Volume 29, Number 15 · October 7, 1982
Complex Oedipus
By Hugh Lloyd-Jones
The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus
by Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles, introductions and notes by Bernard Knox
Viking Press, 344 pp., $25.00
The poet and translator Michael Hamburger called his autobiography A Mug's Game. Whatever one may feel about poetry, the name applies to poetry in translation. Dryden distinguished three kinds of translation: the literal, the free, and the intermediate kind. Literal translation of poetry is usually of low literary quality; free translation of it may have literary merit, but seldom makes an impression like that of the original; the intermediate kind suffers almost always from one of these deficiencies, very often from both.
Review, 2801 words
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