Two Greek Plays
The Alcestis of Euripides. Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. (Faber. 68.) THE ghosts of Swinburne, Morris and Lang seem at long last to have been laid. For years they have haunted the trans- lators of the classics. But (to choose from the more recent translations) such vigorous versions, in a contemporary idiom, as T. E. Lawrence's Odyssey, Mr. Yeats's translations of some of Sophocles' choruses, and these two renderings, one by an English poet and scholar, one by two Americans, suggest that soon there will be no need for such essays as Mr. Eliot has written about a certain perversion of The Medea. The " tutoyer," the thee-and-thou of Wardour Street, the futile endeavour to reproduce an antiquated turn of phrase, and the vagueness, the prolixity which so often defaced Professor Murray's translations, seem at last to have been jettisoned, and translators are grasping after something terse and crisp, something at once simpler and more pregnant, to enable them to do justice to that masterly concision of Greek poetry which could concentrate The Agamemnon in under 2,000 lines.
The Alcestis sets an easier task for the translator, but it is not for that reason that Mr. MacNeice has proved more successful. Each of the translations is meant to be acted ; The Agamemnon is far more likely to retain the attention of the audience. The Alcestis translation contains too many dots, dashes, and exclamation marks ; the translators have not relied to the same extent as Mr. MacNeice on the ability of the rhythmic pattern of their speeches to produce, if properly delivered, the required dramatic effect. Both they and he have made use of a method which was employed fruitfully in Murder in the Cathedral—a deliberate effort to make the characters speak in the idiom and rhythms of ordinary con- versation. But this approximation to conversational prose is only justified by an avoidance of the prosaic, and too often there is a flatness, a dullness approaching bathos, about the speeches and dialogue of the Americans' Alcestis. But Mr. MacNeice's version is always alive and often vivid. The difficulty which faces anyone trying to make an actors' version of The Agamemnon is the subjugation of its heterogeneous profusion of metaphors, the moulding of them into a rhythmic sequence. Clytemnestra's description of the geography of the Aegean, for example, or the Herald's account of the storm at sea, has so to be rendered that it can, while remaining fair to the original, be spoken in a manner adequately dramatic, adequately interesting to the audience. Mr. MacNeice is such a master of the appropriate and concise English parallel for each image in the Greek, he so cleverly superimposes conver- sational rhythms upon his blank verse, that the metaphors rarely get out of hand, and his speeches arc always well knit, well controlled. 'to have made a translation of Aeschylus which is not turgid, and whose longer passages have such a rhythmic continuity that they read well, is a remarkable feat.
There is no comparison between the difficulty or the quality of the choruses of the two Greek plays. Those of The Alcestis are pleasant, simple, lyrical interludes, and the translators treat them as such.
So sweet his music, that the leopards came, And delicate lions prowled from the forest shadow, Following where he led them, without harm ; And through a grove one time a spotted doe Ventured on light hooves, dancing,
As though it were for a chorus, or a game. . . .
The choruses of The Agamemnon set a problem far more difficult and complex. More important in their relation to the action, they are crammed with metaphors, and yet suddenly now and then they achieve a piercing simplicity. Mr. MacNiece has avoided a translation with obvious charms but question- able accuracy. His version keeps close to the words and the mood of the original, and is, I think, far more successful because of its integrity and refusal to shirk the difficulties. The beauty, the poignancy of such passages as the strophe "O xpvcraizca/As 8' 'Apes enoptimw," or the description of the death of Iphigeneia, cannot, surely, ever be adequately reproduced in translation, but Mr. MacNeice's choruses are praiseworthy in their faithfulness to spirit and sense ; and this perhaps is more important—they possess, in their own
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