Thunder on the Left
The Vengeance of the Gods. By Rex Warner. Illustrated by Susan Einzig. (MacGibbon and Kee. 12s. 6d.)
To the 'experienced reader, especially perhaps to one who has n° Greek, these tales of the Olympian gods, of Prometheus, of Helen, or Iphigenia, come with a throng of diverse echoes. Behind Iviri Rex Warner's limpid prose we hear the heavy cadenced march 0' some Alexandrine tirade by Racine, some ductile chorus by Dr,' Gilbert Murray, the sharp stamp of some modern translator, 0' perhaps the grim and biting note of Jean Paul Sartre's Orestes aS in Les Mouches, he defies the Nazis and Petainists of our day. The° are softer echoes too, felicitous Victorian fragments, perhaps a° echo of Iphigenia's girlish voice as she heard her doom in Aulis.
To all these echoes Mr. Rex Warner adds two things, and they things that are especially valuable to those in whose ears all tht! echoes do not yet sound, but who may hope, later, to get nouns" ment from the poets.
First he emancipates us from the dictionary approach, and fr°11 feeling the need to ask, "What really happened?" He makes 1 clear that some tell the tale one way and some another, so that see the stories for what they are, not solid matters of fact but tower. ing like clouds that seem the massed outlines of a mountain range. „ The second thing that Mr. Rex Warner has given us, has WI added through his bringing the tales out of doors. We are enricbc,`: by realising more of the terrain and now able to pick up the slight hil\! that the Greeks themselves give. This the French and English POP hardly ever did. Racine and Pope were too urbane, too much con; vinced that it is human character alone that counts, and LYtt,° Strachey was right when he said that the scene of all Racine's drag" was "a drawing-room in space." An excuse for some of their onus; sions was of course that they took things for granted that we dont!: They too lived in an age when the consequences of persistent cat; or of contrary winds were often momentous, and they, like t A Greeks, got their news from some messenger who often travelt little faster than the defeated or victorious army he heralded. W1 out long descriptions, with only a word or two here and there rt': Rex Warner makes us feel that Agamemnon had every right to rd appalled when, at that particular time of year just when he oaut,t expect not only a wind but a favourable one, his armies must week after week at Aulis. We understand too how the magic of; oracle at Delphi was the stronger because the suppliant to AP; must climb to where "Amid the towering mountains, eagles dre' from the heights and where the air is clear and bright as crystal." s
AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELI
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