The Oresteia Page 2
In a world where the higher powers are so inscrutable and uncertain, the sanctions of authority among humans are bound to be even more open to dispute. The tragedies are set in a world that is a fluid blend of a heroic, mythological society, derived from early epic, along with the contemporary culture and values of the fifth century b.c.e. This makes the conflicting human contexts even more difficult for the characters to assess for themselves. There is a constant tug between the various forces of inherited privilege, wealth, custom, military might, and personal authority, as well as the affiliations of family, city, and race. These are all assessed, contested, and challenged in different contexts during the course of the Oresteia. So, for example, the inherited wealth of the royal house is at stake in the family conflicts, yet it is not taken to be an unquestioned blessing. Great wealth can bring dangers with it and is liable to corrupt, as is seen in the story of Troy as well as in the power struggles at Argos.
Gender and Justice
The issues explored in the Oresteia extend beyond the individual and the family to the broader society, and even to humanity as a whole. Some of the leading ways the trilogy retains its accessible complexity—and its modernity—reside in the larger questioning of the social, political, and juridical issues that are implicated in the storytelling. This kind of complex of live issues, conveyed through plotting, betrayals, and dilemmas, can still inform powerful modern retellings. These include, for example, Theo Angelopoulos’ extraordinarily evocative film The Travelling Players (1975), set in war-torn Greece from the 1930s to the 1950s, and Robert Icke’s gripping contemporary re-creation, still called Oresteia (2015).
The two issues that stand out most prominently are probably those of gender and of vengeance. Women were, generally speaking, subordinated and disenfranchised in ancient Greek society; they were not empowered to participate in their own right in political and legal procedures; they were expected to keep quiet and to stay out of sight. Yet the important place they have in many tragedies stands in tension with this external hierarchy. The plays betray a fascination with women’s forcefulness and intelligence and with their potential challenge to men. In the Oresteia, Clytemnestra stands as the prototype for the figure of the wronged woman who fights back with all her powers of expression, guile, and force. She has a mesmerizing control over language and over practical planning, as well as a strong arm and a ruthless determination to kill—and she is proud of it. This is the Clytemnestra who inspired Martha Graham’s dance drama of 1958 and the assertive, openly sexual woman who dominates the first part of Seamus Heaney’s compelling poem Mycenae Lookout (1996) with her “love-shout” that is like the yell of attacking troops.
Clytemnestra’s marital involvement in the revenge chain also brings to the fore the two basic kinds of familial bond and sets them in discord: the parent-child bond of continuity through seed and blood is pitched against the conjugal bond through marriage and procreation. This antithesis is built up by Aeschylus into a full-scale conflict of gender. Again and again the personal confrontations are generalized into terms of “men” and “women,” “male” and “female.” These plays, made and performed by men for men, nonetheless give the female a seriousness and strength that cannot be dismissed or lightly patronized.
The gender conflict culminates in the trial scene in the third play. The issue of Orestes’ liability for murder could be definitively settled if only it were agreed that one sex is less significant or less essential that the other. And this is what Apollo attempts to argue on Orestes’ behalf: that the mother is not a true parent but merely an incubator for the father’s seed. It is crucially important that this side of the case gains only half of the jurors’ votes: half the votes go to the Erinyes and Clytemnestra. Apollo’s argument from obstetrics is not, then, endorsed by the play—and it rings as even more objectionable today, of course. At the same time, its provocativeness taps into a deep and widespread anxiety about the hierarchy of blood relations, and about the split loyalties of children caught between estranged parents.
The other notably prominent sociopolitical concerns cluster around the nexus of retaliation, revenge, and justice. Arguably, the first response to pay violence back with violence is hardwired in animals, not excluding humans. And the history of the royal house at Argos exemplifies how blood that is unnaturally shed cries out for more blood. The first two plays of the trilogy show the addition of two new generations to the saga of vendetta in a way that sets up the question of whether this chain of consequence can ever be broken. In Orestes at Athens, the goddess Athena, in combination with her citizens, inaugurates a court to try cases of homicide in order to deliver a reasoned and concluding verdict one way or the other. The closing scene then goes on to face the further truth that a legal verdict does not make the desire for revenge simply evaporate; this persistence is conveyed through the continuing fury of the Erinyes, leading to their threat to blight the whole future of the city of Athens. What society has to do, the play suggests, is not to deny the urge to revenge but, somehow, to contain it and keep it in reserve. Yaël Farber powerfully recast the Oresteia to explore these very live issues in post-apartheid South Africa in her play Molora (2007).
The final scene of the trilogy might also be interpreted as bringing out an analogy between how vengeance is to be contained within civic bounds and how, if it is to have a beneficial effect within society, tragedy needs to be experienced and assimilated within the time and place of the theater. The terrifying Erinyes are placated by Athena: instead of being rejected, they are given an underground home and cult, incorporated into the very foundations of the city. But they are not finally disarmed or disempowered. As long as the city remains stable and its individuals live good lives, they will confer blessings; but if things go wrong, they will again exert their deadly threats. In live performance, this presents the integration of a beautiful terror into social life. Yet this containment is conditional, so that it holds in place a potential either for song or for misery, either for gracefulness or for ugliness. Tragedy itself, like the Erinyes in the end, has the potential to be at the same time both horrifying and enthralling, distressing and wonderful.
