Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
The Voice of the Eagle
By Garry Wills
An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles, Orestes by Euripides
translated from the Greek by Anne Carson
Faber and Faber, 255 pp., $27.00
An Oresteia: Part 1: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles
directed by Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas
At the Classic Stage Company, New York City, March 22–April 19, 2009
An Oresteia: Part 2: Orestes by Euripides
directed by Paul Lazar, with choreography by Annie-B Parson
At the Classic Stage Company, New York City, March 22–April 19, 2009
It is hard to capture in English what Robert Browning called the 'eagle-bark' of Aeschylus. Browning's English was just odd enough to give him a good shot at it in his oddly neglected translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Anne Carson, who has translated five plays of Euripides and one of Sophokles, makes her own first attempt at Aeschylus (or Aiskhylos, since she prefers Greek forms throughout) with Agamemnon. The play begins with the musings of a servant on the lookout for news from the Trojan War. His mistress, Klytaimestra, has stationed him on the palace rooftop. This slave is as shrewd as a jester in Shakespeare, and his language ranges from cosmic majesty to basic earthiness. He crouches on the roof, he says, like a lookout dog, and he is so afraid of his mistress that he quotes a proverb about an ox standing on his tongue. Yet he has a poetic feel for the night sky. Carson translates:
Review, 3063 words
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