Volume 22, Number 19 · November 27, 1975
Aeschylus Pinioned and Grabbed
By Bernard Knox
Aeschylus: Suppliants
translated by Janet Lembke
Oxford University Press, 104 pp., $7.95
Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes
translated by Helen Bacon, translated by Anthony Hecht
Oxford University Press, 88 pp., $5.95
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound
translated by James Scully, translated by C. John Herington
Oxford University Press, 117 pp., $7.95
Ever since Greek tragedy was rediscovered by the West in the early Renaissance, it has been more widely read in translation than in the original. Greek in the modern world has always been an elite accomplishment and the Renaissance editions of Greek tragedy, like many of their modern counterparts, were bilingual—Latin translation on the facing page. What is surprising is that when the time came for English translation, tragedy was so badly served: unlike Homer, it did not attract the poets—it has no interpreter even remotely comparable with Chapman or Pope. Dryden, the translator-general of his age, Englished all of Vergil, much of Lucretius, Ovid, Juvenal, and Persius, some of Horace, Theocritus, and Homer; he versified Boccaccio, modernized Chaucer, and even converted Paradise Lost into an opera 'in Heroickal Verse,' but he never laid a finger on Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.
Review, 3358 words
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