Theatricality of Action and Sound
This concern with ideas and issues should not suggest that the Oresteia is static and abstract—far from it. Everything is conveyed though vivid and constantly surprising theatricality—all the more astonishing when we remember that until fifty years earlier, there was no such thing as theater: no staging, props, or costumes, no enactment. We are not in a position to reconstruct Aeschylus’ original performance, of course, and there is much that we simply cannot know about how it was done, but the words and the shaping of the plays do still indicate quite a few theatrical scenes and features. These start with the Watchman on the roof at the beginning of Agamemnon looking out for the distant beacon fire—an anticipation of the first scene of Hamlet!—and they end with a spectacular torchlight procession.
There is, once we begin looking, a wealth of visual material: flaming torches, trails of blood, snake-entwined Erinyes, bodies tangled in nets. For such early theater, the Oresteia makes extraordinarily inventive use of costumes, portable objects, background buildings, tableaux, rapid movements, handing over, running away, and more. These supply many opportunities for modern productions to set them in their own aesthetic staging in one form or another.
Two great scenes demonstrate this theatrical inventiveness. First the “path of purple cloth.” Agamemnon has returned in triumph on a wheeled carriage of some sort; but before he can step down from it, Clytemnestra has a path of precious purple-dyed cloths spread out in front of him and persuades him to tread over these. The scene sets a kind of enigma: Why is this action so ominous? It suggests that he walks a pathway of blood; he tramples on the wealth of his house; he submits to Clytemnestra’s power, against his better judgment. And does he offend the gods by this questionably presumptuous act? Is it, perhaps, a kind of reenactment of his killing of Iphigeneia? Agamemnon fails
to make direct contact with the earth of his own land, and is instead caught up in the beguilement of wealth, tangled in Clytemnestra’s wrappings of words. This surely still stands as a fascinating, inexhaustible coup de théâtre, one of the greatest of all time.
Secondly, Orestes at Athens provides the archetypal theatrical stage trial. It is set up with a presiding judge (Athena), jurors, a defendant, a counsel for the defense (Apollo), and the strangest of prosecutors—the whole chorus of Erinyes, determined to exact punishment. While there are details that we cannot work out, the original action of the voting seems fairly clear: there are two urns, one for guilty, one for not guilty, and one by one the jurors hide their hands inside each of the urns and secretly drop their vote, probably a pebble, into one or the other. Once everyone has cast their vote, Athena tells an official to tip out the urns and count the pebbles. The votes in each are equal! All of this turns the judicial arguments and issues into thrilling theater.
When it comes to the sound of the plays, there is, compared with the visual, much less obvious direction arising from within the plays themselves, and we find much more disparity among modern productions. How like or unlike everyday, naturalistic speech is the delivery of the spoken parts to be? How much or how little music? Whether the chorus is small or large, do they speak, or sing, or do something in between? Conventions and fashions in the soundscapes of the theater are, in any case, less liable than the visual design to take much account of the original style and tone.
Still, we do have some idea, although limited, of how Aeschylus’ own performance will have sounded, especially the partitions into the spoken sections and sung sections, and the relative style and diction of each kind of delivery. Most of the scenes of the plays’ action were spoken, albeit in verse: a regular line that is actually to some degree comparable with iambic blank verse in English (as in Shakespeare). This meter was, we are told by Aristotle, “especially speakable.” The mode of delivery for the alternating “lyric” parts, which are very substantial in Aeschylus, was quite different. These are set in complex and highly varied meters, and were mostly delivered by the chorus, although there are also passages of “lyric dialogue” involving actors. All of these lyric passages were sung with musical accompaniment, mostly played on a double pipe with reeds called the aulos, which combined one pipe as a drone with the other that made a piercing sound like that of a clarinet or a shawm. It is likely that, as a rule, the chorus sang in a collective unison and with one note to each syllable. The poetic diction of these parts of the play was much more highly wrought than the relatively plainspoken sections, even at times high-flown. Although they were elaborate, there is, however, no good reason to suppose that they were incomprehensible to their public. They were put there not to baffle the audience but to lead them toward a more intuitive response approached through poetry and music rather than through reason.
Modern drama does not, on the whole, embrace poetry and musicality—though there are exceptions, of course. But the Oresteia provides a powerful reminder of how far theater can depart from naturalistic realism, and yet still be dramatic, arguably even more highly dramatic in some ways. This translation does not try to water down Aeschylus’ rich palette of phrases and images, but tries to bring out how we, the audience, are being challenged by poetry and music and color, and how that is all part of its enduring theatrical power. If it succeeds, this text may open up sights and sounds to astonish the open-minded reader, and to inspire potential performers.
