The Complete Plays of Sophocles: A New Translation
Sophocles, Robert Bagg, James Scully
Language: English
Pages: 880
ISBN: 006202034X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Award-winningpoet-playwrights Robert Bagg and James Scully presenta gripping new translation of Western literature’s earliest treasures in TheComplete Plays of Sophocles. In the tradition of Robert Fagles’bestselling translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, andretaining the textual authenticity of Richmond Lattimore’sAeschylus, Bagg and Scully render Sophocles’ dramasaccessible and exciting for the modern reader. Students new to Athenian drama,readers of classical literature, and anyone wishing to kindle anew theirpassion for Greek tragedy will find no more captivating entrance to thesemilestones of world literature than in Bagg andScully’s The Complete Plays of Sophocles.
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reason forbids that two voices should contend and claims the hastening of the deed. Only when I attempt this task aid me with your silence, I entreat you, my friends. If my mother should hear of it I think I shall yet have cause to rue my venture. (Exit.) CHORUS. If I am not an erring seer and one who fails in wisdom, Justice that has sent the presage will come triumphant in her righteous strength, will come ere long, my child, to avenge. There is courage in my heart, through those new tidings
deeds delay is evil and it is well to make an end. ORESTES. What then will be my prospects when I enter? TUTOR. Good, for you are secured from recognition. ORESTES. You have reported me, I presume, as dead? TUTOR. Know that you are numbered with the shades. ORESTES. Do they rejoice at these tidings, then, or what do they say? TUTOR. I will tell you at the end. Meanwhile all is well for us on their part—even what is not well. ELECTRA. Who is this, brother? I pray you, tell me. ORESTES. Do
should I not?) even without your edicts. But if I am to die before my time I count that a great gain. If anyone lives as I do compassed about with evils, could he find anything but gain in death? So for me to meet this doom is trifling grief. But if I had suffered my mother’s son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me; for this I am not grieved. And if my present deeds are foolish in your sight, it may be that a foolish judge arraigns my folly. CHORUS. The girl shows
But now, moved by some god and by a sinful mind, an evil rivalry has seized them, thrice infatuate!—to grasp at rule and kingly power. The hotbrained youth, the younger born, has deprived the elder, Polyneices, of the throne, and has driven him from his fatherland. But he, as the general rumor says among us, has gone as exile to hill-girt Argos and is taking up a new kinship and warriors for his friends, as deeming that Argos shall soon possess the Cadmean land in honor or lift that land’s
those maidens and produce them in my sight; for your deed is a disgrace to me and to your own race and to your country. You have come to a city that observes justice and sanctions nothing without law—yet you have put her lawful powers aside, you have made this rude inroad, you are taking captives at your pleasure and snatching prizes by violence, as in the belief that my city was void of men or manned by slaves, and I a thing of nought. Yet it is not by Theban training that you are base; Thebes