What a brilliant collection, and now that I’ve read Sophocles’ entire oeuvre, I consider him one of my favorite playwrights

Philoctetes is one of the most brilliant portraits of pain, physical and emotional pain. And Odysseus, who appeared as the commonsensical counterpart to the sons of Atreus in Ajax (a superb portrait of heroic madness in the face of perceived insult), is here the deceptive schemer. Thinking now of Philoctetes, I am surprised by how singular The Odyssey’s multifaceted and mostly sympathetic portrayal of Odysseus stands out in light of Odysseus’ often negative reputation in later ancient literature.

Then the Oedipus plays are the most masterful “classic” Greek tragedies, full of gravity, beautiful language, elevated grandeur and nobility, and more. Oedipus the King is perhaps the more perfect, but so far my preference goes toward Oedipus at Colonus for the serenity that pervades that play and for the presence of a wiser and more peaceful Oedipus and for the noble presence of Theseus

And Antigone is special for its dramatization of the resistance of right against might, of the individual against the State. And it’s perhaps Sophocles’ bleakest play, insofar that there are three deaths at the climax - Antigone, Haemon, and Eurydice. At least the Oedipus plays establish a kind of noble stance in relation to fate, and Philoctetes ends with a hope of healing. Antigone seems the most relentless of the Sophoclean masterpieces.

Un libro che per me ha colmato un vuoto, ma che potrebbe farlo anche per tanti altri. C'è questa cosa che da un lato siamo imbevuti di cultura classica e di citazioni greche e latine da tutte le parti, dall'altro quelli che non hanno compiuto studi classici si trovano non in grado di goderne appieno. Nei licei scientifici (degli istituti tecnici ancora meno, ovviamente)di letteratura latina si fa pochissimo, di quella greca niente affatto. Con l'aggravante che la prima è la figlia neanche troppo originale della seconda, e che quindi è quella che non viene fatta quella che si sarebbe dovuto invece fare.

Dopo i poemi omerici, con tutto il loro carico di millenaria fama, ma anche di brutale ed animalesca ptimitività, si passa di botto all' Atene di Pericle, dell'acropoli, della nascita della filosofia. La grande tragedia greca, Eschilo Euripide ed, appunto, Sofocle. C'è di mezzo un periodo lunghissimo del quale non si sa pressochè nulla, e infatti la differenza si vede, eccome se si vede. Le tragedie di Sofocle (delle quali ci è rimasto pochissimo, al punto da stare tutto in un libro come questo) raccontano già di un genere letterario strutturato, con le sue regole, la sua metrica, i suoi topoi ben definiti ai quali ogni personaggio deve aderire. Niente a che vedere con le canzoni che stavano dietro all' Iliade ed all'Odissea.
Raccontano anche di un mondo che è già molto più civile. Le polis sono diventate un mondo civile, con le sue regole, a volta addirittura democratiche, con un rappporto con il sacro che è divenuto religioso. Sono città tanto più simili a noi, o comunque più simili all'idea che abbiamo del mondo classico come ci viene tramandato.

E' un mondo in cui la sopravvivenza della civiltà non è più messa in discussione, nel quale quindi ci si può occupare di ciò che sta oltre la mera sussistenza, qualcusa che sta sopra ed è più grande. Omero ci racconta dell'animalesca ricerca di un po' di cibo e di un riparo per la notte, nelle tragedie dell'età classica si parla dell'uomo, del senso della sua vita, del rapporto con gli dei e con un mondo che resta comunque ostile. La cesura è nettissima, e se ne accorge anche un profano.

Pagina dopo pagina, si fa la conoscenza diretta di figure che si è sentito nominare tante volte. Teseo l'uccisore del Minotauro, Edipo il vincitore della sfinge, e poi l'arciere Filottete, il focoso Neottolemo, Aiace Telamonio con la sua follia...
E quì secondo me torna fuori un punto che emergeva anche leggendo Omero. Sono tutti personaggi del mondo antico, e quindi poco profondi, semplici, diretti, coerenti con se stessi, anche se a differenza degli eroi omerici hanno una caratura psicologica nettamente superiore. Le loro sofferenze si traducono sempre al di fuori da se stessi, fuori verso un mondo dominato da divinità verso cui non si ha nessun controllo. Questa semplicità tipica del mondo antico nel pensiero collettivo non c'è, forse per colpa di un pesante neoclassicismo ottocentesco che ci ha ricamato davvero troppo, mascheraando il mondo ellenico con un idealismo davvero troppo pesante.