ON THIS TRANSLATION
Musicality and Verse
Every translator has priorities, whether they are recognized or not; and the leading priorities of this version of the Oresteia are to bring out the vivid musicality of the expression and the theatricality of its potential performance. Indeed, every word of every translation is a choice; not a single word or phrase has to be rendered in one particular way. Even in translations that are supposed to be “literal” or “highly faithful,” every word is chosen—and, in fact, the choices often tend toward the colorless, and the word order is often awkward. Those plain, pedestrian qualities are very far from the exuberant coloring and vigorous phrasing that characterize the language of Aeschylus.
Aeschylus was not by any measure a plain or modest craftsman of words. He was notorious already in the fifth century b.c.e. for being “lofty,” piling up elaborate locutions, and glorying in coining word combinations. It is part of the texture of his theater that it is expressed in highly colored language, thick with metaphor and with constantly shifting turns of phrase. His lyrics are even further from everyday speech, piling up strange, vivid, sometimes almost hallucinogenic helter-skelters of imagery.
Translations of the Oresteia range from plodding prose to word whirligigs so weird that, as has been said of Robert Browning’s version, it’s fortunate that we have the Greek to puzzle out what the English is about! Every translation of a work from another time and place has to position itself at some point, or at various points, on a scale between the simple and mundane at one end and the outlandish and estranging at the other—between “domestication” and “foreignization,” as these poles have become known. One extreme tends toward the danger of a comfortable familiarity that becomes banal, the other to an exoticism that can become a mere distraction. This version aspires, above all, to convey some sense of the vivid poetic color, the musicality, and the theatricality of Aeschylus’ plays, while still keeping them accessible and without need of constant explanation. The aim is to bring across how the Oresteia is rich and strange and, at the same time, powerfully immediate.
So this translation is very much in verse, not prose. And the verse measures attempt to reflect the metrical and musical differences in the Greek. First, for the sections spoken by individual characters, which make up a bit more than half of Aeschylus’ tragedies, the meter is relatively simple and regular. They are rendered here in English by an iambic beat, but with no regular line length. So, although there are many slight variations and syncopations, there is an underlying alternation of light and heavy syllables. Provided it is working well, readers should find an iambic pulse underpinning the pace of the lines, especially if they are read out loud.
The lyric sections, which were sung, mainly by the chorus, are much more complex. In the Greek they are usually divided into something like “stanzas” that come in pairs (sometimes known as “strophe” and “antistrophe”); and these are set in a wide variety of verse forms—in fact, the meter of each stanza pair was unique, calling for great musical and choreographic variety. This translation, which distinguishes these lyrics in the layout of the text by indentation, attempts to reflect this variety, although it is inevitably far less inventive than the Greek. Rhyme is used extensively as a way of holding together the metrical patterns; but rather than direct rhyme, there are more often variations of partial rhyme and what might be called “sound matches.” The aim is to produce a sense of coherence and musicality, while not making this too pat or simplistic.
There is also a third kind of metrical mode, marked by lesser indentation, which is the anapaestic measure. These crop up in various contexts, delivered by the chorus or by actors, and were probably delivered in some kind of “singsong” chant. Thus, for example, the chorus of Agamemnon, when they first enter, chant for some sixty lines before they modulate into sung lyric.
Names, Especially Erinyes and the Play Titles
In any translation from one culture to another, there will be problems about names. Should they be transliterated, or rendered phonetically, or adapted? From ancient Greek into English, it has usually been the convention to use the Latin versions of Greek names, slightly adapted to English. And that is what has been done here (a concession, admittedly, to tame domestication). That means “Clytemnestra,” not “Klytaimestra,” and “Troy,” not “Troia,” and so forth. Since a verse translation like this one has to assume certain pronunciations of names, an indication of those adopted (often very different from the ancient Greek pronunciatio
n) is supplied on p. 171.
An exception to this latinizing arises with the names of the major gods, where the Greek forms mostly supplanted the Latin back in the nineteenth century: so “Hera” rather than “Juno,” “Hermes” instead of “Mercury,” and so forth. The polytheistic Greeks also recognized a multiplicity of gods beyond the well-known family on Olympus. Among the host of other divine powers, there are two collective groups of particular importance for the Oresteia that are still traditionally known by their Latin names: the “Furies” and the “Fates.” In this translation they are given their original Greek names because the domesticated Latin forms do not do justice to their potent significance.
First, the Erinyes (four syllables in the plural—E-reen-newezz—whereas the singular “Erinys” has three: E-reen-noose). The English term “Furies” fails to convey the range of their associations. In the first two plays of the trilogy, the Erinyes are rather mysterious divinities who are thought of as having the task of pursuing grievous wrongs, moral or even cosmic, especially in response to family curses. They are imagined as ghoulish and horrifying creatures who lurk in the underworld and strike at humans in strange and unpredictable ways. In the third play, Orestes at Athens, however, they become terrifyingly incarnated as the chorus. This new physicality, an innovation by Aeschylus, changed the way they were perceived from then on, providing artists with snake-entwined figures—often rather beautiful—always ready to pursue and to punish.