Antigone and Other Tragedies: Antigone, Deianeira, Electra

by Sophocles, Oliver Taplin (Translator)

Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action.

Antigone's obsession with the dead, Creon's crushing inflexibility, Deianeira's jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra's obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination... Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of music and poetry. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation.

Genres: Classics, Plays

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2022

About the author

Sophocles (497/496 BC-406/405 BC), (Greek: Σοφοκλής ; German: Sophokles , Russian: Софокл , French: Sophocle ) was an ancient Greek tragedian, known as one of three from whom at least one play has survived in full. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in thirty competitions, won twenty-four, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won thirteen competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles; Euripides won four.
The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, though each was part of a different tetralogy (the other members of which are now lost). Sophocles influenced the development of drama, most importantly by adding a third actor (attributed to Sophocles by Aristotle; to Aeschylus by Themistius), thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights.

Reviews

[MxMorganic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a high-quality translation of three very compelling plays. The plays are absolutely worth a read, and I think these translations are a great way to do so. I’d also encourage you to take Taplin’s suggestion to read his translations out loud, if only under your breath. In his Foreword, he describes his translation as an “attempt to infuse some inherent musicality and colour into the language” (pg. vii), and I think he largely succeeds.

That said, I have enough other thoughts about these translations that I wanted to follow up the above (aka the important part) with a fuller, more complicated review. If you’re debating how you’d like to read Sophocles in translation, hopefully you’ll find this helpful!

First, I found Taplin’s translator’s note and introductions – both to the volume as a whole, and to each individual play – very illuminating. He describes tragedies as a way to “make some kind of sense out of human suffering” (pg. xii). I’d never thought about approaching tragedies from that angle, so I found this a very compelling take generally, but I also found reading Sophocles’ plays specifically through this lens to be quite rewarding. In general, Taplin does an excellent job of contextualizing these plays within their own time, within classical scholarship, and within modern reception. As he does so, he consistently presents multiple sides of debated material, while still taking clear, definitive stances on the matters.

The translations themselves are excellent, although not perfect. I’m actually going to review them in reverse order to illustrate this. Taplin’s Electra is largely an excellent translation, even in spite of my quibbles, but being the last play in the volume, it’s easier to notice the little things which have added up over time. The whole volume features an unfortunate number of typographical errors – at no point is anything so bad as to impede understanding, but there were enough misspelled words and commas where there should have been periods that it stuck with me. This play also doubles down on a choice I find rather questionable, which is that Taplin more than once uses the abbreviation “d’you,” presumably to make a line fit his meter. However, his meter is so loose throughout the volume (not a bad thing, mind you) that one wonders why he decided it was so important to use “d’you” so many times. It did occur to me that in Electra, Electra herself is the only one to use it, so perhaps it’s intended to fit into certain characters’ speech patterns, and I didn’t pick up on that. I didn’t have it in me to look back over all three plays to find out, and either way, it’s a little jarring.

Again though, it must be stressed that I loved Taplin’s Electra. This translation felt to me like the most effective instance of Taplin’s attempts to “more often than not” incorporate “rhymes, or half-rhymes, or off-rhymes of one type or another” (pg. xxix) into his verse. In the other two plays, it most often felt forced or ineffective. That still happens sometimes, but it lands here much more consistently, and it very much enhanced Electra. It’s also worth noting that Electra is the longest play in this volume, but was still an incredibly quick read, thanks in no small part to how lively Taplin’s verse is. This is actually true of all three plays – while Taplin’s intros are a little denser (but not too dense, and again, they’re absolutely worth reading), I found myself breezing through the plays themselves. A few weeks before reading this, I was reading Euripides’ Electra (also in translation), and that volume was published in prose. I thought that translation was also great in its own ways, but I realized when reading Taplin just how much of a disservice it is to translate Greek tragedy – written originally in verse – into prose.

(As an aside, I found myself very glad to have read Sophocles’ Electra in close proximity to Euripides’ – while relating the same story, each tragedian produced a surprisingly different play from the other, and with each fresh in my mind, I could better appreciate how the two are similar . I’d recommend checking out Euripides’ Electra if you like Sophocles’.)

