A stinging desire, like a poisoned fly, bites at you even to the mind's dark root - dramatic classical temptations

As the year begins, I have been beset on all sides by temptation.  See Emily All Afternoon’s delight with Anne Carson’s brilliantly conceived hybrid Oresteia.  Or the entire premise of the Lifetime Reader’s up-and-running Lifetime Reading Plan. Or obooki finding contemporary relevance in Aristophanes.  Hugo, Trollope, feh - I want to read Greek plays!

So I am, one a day.  Aeschylus, so far, the tricky ones.  Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants.  Tricky because they are fragments of trilogies, tricky because certain parts are so darn weird.  The great climax of Seven Against Thebes is the revelation of the embossment on a shield.  Undramatic, painfully so, unless the reader can work his way into the spirit of the thing, in which case the scene becomes a shocking protest against fate, or an embrace of doom.

Imagine the costumes, the music, the staging, the huge masks, the fishcake vendors.  Imagine Aeschylus himself standing behind the giant Prometheus puppet, daring Zeus to blast him to pieces and sic an eagle on his liver.  Imagine the entry of the dazzling chorus of Aristophanes’ birds on that spring night in 414 BC.  Wild.

Maybe I’ll shadow the Lifetime Reader and reread ‘em all.  I’ve always thought they would make a perfectly reasonable blog project.  Aeschylus: 7, Sophocles: 7, Euripides: 18, Aristophanes: 11, Menander: 1.  Total: 44 plays, many quite short.  One a week for 44 weeks.  Or one a year for 44 years.  Well worth doing, either way.

The plays can be read profitably in any order, but the chronology is meaningful.  Aeschylus is near the actual beginning of the dramatic tradition, a radical innovator in a new form.  Sophocles perfects his innovations, and makes new ones.  Euripides is the decadent end of the tradition, mocking and attacking his audience, his predecessors, Homer, Athens.  Sometimes, as in the derisively jolly Helen or the existentialist nightmare Orestes, he seems to be trying to destroy the form, to destroy tragedy.  Soon after, Aristophanes mocks them all again, even staging a debate between the deceased Aeschylus and Euripides.  Then the comic tradition shifts, too, into the flashy, shallow fun of the New Comedy.  And then, poof, it’s all gone.  Mummy dust.

Euripides was a younger contemporary of the long-lived Sophocles, so the path I laid out is fanciful, but boy, does it seem right.  I acknowledge the ritual power of Aeschylus and the undeniable perfection of Sophocles, of Oedipus the King, but it’s Euripides I really love, perhaps because he’s so cantankerous, so willfully odd, even, at times, self-destructive.  Not that Sophocles and Aeschylus, Oedipus at Colonus or Prometheus Bound are not plenty odd.  But it’s Euripides who somehow leads me to Samuel Beckett.

Which translations are good?  So many are good.  The old University of Chicago Press series is excellent, thirty-two tragedies in nine volumes, but so are the poet\classicist collaborations of the Oxford University Press line.  William Arrowsmith was particularly good with Aristophanes and Euripides.  I’ve read bits of the Ted Hughes’ Aeschylus, suitably stark and highly promising, as is the Euripides of Anne Carson.  Here’s an odd one – try to find the poet H.D.’s version of Ion, a psychologically intense, poetically Modernist Euripides.  She has a Hippolytus, too, that I haven’t read.  As Kenneth Rexroth advises about Chinese poetry in translation, one should read as many different translators as possible.  The plays are so rich, and so suggestive of possibilities.  So tempting.

Title quotation from Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes, tr. Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon, Oxford University Press, 1973.