Sono contento di aver letto le tragedie di Sofocle. Hanno gettato un po' di luce sul mondo greco che ci fa da padre ma del quale troppa gente ha solo sentito parlare. E mi hanno raccontato di che cosa era davvero il mondo antico che no, non era quello di Foscolo, di Monti o di Pindemonte o addirittura di Antonio Canova. Quella era tutta fuffa, tutto un raccontarsela.

I finished this new volume of translations of the seven existing plays by Sophocles last night. I unhesitatingly recommend this new work of the translators, Robert Bagg and James Scully, as they really did an outstanding job of presenting these powerful dramas with lyricism and impact. For your information, I am providing a list of the plays in the collection and the primary translator--

Aias (James Scully)
Women of Trakhis (Robert Bagg)
Philoktetes (James Scully)
Elektra (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus the King (Robert Bagg)
Oedipus at Kolonos (Robert Bagg)
Antigone (Robert Bagg)

Interestingly enough, this was the first time that I had read Aias (Ajax) or the Women of Trakhis and I really, really enjoyed both of them. While I was familiar with the story of Ajax from The Iliad, I have to say that Sophocles and James Scully really made me realize the physical and psychological toll that warfare and combat has upon a soldier. One has to believe that what is described in Aias can only be classified as "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD). We see the toll that this 'madness' takes upon the family and friends of Ajax, and it is truly heartbreaking. In the Introduction to the volume, Bagg and Scully indicate that excerpts from both Aias and Philoktetes have been performed for members of the American armed services and their families in the context of addressing and dealing with PTSD. Bravo!

Finally, I have to say that I consider myself somewhat a connoisseur associated with Sophocles' Antigone, and the version in this collection is simply superb. The dialog is spare, clipped, and drips with pathos--we emotionally respond not only to what Kreon and Antigone say in the play, but the overall intent of Sophocles in writing the play. As Antigone prepares to meet her fate she laments,

"Hades, who chills each one of us to sleep,
will guide me down to Acheron's shore.
I'll go hearing no wedding hymn
to carry me to my bridal chamber, or songs
girls sing when flowers crown a bride's hair;
I'm going to marry the River of Pain." (890-895)

That'll wrench your heart-strings. Bagg and Scully have given us a new version of Sophocles that is dramatic, poetic, and lyrical. The language incorporated in these translations is not in the slightest degree flowery or excessive. In my opinion, not one word is wasted, the emotion is right there--in your face--and it just feels right. Read these plays and see what you think.

Tenés que cerrar el θέατρον los grandes hacen eso

Source inépuisable de pensées; à lire et à relire sans modération

Áyax, de Sófocles, nos devuelve al Ciclo Troyano que habíamos dejado en Orestíada. Los eventos que hacen parte de este universo se ubican en lo que se suele llamar la Edad Heroica: una estrecha franja de tiempo limitada a unas pocas generaciones anteriores y posteriores a la guerra de Troya.
https://www.musaparadisiaca.co/2020/0...

Aias - 3 Stars
Women of Trakhis - 5 Stars
Philoktetes - 4 Stars
Elektra - 4 Stars
Oedipus the King - 4 Stars
Oedipus at Kolonos - 5 Stars
Antigone - 5 Stars

A beautiful, simple translation. I only wish more than 7 of Sophocles' 125 plays had survived.

m.a.r.a.v.i.l.h.a.
(comprado para reler elektra. seguem-se os dois édipos e antígona)

"The kind of man who always thinks that he is right,
that his opinions, his pronouncements,
are the final word,
is usually exposed as hollow as they come.
But a wise man is flexible, has much to learn
without a loss of dignity." Pg 366

It is never a bad time to get right with the classics. After having read Oedipus and Antigone several times in multiple translations (Jebb, Arnott, Fagles) over the years, I decided to read all of Sophocles’s extant plays—a mere seven out of 123 (civilization is fragile; don’t let anyone tell you differently).

