The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus Author: Sophocles | Language: English | ISBN:
B00256Z2AA | Format: PDF
The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus Description
Oedipus in exile, searching for his identity and achieving immortality; his daughter, Antigone, defending her integrity and ideals to the death—these heroic figures have moved playgoers and readers since the fifth century BC. Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, the three plays that tell the story of the fated Theban royal family—
Antigone, Oedipus the King and
Oedipus at Colonus-- are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. Robert Fagles' translation conveys all of Sophocles' lucidity and power: the cut and thrust of his dialogue, his ironic edge, the surge and majesty of his choruses and, above all, the agonies and triumphs of his characters.
- File Size: 841 KB
- Print Length: 436 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0140444254
- Publisher: Penguin Classic; 1st edition (February 7, 1984)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00256Z2AA
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,281 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > Classical & Early - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Drama & Plays > Greek & Roman - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Drama & Plays > Classical & Early
- #5
in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > Classical & Early - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Drama & Plays > Greek & Roman - #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Drama & Plays > Classical & Early
Researching translations is never an easy task, and in this case, where you'll have to search on Amazon for the title and the translator to find what you want, it's particularly difficult.
Here's what I've found by comparing several editions:
1. David Grene translation: Seems to be accurate, yet not unwieldy as such. My pick. Language is used precisely, but not to the point where it's barely in English.
2. Fitts/Fitzgerald translation: Excellent as well, though a little less smooth than the Grene one. Certainly not a bad pick.
3. Fagles translation: Beautiful. Not accurate. If you are looking for the smoothest English version, there's no doubt that this is it. That said, because he is looser with the translation, some ideas might be lost. For instance, in Antigone, in the beginning, Antigone discusses how law compels her to bury her brother despite Creon's edict. In Fagles, the "law" concept is lost in "military honors" when discussing the burial of Eteocles. This whole notion of obeying positive law or natural law is very important, but you wouldn't know it from Fagles. In Grene, for example, it is translated to "lawful rites."
4. Gibbons and Segal: Looks great, but right now the book has only Antigone (and not the rest of the trilogy) and costs almost 3x as much. I'll pass. But, from a cursory review, I'm impressed with their work.
5. MacDonald: This edition received some good write-ups, but I wasn't able to do a direct passage-to-passage comparison.
6. Woodruff: NO, NO, NO. Just NO. It's so colloquial it makes me gag. Very accessible, but the modernization of the language is just so extreme as to make it almost laughable. You don't get any sense of the power of language in the play.
There's not much to say about these plays that hasn't been said over the last 2,500 years except, read them. More than once. More than twice.
As to the Fagles translation, as with most of his translations it is very smooth, almost lyrical, quite appealing. But he takes more liberties than I really like a translator to take. You are not reading as close as possible a rendition of what Sophocles actually wrote; rather, Fagles is somewhere between translation and retelling. For the average reader this may be fine, but don't think you're getting pure Sophocles, or as pure as is possible with a translation.
If all you want is an enjoyable read that is reasonably close to what Sophocles wrote, Fagles is fine. For more scholarly accuracy, try the translations by Greene, Fitzgerald, or Wyckoff. For a very good set of alternate translations which have as much fluidity as Fagles and a bit more faithfulness to the original, try the Fitts/Fitzgerald translations.
One benefit to the Fagles translation is the introductions by Knox, which are excellent (nearly as good as his superb introduction to Fagles' Odyssey).
One detriment, for me, is that the volume presents the plays in the order they were written, not in the order of the (relatively) unified story which they present. (It's sort of like reading Shakespeare's Henry VI plays before his Henry IV and V plays; that's the order he wrote them in, but the Henry V and VI plays make more sense if you've read the Henry IV plays first.
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