Meineck and Woodruff's new translations of these plays combine accuracy with concision, clarity, and powerful speech. Each translation includes foot-of-the-page notes, stage directions, and line numbers to the Greek. The Introduction discusses the playwright, Athenian theatre and performance, plots and major characters of each play, and major critical interpretations of the plays.
These contemporary translations of four Greek tragedies speak across time and connect readers and audiences with universal themes of war, trauma, suffering, and betrayal. Under the direction of Bryan Doerries, they have been performed for tens of thousands of combat veterans, as well as prison and medical personnel around the world. Striking for their immediacy and emotional impact, Doerries brings to life these ancient plays, like no other translations have before.
This book examines the lyrical voice of Sophocles' heroes and argues that their identities are grounded in poetic identity and power. It begins by looking at how voice can be distinguished in Greek tragedy and by exploring ways that the language of tragedy was influenced by other kinds of poetry in late fifth-century Athens. In subsequent chapters, Professor Nooter undertakes close readings of Sophocles' plays to show how the voice of each hero is inflected by song and other markers of lyric poetry. She then argues that the heroes' lyrical voices set them apart from their communities and lend them the authority and abilities of poets. Close analysis of the Greek texts is supplemented by translations and discussions of poetic features more generally, such as apostrophe and address. This study offers new insight into the ways that Sophoclean tragedy inherits and refracts the traditions of other poetic genres.
The ancient scholia to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus shed light on Alexandrian ways of engaging with this play, and are richer than those to the other Sophoclean plays. The last editor, Vittorio de Marco (1952), established a better text of these scholia than his predecessors, in as much as he had a fuller knowledge of their manuscript tradition and a better understanding of their stratified nature. Still, his work is marred by a number of inaccuracies, omissions and methodological shortcomings. The new edition by Georgios Xenis improves on de Marco’s work by a careful examination of all the sources of the text and the conjectures proposed by scholars, and by relying on a clearly defined methodological framework. In this edition the scholia to the Oedipus at Colonus are restored in a textual state that is arguably the earliest we can recover, and is free of contradictions, unacceptable repetitions, and hybridisation or blending of elements from different versions. The critical text is accompanied by a detailed apparatus criticus, and is contextualised in its ancient scholarly tradition by means of a rich array of passages drawn from comparable sources. Extensive indices are provided at the end of the volume. The edition will be an invaluable resource for those engaged in the interpretation of Sophocles’ tragedies and, in particular, of the Oedipus at Colonus, and will be of interest to classicists working on ancient literary criticism and ancient scholarship.
Accessible edition with commentary of this widely read but highly complex and challenging play. Provides help with morphology, grammar and syntax and interpretation of the text in its historical, social, cultural and intellectual contexts. The introduction also gives an account of its reception from antiquity to the present day.
This book provides separate discussions of each of Sophocles' seven plays: Ajax, Women of Trachis, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. It sets these between an essay that outlines modern approaches to Greek tragedy and a final chapter that spotlights a key moment in the reception of each work.Focusing on the tragedies' dramatic power and the challenges with which they confront an audience, Morwood refuses to confine them within a supposedly Sophoclean template. They are seven unique works, only alike in the fact that they are all major masterpieces. Focusing on the tragedies' dramatic power and the challenges with which they confront an audience, Morwood refuses to confine them within a supposedly Sophoclean template. They are seven unique works, only alike in the fact that they are all major masterpieces.
Jealousy and suicide, love and passion, grief and intrigue, honor and deceit are the order of the day in four of Sophocles's great tragedies. The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of classical Greek drama. The aim of the series is to make both the works and their interpretations accessible to the reading public.