I am here reading the version by poet and translator Paul Roche for Signet Classics. According to Wikipedia, Roche was a second-generation Bloomsberrie, enemy to Vanessa Bell and lover of Duncan Grant. (Was it Hugh Kenner who, with a mixture of homophobic venom and campy cattiness, described Bloomsbury as a congeries of men and women all in love with Duncan Grant?) As a translator, Roche is much less devoted to Biblical fustian than Jebb, and his verse is as simple and conversational as Fagles’s while also being more carefully wrought. As he tells us in his translator’s preface, he retains Sophocles’s meter by using what he rather oddly calls “Freewheeling Iambic”—i.e., essentially a form of accentual verse, not unlike Hopkins’s neo-medieval “sprung rhythm,” wherein the poet counts the beats per line without also counting the syllables, this to keep a flexible but percussive regularity, as of natural speech. Roche adopts this technique, he says, to give English readers a sense of the speed of the plays in Greek, and it works quite well for that; but he confesses also that it is beyond his ingenuity to reproduce the density of sound in Sophocles—the alliteration, consonance, and assonance that creates such magnificent textures out of what Roche assures us are common Greek words.

Roche arranges the plays in the historical/mythological order of events they describe, so that the volume opens with Ajax, set during the Trojan War, and ends with Antigone, the conclusion of the Theban cycle—even though Antigone is a work of Sophocles’s middle period and famously late plays, such as Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, get displaced into the middle of the volume. I suppose this is the least confusing way to do it for students, but I would have preferred to track the development of the playwright’s vision and sensibility.

My brief responses to the plays themselves, in the order in which they appear in this volume:

Ajax: In this play set during the Trojan War (after the death of Achilles), the great warrior Ajax has just been vexed by Athena. Furious that the armor of Achilles has gone to Odysseus, he plots to murder Agamemnon and Meneleaus, whom he not unreasonably blames for having dragged him away from family and homeland for the sake of their corrupt and sordid war. But Athena tricks Ajax into murdering instead a head of cattle seized from the Trojans before it can be distributed among the Argives. When he comes out of his illusion, the mortified and furious Ajax plots and eventually accomplishes suicide, despite the protests of his sailors (the chorus) and of his touchingly though realistically loyal captive bride Tecmessa. Following Ajax’s death, a dispute ensues between his half-brother Teucer and the Atreus brothers over whether his body should be buried (shades of Antigone); eventually the shrew and politic Odysseus mediates and the burial takes place. This is not a very action-packed play; the main interest is in its laments and debates, particularly in Ajax’s climactic curse upon the House of Atreus, Teucer’s rancor against same, and Odysseus’s amusing opening conversation with Athena. (Odysseus is an ambiguous figure here, ethically dubious but pragmatic and level-headed in a play all about seeking balance; Athena, standing behind him, is even more questionable.) Even more interesting than the language, though, is the mise en scène: Ajax among the slaughtered cattle in the play’s beginning; Ajax’s body impaled upon his own sword, oozing gore, throughout the final third. This is a play whose superficial resolution cannot cloak its terrible assertion that if the gods will it, your life will become an abattoir. (Your own hubris will certainly not be to your advantage in the situation, however.)

Electra: This a protracted revenge play, poignant for its tender portrayal of its heroine, reduced to the conditions of a slave and thereby able to sympathize with the conditions of slavery. Her repeated references to herself as a nightingale, singing of her losses, is moving in itself and more moving when one considers it as a poetic trope that will resonate through the centuries—in Ovid, Shakespeare, Keats, Eliot:

ELECTRA: Shallow is one who forgets a parent’s
Pitiless end. Give me instead
The sorrowful nightingale, she who sings
Its Itys—forever distraught:
Emissary of Zeus.

The confrontation between Electra and her sister (who wants to be prudent) is a nice revisitation of the Antigone/Ismene conflict in Sophocles’s earlier play. Orestes’s fake death, reported by his older confederate to mislead the villainous Clytemnestra, is a masterpiece of action-narrative, justifying the back cover’s reference to Sophocles as a “tragic Homer.” Clytemnestra herself is too petulant to be impressive, though her self-justification (that she killed Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of Iphigenia) is compelling, despite Electra’s correct reply that this does not justify adulterous murder. Not the most impressive Greek play, but worth reading for its heroine.

