Sophocles: The Complete Plays (Signet Classics (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: A little too much like the modern Bible
Review: I enjoyed this translation, and I recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. Its strength is that it is very easy to read in large part because Roche structured the lines as he felt they would have been spoken. He includes some interesting appendices on production, etc, and he has just the right number of footnotes to help us keep up, but not be slowed down.

My beef is that comparing it to other translations I have read is like comparing the clunky dumbed down modern translations of the Bible to the King James Version. Still, the language and the wisdom do sometimes soar together.

Rating:
Summary: A little too much like the modern Bible
Review: I enjoyed this translation, and I recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. Its strength is that it is very easy to read in large part because Roche structured the lines as he felt they would have been spoken. He includes some interesting appendices on production, etc, and he has just the right number of footnotes to help us keep up, but not be slowed down.

My beef is that comparing it to other translations I have read is like comparing the clunky dumbed down modern translations of the Bible to the King James Version. Still, the language and the wisdom do sometimes soar together.

Rating:
Summary: Agony, despair, suffering, misery...It's all good.
Review: If tragedy is, as Aristotle described, the imitation (that is, representation) of great people whose downfall induces a sense of pity and fear in the audience, Sophocles's plays are exemplary illustrations of the genre. The Sophoclean hero suffers, agonizes, despairs because of cruel fate or, more likely, some mistake he or she has made as a result of a character flaw such as pride or anger. Thus the tragedy of "Ajax" is not only that the title character kills himself in shame over having lost out to Odysseus on being awarded Achilles's armor, the ownership of which would have been proof of his heroic deeds in battle, but that his shame might have been alleviated had he known that Odysseus greatly respected his heroism. Similarly, in "Antigone," Creon, king of Thebes, suffers the loss of his wife and son over his stubborn insistence to enforce a law founded on his pride.

Sophocles portrays "noble" sufferers too. In "Electra," the title heroine plots to kill her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, but she has a good reason -- revenge for killing her father Agamemnon and bounding her to a life of slavish submission. The title hero of "Philoctetes" is marooned on an island through no fault of his own, and furthermore becomes the target of trickery when Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles's son, show up with the intent to obtain a magic bow in his possession which they need to win the Trojan War. Heracles's wife Deianeira, in "The Women in Trachis," catches her husband in the act of intended infidelity; her reaction is to send him a cloak she thinks is a talisman to keep him faithful to her, when in reality it is poisoned. That Electra's plans are fulfilled, Philoctetes receives sympathy, and Deianeira kills herself in grief shows the range of emotions that lead to the end of a Sophoclean tragedy.

The most masterful of these plays is "Oedipus the King," which seeks to maximize pity and fear in the audience by portraying some of the most tragic circumstances imaginable -- a hero who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother as was prophesied, and then, to his horror, discovers their identities. Does Oedipus, like Deianeira, kill himself in grief? No, that would be too merciful. Instead, he gouges out his eyes in self-punishment and lives to continue suffering, as an abject vagrant in "Oedipus at Colonus."

In this Signet Classics edition, Paul Roche translates these plays in verse rather than prose, which preserves their poeticality, improves their clarity, and significantly increases the enjoyability of reading them. This is the perfect edition for getting acquainted with one of the great Greek dramatists.

Rating:
Summary: The Master of the Greek Tragedy
Review: Sophocles was the greatest of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece. He wrote over 100 plays of which only seven survive. Paul Roche has done a superb job in translating the extant plays in the same book. They include "Ajax", "Electra", "Philoctetes", "The Women of Trachis", and the three Oedipus plays: "Oedipus the King", "Oedipus at Colonus", and "Antigone."

Sophocles was a master at understanding human nature and the consequences one faces when we don't act in a virtuous manner. In "Ajax" the hero at Troy becomes a raging terror when he is not awarded Achille's armor. He seeks a murderous revenge but a trick of Athena causes him to confuse sheep with men. His friends and family can only stand by while Ajax creates the ultimate revenge on himself.

In "Electra" the daughter of the murdered Agamemnon seeks her revenge on her mother and paramour with her brother's help. It leads to tragic consequences when people can't learn to forgive. The murderous revenge was in response to the same murderous revenge her mother felt when Agamemnon sacrificed their infant daughter to gain a favorable wind to get to Troy.

"Philoctetes" is a study in what happens when care, friendship, and trust disappears. Philoctetes was abandoned by his shipmates years earlier because he was bitten on the heel by a poisonous snake. The moaning and stench from the festering wound caused his shipmates to abandon him on a deserted island. His only protection was a magic bow from Heracles that never misses its target. Years later Odysseus and Achilles' son, Neoptolemus returned to the island to get Philoctetes' bow. Neoptolemus tricks him by pretending to help him and then steals his bow. A change of heart and Heracles' intervention saved the day.

In "The Women of Trachis" a jealous wife's remedy for her philandering husband has tragic consequences. When Deianeira found that her husband, Heracles, had sent a bedmate home to the palace it was the last straw. She gave him a cloak soaked with a potion that was supposed to make Heracles fall madly in love with her. What she didn't know was that the potion was designed to kill him.

"Oedipus the King" was clearly the play Sophocles was most famous for. This is the tragic story of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother. His denial of this truth would have ruinous consequences that would span through the next generation. Oedipus would become a ruined man who would only find salvation at the end of his life in "Oedipus at Colonus", but tragedy would spread to those of his children in "Antigone". Death would take the lives of the two sons of Oedipus as they fought over the throne and when Creon, the new king, dishonors the dead the gods mete out justice.