit that the speaker is reminding Orestes of his father’s importance - not because the boy could forget, but because the tutor wants to motivate him to do great deeds. I have also had to add the word ‘‘father,’’ which is not explicit in the Greek, and to drop the word ‘‘once’’ which we would not use in this context, and which would mar the concision of the lines. The following would be closer to the grammar (or syntax) of the original:
O son of Agamemnon, who once commanded the army at Troy!
But I cannot imagine anyone saying this in English, especially on stage in a play. Worse, it loses the beautiful embracing of the original, the surrounding of the father by the son. The word order matters because it represents in the first two lines one of the main themes of the play, that the status of the dead father is now entirely in the hands of the son. Had the poet reversed the order, we would have these lines, which suggest a different deeper meaning:
O of Agamemnon the son, of him who once commanded the army at Troy!
Here the son is obscured, and not ennobled, by the presence of a reference to his father. Sophocles could have done it either way. He is not showing off his verbal technique here; he is doing something brilliant with the tools he has. Greek offers the poet many elegant tools that a translator into English cannot use. But, at a small cost to grammar, a translator may preserve the beauty of word order. Often, as here, word order is the most important feature of a passage.
World History