Philoctetes: In this play’s backstory, the titular snakebitten warrior has been abandoned on a deserted island called Lemnos by his Greek comrades during the Trojan War because the stench of his wounded foot so disgusted them. The play begins when crafty Odysseus, along with the dead Achilles’s son, Neoptolemus, land on Lemnos to retrieve Philoctetes, because an oracle has revealed that the Greeks will not defeat Troy without him. This play is notable for its particularly unpleasant portrayal of the scheming Odysseus, a figure Sophocles seems to find repellent, as he attempts to trick Philoctetes into coming back to the Greek camp. The decent Neoptolemus forges a tender relationship with the aging, injured warrior and resists Odysseus’s deceit. (As in the similarly late play of old age, Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles elegiacally portrays a youngster coming to love an older, more vulnerable person who relies on the aid and loyalty of youth.) Philoctetes’s characterization is masterly, from his sad way of asking after his former associates and lamenting the news of their deaths (including that of Achilles) to his sick old man’s querulousness, especially potent in his rage against Odysseus. He really does remind me of a Beckett character, with his unutterably sad vulnerability, his bittersweetly comic and half-impotent fury, and even his injured foot (a motif in Beckett, poet of pain, whose characters often literally “can’t go on,” because they lack the power of locomotion). But Sophocles has the gods whereas Beckett has nothing, and this play, not a tragedy at all, ends full of promise, as the 90-year-old playwright and his suffering hero look to the horizon:

Good-bye, sea-skirted isle of Lemnos:
Breeze me away on a faultless voyage
To whatever haven Fate will waft me,
To whatever purlieus the wish of my friends
And the universal god of happenings brings me.

The Women of Trachis: This one is almost Euripidean in its sympathy and complexity. It is the story of how Deianeira, trying to win back the love of her womanizing husband, the hero Hercules, after he captures a younger bride, accidentally kills him by sending him a shirt bequeathed to her by the centraur Nessus. Nessus, unbeknownst to her, had poisoned it to revenge himself on Hercules for wounding him as he attempted to rape Deianeira. The second half of the play, full of the very slowly dying Hercules’s complaints, is not interesting, but Deianeira’s resigned, intelligent, and forthright reflections on the fatality of love are quite moving, as is her eventual suicide:

You are talking to a woman
    who is neither perverse nor ignorant
    of the ways of men
    and knows the inconstancy of the human heart.
Anyone who has a boxing match with Eros is a fool.
The god of love does exactly what he likes—
    even with the gods.
If he rules me,
    then why not another woman in the same way.

Oedipus the King: What is left to say about Oedipus? It is a masterfully constructed play, full of symbolic economy (references to eyes and vision are pervasive) and, every time I experience it, it is unbearably suspenseful in its dramatic irony. Everybody from the ancient audience to the post-Freudian reader knows Oedipus’s story before he does, rendering the play a master-class in sympathy with sublime catastrophe. Even though this play allows its spectators a god’s-eye-view, we know that we, no less than the tragic hero, are caught in the toils of fate and must one day submit. Few moments in literature are more moving than Jocasta’s farewell: “Good-bye, my poor deluded, lost and damned! / There’s nothing else that I can call you now.” (Not son, not husband.) Oedipus’s tragic flaw, I note, is a trust in himself (borne of solving the Sphinx’s riddle without realizing its implications for all mortals). When he refers to himself, earlier in the play, as “a stranger to the story” of Laius’s murder, we know that the terrible story is in fact about him and no one else. Seeing himself as a rational foe of the monstrous (perhaps also, implicitly, the sexual, the feminine, and the deadly), he does not recognize the monstrous in himself. But the sublimity of his self-trust comes from his pursuing his investigation to the end of the line, until he finds a truth so horrifying to look upon that he must strike at the organs of perception, thereby becoming precisely the decrepit man at evening, going on three legs, referred to in the Sphinx’s riddle. I recall that Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, were able to mount their attack on the entirety of Western civilization by treating Odysseus (about whom Sophocles is so ambivalent) as its founding representative—Odysseus, the polytropic man, who always wins by cheating. Of course, there would have been a hint of self-praise in selecting Oedipus as representative of Enlightenment. But Oedipus is the ultimate in self-scrutiny and self-criticism, as the modern West might say of itself, if only it weren’t too self-critical to congratulate itself so. In any case, Oedipus may investigate himself and punish himself, but it does not make him (or us) any less a monster. This truth—that knowledge is its own good but no salvation—suggests the limits of any Enlightened perspective.

Oedipus at Colonus: Sophocles’s final vision, the drama of the aged Oedipus’s transfiguration, his mysterious near-assumption on the outskirts of Theseus’s Athens:

Some emissary maybe from heaven came;
    or was the adamantine floor of the dead
    gently reft for him with love?
The passing of this man was painless
    with no trace of pain nor any loud regret.
It was of mortal exits the most marvelous.

