Great translation of the text. Very readable. Introductions to each play were helpful. Would have preferred footnotes or endnotes to expand, but great translations.

My version is Watling and a Penguin Book. Sophocles knows how to create tension and make us empathize with the characters.

A good compilation of classic Greek tales of tragedy. These stories form the basis for many modern adaptations.

Heady stuff. Greeks put in hard places by the events of the Trojan war. They are on the periphery, and the main guys like Odysseus play cameo roles in these plays. They are like spinoffs of Homer's great works, the Iliad and Odyssey, hundreds of years later, in the 400s before Christ.

Fate and loss of honor are big themes. What do we do when fate turns against us so that we lose our reputation, stumble and fall? For Ajax, it led to cynicism. "Most men have found friendship a treacherous harbor." Suicide was the answer.

Echoes of Job come through, when they consider the injustice of their suffering. Electra's murderer is her stepfather, and her sister acquiesces: "justice is not on my side but on yours." Electra cannot: "Have your rich table and your abundant life. All the food I need is the quiet of my conscience."

The gods are always the ones pulling the strings, and life is pain. "None can foresee what is to come... and there is nothing here which is not Zeus." "Nothing painless has the all-accomplishing King dispensed for mortal men." Philoctetes says, "How can I praise, when praising Heaven I find the gods are bad?"

It's quite a dismal worldview, when you step back and look at it. Electra sums up the Greeks well: "It is terrible to speak well and be wrong." Of course, they capture glimpses of wisdom, too, like in that quote.

Here are a few more.
"Harsh words, however just, still rankle."
"You win the victory when you yield to friends."

همينطوري كه من يونان و اسطوره دوست دارم،ديگه سوفوكل هم جاي خود دارد.

Sophocles made a lot of big changes in his time, and E.F. Watling takes the time to make readers appreciate it. Take a look at my thoughts in much more detail and 500 more words on my blog!

For most people, the name Sophocles is synonymous with Oedipus. Yet, both as a reader of literature and a classical educator, I prefer the non-Oedipus plays of Sophocles, the Ajax in particular. These translations of the plays dealing with Ajax, Hercules, Electra and Philoctetes, edited by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene, are accessible, intelligible, and faithful to the original. I have used this translation many times with students and highly recommend it to someone who wants to read Sophocles, whether from a literary, mythological or historical perspective. I would not recommend it for dramatic performance; you can find translations that do a lot better job of poetic interpretation and foreground the plays' continuing resonance (one example might be Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes for the Philoctetes).

آژاکس
زمستان با پای برف‌آلود از مقابل تابستان گرم می‌گریزد. شحنه شب از گشت شبانه خود باز می‌ایستد تا چابک‌سوار صبح بر سمند نقره فام نشیند و عالم را منور کند. طوفان باد توقف می‌کند تا امواج خروشان دریا اندکی بیارامد. حتی خواب که قادر مطلق جان آدمیان است دریچه‌ی خود را گاهی می‌گشاید و گاهی می‌بندد و هرگز نمی‌تواند زندانی خود را تا ابد در بند نگاه‌ دارد.

Greeks with issues

In the USA there's a social category of people known as "airheads" for whom anything that happened before the year 2000 is "like, major antiquity, guy". What can we say, then, about plays that were written over 2,400 years ago ? For most of my life, the mention of Greek plays was on a par with cod liver oil. Probably good for me, but best avoided if possible. I admit, it was the airhead-lite approach. Recently, I finally buckled down and decided it was now or never. I'm not sorry I did.
The four plays by Sophocles in this collection deal with Iliad spinoffs---events connected to that ancient epic with some of the Trojan War characters already known to the Greeks of the author's time---with legends of the gods (Hercules or Heracles, as they write it) or with both at once. Each play uses a chorus to reflect inner thinking or thinking by "other people", whoever they may be. The translation in this volume brings a modicum of modern English to the plays, rendering them very understandable. Purists might not appreciate that, but I, for one, found myself better able to follow the deeper meanings of the plays because I didn't have to wade through archaic English. (Remember how we struggled through Shakespeare?) AJAX, ELECTRA, WOMEN OF TRACHIS, and PHILOCTETES jolted me out of my neo-airhead tendencies and amazed me by their modernity. Their form may be ancient, stilted to modern eyes, and lacking much action, but the themes reveal human nature as if these plays all were written yesterday. The same dilemmas pose themselves, the same contrasts in human character---the straight and the crooked, the mean and the noble, the forgiving and the vengeful. Actions well meant turn out to have disastrous consequences. Greed and jealousy run rampant. AJAX, the earliest work here, is a little less dramatic than the other three, but does deal with "temporary insanity". I don't have the silver tongue and deconstruction abilities of a literary expert, but if these plays don't knock your socks off---just because of their relevance to 2018 if for no other reason---then I don't know what will. Don't wait 40 years. Delicious cod liver oil, no lie.

