“OTOTOI POPOI DA! Apollo! O!pollo! Woepollo! O!”
Lit Hum students may have actually enjoyed Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” had Cassandra shouted such exciting gibberish in the assigned version of the play. Compare these guttural exclamations of grief with the standard Lattimore translation: “Oh shame upon the earth! Apollo, Apollo!”
Anne Carson’s An Oresteia (Faber & Faber, March 2009, $27) updates Greek tragedy for a generation raised on Hollywood and Ritalin. The language is clear and contemporary, and the pagination is easy on the eye. Yet the accessibility of her style does not detract from the emotional power of her poetry.
An Oresteia was commissioned by the Classic Stage Company in New York, and it is a compilation of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” Sophokles’ “Elektra,” and Euripides’ “Orestes.” The play is ongoing at CSC through April 19.
Although Aeschylus wrote a complete Oresteia, Carson decided to tell the tale of the House of Atreus using three different authors. The order of the plays and the order of the author’s lives are both chronological. This juxtaposition reveals interesting stylistic distinctions that mirror historical transitions in classical Athens.
In the hundred years between Aeschylus’ and Euripides, Athens went from the height of its political, cultural, and military supremacy to a period of great unease. In Carson’s introduction, the artistic director of CSC compares the progression of Greek drama to the movement of the sun: Aeschylus’ is dawn, Sophokles is noon, and Euripides is twilight.
Carson also provides insightful introductions to each of the plays. These brief passages are scholarly and analytical, but they feel nothing like academic writing. They are full of cultural references, ranging from Björk to Francis Bacon, that make the plays feel more accessible to the modern reader.
Carson often uses creative pagination techniques, isolating single words and making particularly emotional passages scurry back and forth across the page.
Carson’s language throughout all three plays is exceedingly forceful and vivid. She uses original Greek expressions of suffering, such as “OIMOI” and “PHEU.” She also creates compound adjectives that capture the nuances of the original language, such as “manminded” or “firstblush.”
At times, the familiarity of her language can be surprising, and it infuses the plays with a modern sense of humor. In “Agamemnon,” when the chorus questions Cassandra about her relationship with Apollo, the following exchange occurs:
Cassandra: The fact is we wrestled.
Chorus: Had sex?
Cassandra: I said yes but defaulted.
The directness of this exchange is striking. It grabs the audience’s attention much more forcefully than Lattimore’s version, in which the chorus asks, “Did you come to the getting of children then, as people do?”
Certain critics may argue that Carson’s writing detracts from some of the rhetorical force of the original Greek. And indeed, her direct style transforms the subtleties of the language into more overblown emotional displays. Yet the appeal of Carson’s poetry is undeniable, and her work should be considered a new literary creation rather than a simple translation.
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