There is loud conflict, with the blind and vulnerable Oedipus in marvelous command of language as he rebukes his enemies—including Creon and his son, Polyneices. As Roche observes, “his years of suffering have raised him to a holy dignity as the recognized vehicle of divine justice.” The drama gives way to the mysterious ritual of its conclusion, a kind of authorial prayer for grace on the lip of the grave. Meanwhile, the chorus of Athenian elders concludes, at the play’s end, as Sophocles nears his own death and a weeping Antigone walks offstage to her fate,

Come, then, cease your crying
Keep tears from overflowing
All’s ordained past all denying.

A wisdom much out of fashion—and not actually comforting—but fortifying.

Antigone: Now this play I have never quite understood. Ever since Hegel, it is famous for supposedly representing a confrontation between two viewpoints, each of which is right on its own terms. But Creon is not right on any terms. Everyone in the play agrees that his decree against burying Polyneices is impious, a slight against the gods that will invite punishment. Moreover, his ruling is impractical from a pragmatic political perspective—while a leader wants to make himself feared and respected, petty dictatorial actions against a defeated enemy seem like a confession of insecurity, a display of inner weakness rather than strength. As for Antigone, she may be technically correct about the familial and religious need to bury her brother, but Sophocles presents her as a heroine so death-entranced as to be positively Decadent (I imagine she is the inspiration for Wilde’s Salome). I believe some have suggested that Antigone has an incestuous desire for her brother, a plausible interpretation given that she is herself a child of incest. But she justifies risking her life for her brother in coldly rational terms, terms so rational that they actually exclude piety (since she avers that she would not risk death to bury any other family member): if you lose a husband or a child, you may marry or bear another, but you can’t find or make more siblings. Again, correct on a technicality, but all her emotion, all her desire, is for death itself, because what does she, who has lost so much, have to live for?—

Come, tomb, my wedding chamber, come!
You sealed off habitations of the grave!
My many family dead, finished, fetched,
    in a final muster to Persephone.

There is much to admire in this brief play, from the chorus’s extraordinary oration on human power and limitation to the brief but perfectly evocative roles for Haemon (a Romeo avant la lettre, as Roche points out in his introduction) and the prudent (or cowardly) Ismene. I do not think this play can bear the weight of its political interpretation—as a staging of the rival claims of family and state—since both family and state are so utterly disordered in this story of the house of Oedipus. But as a drama about human despair and perversity, about the irresistible urge some of us—the fatally stubborn Creon no less than death’s bride, Antigone—feel to take our lives to their ultimate conclusions in some spectacular gesture, it is unrivaled.

تراجيديات سوفقليس
سبع مسرحيات للشاعر الإغريقى سوفقليس أو سوفوكليس
ترجمها من اليونانية و قدمها وعلق عليها أستاذ الفلسفة د. عبد الرحمن بدوى

أشهر مسرحيات سوفقليس هى أوديب ملكا و كنت قبل ان أقرأ المسرحيات سمعت كتاب صوتى للكاتب الراحل على أحمد باكثير اسمه مأساة أوديب و تأثرت به
كثيرا و عندما علمت انه محاكاة للمسرحية الأصلية لسوفقليس قررت أن أقرأ النص الأصلى مع باقى مسرحيات سوفقليس

شبّه الدكتور عبد الرحمن بدوى عقدة أوديب لعالم النفس الشهير فرويد بالترهات

المسرحيات

آياس
آياس هو صديق الفارس الشهير أخيل أو أخيلوس و كان معه خلال حصار طروادة فى ألياذة هوميروس الشهيرة

أوديب ملكا
مأساة أوديب مع والديه لايوس و يوكستا

أنتيجونا
إبنة أوديب

الكترا
إبنة أجاممنون و عمها هو منلاوس زوح هيلانة التى هربت مع باريس إلى طروادة

أوديب فى كولونا
أوديب يذهب مع ابنتيه إلى أثينا ليموت هناك

فيلوكتيت
صديق البطل الأسطورى هركليس و ذهب مع اليونانيين لإعادة هيلانة زوجة منلاوس

نساء مدينة تراخس
مأساة موت البطل الأسطورى هركليس

المسرحيات بها الكثير من الأقتباسات المليئة بالحكمة

5/5 Stars (%100/100)

Includes all 7 of Sophocles's surviving works. Instead of adding all of them separately, I've decided to add this one only. (Same as Shakespeare) I've read all of these plays multiple times. I only added Turkish editions of the plays separately. Great compilation of plays, definitely recommended.