You cannot count on tomorrow until you've survived today.
(945-946)

You can't engage in a boxing match with Love
Who'd be such a fool? Love governs even the gods
At his own sweet will. He certainly governs me.
(441-443)
-Sophocles from Women of Trachis

آشنایی زیادی با یونان و نمایشنامه‌هاش ندارم. به‌عنوان کسی که فقط آواز آشیل و پنلوپیاد خونده اینا رو هم خیلی دوست داشتم.

فیلوکتتس: کسی که ادیسیوس و نئوپتولموس پسر آشیل خواستند با حیله راضی به بازگشت و تسلیم کردن کمانش کنند.


زنان تراخیس: تلاش دیرانیرا برای جلوگیری همسرش هراکلس از معشوقه گرفتن به فاجعه منتهی می‌شه...

الکترا: انتقام دخترِ آگاممنون از سلاخی پدرش توسط مادر و معشوقه‌ی وی با بازگشت برادرش اورستس محقق می‌شه.

آژاکس: داستان زوال و نابودی قهرمان جنگ‌های یونان و تروا (چقدر دراماتیک و بچه‌ان اینا=)))ا

Previously I had read Oliver Taplin’s translations of Aïas and Philoctetes. So here I read The Women of Trachis translated by Michael Jameson and Electra by David Grene. All together, Sophocles is my favorite among the tragedians, though I still have about half of the works of Euripides left. Euripides according to Plutarch was the better loved by those beyond Athens borders, yet Sophocles was the winningest playwright.

Reviews for Aïas and Philoctetes appear in an earlier review, so here I will only add to a holistic comparison of all four works, and then add specific thoughts on The Women of Trachis and Electra. What thread might connect the four works here are time and the emotions: betrayal and rage, betrayal and rage, betrayal and rage, betrayal and rage.

Ajax tells of the fall of the mighty son of Telamon, of his rage and sense of betrayal in the the brothers Atreus proclaiming Odysseus the winner of the Shield of Achilles. A powerful unsung tragedy of the Trojan War.

The Women of Trachis tells one story of Heracles, and his separation from Deianira for twelve years, only to return with a young girl bride, and the consequences of such on the family. This ought to be compared with Euripides Heracleidae where the outcome is quite different.

Sophocles’ Electra is a powerful work adding to the saga of the family Atreus, of the consequences for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and of the even older family transgression of Thyestes by Atreus. Here Sophocles diverges from Aeschylus and Euripides in the portrayal of Electra. She is vengeful and bitter, and in a unique way mirrors the just virtues of Antigone while Chrysothemis’ self preservation mirrors Ismene’s conservatism.

Electra
You may be sure I am ashamed, although you do not think it. I know why I act so wrongly, so unlike myself.
The hate you feel for me and what you do compel me against my will to act as I do.
For ugly deeds are taught by ugly deeds.

Clytemnestra
O vile and shameless, I and my words and deeds give you too much talk.

Electra
It is you who talk, not I. It is your deeds, and it is deeds invent the words.

Clytemnestra
Now by the Lady Artemis you shall not escape the results of your behavior, when Aegisthus comes.

Electra
You see? You let me say what I please, and then you are outraged. You do not know how to listen.

Another tale of the Trojan War, Philoctetes is an incredible story about the necessity to recover Philoctetes from Lemnos, where Odysseus and the Greeks abandoned the injured bowman to his screams. His possession of the mark-perfect bow of Heracles is prophesied a requirement for victory. Yet he rages at Odysseus and it is only by his cunning use of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus and the divine intervention of Heracles that Philoctetes is persuaded.

In all, all of these remaining plays are critical to understanding the Homeric epics. Their tales are woven throughout the larger mythology, and it is an understanding of the variations that one can come to understand the depths of Athenian tragic interpretations.