Review (PDF) The Three Theban Plays: Antigone - Oedipus The King - Oedipus At Colonus (Theban Plays Of Sophocles - Antigone - Oedipus The King - Oedipus At Colonus)
The Three Theban Plays - Oedipus the King - Oedipus at Colonus – Antigone by Sophocles Translation by F. Storr To Laius, King of Thebes, an oracle foretold that the child born to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother. So when in time a son was born the infant's feet were riveted together and he was left to die on Mount Cithaeron. But a shepherd found the babe and tended him, and delivered him to another shepherd who took him to his master, the King of Corinth. Polybus being childless adopted the boy, who grew up believing that he was indeed the King's son. Afterwards doubting his parentage he inquired of the Delphic god and heard himself the word declared before to Laius. Wherefore he fled from what he deemed his father's house and in his flight he encountered and unwillingly slew his father Laius. Arriving at Thebes he answered the riddle of the Sphinx and the grateful Thebans made their deliverer king. So he reigned in the room of Laius, and espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own act and praying for death or exile.
Series: Theban Plays of Sophocles - Antigone - Oedipus the King - Oedipus at Colonus
Paperback: 186 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 22, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500922757
ISBN-13: 978-1500922757
Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.4 x 10 inches
Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #133,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #76 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Dramas & Plays > Ancient & Classical
Researching translations is never an easy task, and in this case, where you'll have to search on 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.
I try to reread Sophocles every few years, both because I enjoy him and because I find him a moral tonic. Since I can only haltingly stumble through his Greek, I always read translations, and I read a different translation each time.When one reads a translated literary work, one is reading a piece of literature that, in a manner of speaking, is "co-authored." Translation isn't, can't, and oughtn't to be a mechanically isomorphic transliteration of the original text. Translators--good ones, anyway--are artists in their own right. The choices they make in deciding how best to render the original text reflects not only their own creative sensitivity, but also their cultural context. Different translators, because of the variability of their temperaments, talents, and times, focus on different inflections. (In this regard, they're not unlike stage directors, who also "co-author" the plays they present.) So one never reads Sophocles, unless one reads the original Greek. One always reads Fagles' Sophocles, or Fitzgerald's Sophocles, or X's Sophocles.I think Fagles and Sophocles make a marvelous collaboration. In fact, I like this translation better than any other I've read over the past half-century (and I've liked some others very much). Fagles has the soul of a poet (his volume of poems, I, Vincent, is very good indeed), and his rendering of "Antigone" and "Oedipus the King" are especially fine. Like all translators, he has a spin that mirrors the fears and hopes of his own time. In Fagles' case, it's what the existentialists would call nausea or anxiety over the absurd contingency of existence. For example, Oedipus the King [1442], after learning of his unhappy fate:...the agony! I am agony--where am I going? where on earth?
The Three Theban Plays: Antigone - Oedipus the King - Oedipus at Colonus (Theban Plays of Sophocles - Antigone - Oedipus the King - Oedipus at Colonus) The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus & other Bonus works The Theban Plays: King Oedipus; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone (Penguin Classics) Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus (The Complete Greek Tragedies) The Complete Works of Sophocles: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus the King, Philoctetes, Trachiniae (7 Books With Active Table of Contents) Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus (The Complete Greek Tragedies Book 1) The Theban Plays: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone (Dover Thrift Editions) The Theban Plays: "Oedipus the Tyrant"; "Oedipus at Colonus"; "Antigone" (Agora Editions) The Oedipus Plays: Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus SparkNotes Literature Guide (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series) Greek Tragedies 1: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound; Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone; Euripides: Hippolytus The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone Sophocles : Antigone (Focus Classical Library) Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra (Oxford World's Classics) Greek Tragedies, Vol. 1: Agamemnon/Prometheus Bound/Oedipus the King/Antigone/Hippolytus Theban Plays (Hackett Classics) The Complete Plays of Sophocles The Witches Alphabet: How to Write Theban for Beginner’s All That You've Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (A Vintage original)