The second play in the volume is Women of Trachis, which Taplin has renamed Deianeira. I have very mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, Taplin explains why he made the change, and I think his reasoning is fair. I think for anyone who picked up this book to read Antigone (and I have to assume that’s why most people would come here, as it’s the most famous of the three), the title Deianeira may mean more to them and possibly cause the play to stick with them longer than it would with the original title. The problem is for anyone actively looking for a translation of Women of Trachis, because they’ll never know to look for it under this name! From what I can tell, no one other than Taplin here has ever chosen to rename Women of Trachis (barring those who choose its untranslated Greek name, Trachiniai, which is reasonable enough). Between this volume and another recent translation of Taplin’s, Oxford World’s Classics offers translations of all seven of Sophocles’ surviving plays, but until I realized “Deianeira” was in fact Women of Trachis, I thought that one play had been left untranslated, and I wondered what the hell Deianeira was. It seems to me that changing the name does a disservice to those who primarily want to read Women of Trachis, and may reflect a lack of faith in a general audience to enjoy reading a play in spite of a “weird name” or whatever.

Anyway, Women of Trachis was a really compelling read. It tells one of the recorded accounts of Heracles’ death, in which his second wife, Deianeira, accidentally poisons him in an effort to renew his love for her. It’s a clear example of a reality of Greek myth, that Heracles was a real bastard of a man, not the glorious hero who comes to mind thanks to Disney’s Hercules. (No hate for Hercules, which I think is a tremendous movie, a great work of reception and my personal favorite in Disney’s library. It’s just had the unfortunate side effect of painting over the original myths of Heracles, in which he’s a horrible monster, to such a degree that most don’t realize this is true at all.) Deianeira does what she does out of a deep fear that despite keeping his home for some two decades, Heracles will abandon her in favor of his new sexual interest, a girl named Iole, and the fact that she’s afraid of this at all says a lot about the man’s capacity for fidelity. Moreover, when Heracles shows up in the last quarter of the play, he shows no remorse for any of his actions, and – very uncomfortably – encourages his son Hyllus to have sex with Iole in his stead, after he’s dead and can’t pork anymore. Hyllus, for his part, isn’t having it. Hyllus’ final words in the play also stood out to me as a tremendous note to end on.

Antigone needs no introduction. Prior to this, I’d only ever read it in Greek (and at that point in my Greek education, “read” is a very generous characterization of how I used my very rusty, underdeveloped Greek reading skills to stumble through the text), and that was four years ago (at the time of writing). It was a treat to return to, and I appreciated it more than ever, thanks again in part to Taplin’s excellent introduction to the play. Speaking to the play’s many rich complexities, he describes it as “like a double-helix, and marked with many shifting colours rather than black and white” (pg. 5), and while that’s perhaps a bit much, it’s nevertheless a very compelling way to attempt to make sense of a play which, to summarize Taplin again, the elders of the play’s chorus never succeed in making sense of themselves (pg. 5).

I’ll point out two other things Taplin made me appreciate, the first of which really surprised me. The name “Creon” is only one letter off from the Greek word κρείων, meaning “prince” or “ruler,” and other Greek tragedies also feature a ruler named Creon (e.g. Euripides’ Medea), so this always struck me as a rather lazy choice. But Taplin emphasizes just how much the play is about Creon as “an individual, not merely a token figure” (pg. 6). His translation really helped me appreciate that, and I think I got much more out of Antigone with this in the back of my head as I read. Similarly, Taplin points out that “Antigone does not express love for one single living being” (pg. 10), and I found bearing that in mind to be more impactful yet.

I said the important part of the review at the jump, because I realized that ultimately, everything else I had to say was less important than that. So I’ll just restate here what I said there: these are high-quality translations, written with the hopes they’d be read aloud, and they’re absolutely worth reading, aloud or otherwise.

[Jacob Liley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let down by Electra, a highly nuanced myth that this play failed to capture. Electra’s complex, Cyltemnestra’s grief and justifications, and Orestes’ guilt after committing matricide were all either partially covered or not at all.

Antigone and Deinaira were better but I still didn’t find them nearly as interesting as some of the retellings.

[Alonsa Biju · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic Greek tragedy! Deianeira is one of my all time favourite characters and I loved Sophocles' take on the Greek figure. Support woman's wrongs.