3.5/5

Ya puedo decir que he leído todo Sófocles y todo Esquilo. El primero me gusta mucho más que el último, sobre todo porque la acción de la obra se centra en los personajes y ya no en el coro; de hecho, en las obras sofócleas existe un protagonista muy marcado y muy muy delimitado. Además, los conflictos de las obras suelen ser de entre dos poderosas fuerzas opuestas, que encarnan en personajes de la tragedia, y que provocan el desenlace trágico cuando son incapaces de ceder ante la otra. Algo interesante de Sofócles, es que no expresa categóricamente cuál es la postura correcta o incorrecta, sino que lo describe de tal manera que es el público (o, en estos tiempos, el lector) quien debe descubrir eso por sí mismo. No obstante, sigo prefiriendo a Eurípides pues, si bien hay un personaje sofócleo que tiene un fuerte conflicto interno debido a sus decisiones (Neptólemo en Filóctetes), los demás suelen estar muy convencidos de sus creencias y, más bien, la tragedia se da a nivel obra, no a nivel personaje. Also, quisiera señalar que la intervención divina, así como la frecuente alusión a la fe en los dioses, va disminuyendo según avanza la edad del poeta.
Finalmente, me gustaría comentar brevemente la edición que yo leí: Cátedra suele caracterizarse por las ediciones cuidadas, con prólogos especializados, multitud de notas e introducciones a cada tragedia (al menos, eso pasa en mi edición de las tragedias de Séneca). Este volumen no es la excepción, sin embargo, eché en falta la versificación de las tragedias, sobre todo tomando en cuenta que la edición no está pensada para un público no especializado; también me pareció que las introducciones eran demasiado simplonas: el autor sólo daba un resumen de la tragedia y sus apreciaciones personales de ésta, pero sin comentar antecedentes, influencias o características métricas de la tragedia; las notas tampoco me gustaron mucho, pues --aunque varias comentaban el griego-- la mayoría eran simplemente el autor diciendo porque su interpretación del texto era la única correcta. Por último, he de admitir que la traducción no me convenció 100%, más que nada por el continuo uso de "mozo" para decir "hijo" y las construcciones del tipo "esta tu hija, este tu palacio, estos tus argumentos".
Ahora, mis calificaciones a cada tragedia. Mis favoritas, por supuesto, son Edipo Rey, Electra y Antígona, aunque Edipo en Colono también me gustó bastante.
Áyax: 3/5
Las traquinias: 3/5
Antígona: 4/5
Edipo Rey: 5/5
Electra: 4.5/5
Filoctetes: 3.5/5
Edipo en Colono: 3.5/5

Of the seven plays, two of them have a happy ending. All are bathed in tragedy, but in two, the struggling protagonists get what they wanted, but as it is common of tragedies, not what they deserved.

A Must Read for everybody.

Sofocles escribe muy bien.
Todas las tragedias estuvieron bellas, por decirlo así ya que en realidad fueron tragicas pero de todas formas me gustaron.
El drama y yo nos llevamos muy bien y en ellas ahí mucho drama.
Todas super recomendadas para cualquiera que tenga curiosidad de leerlas; no son para nada complicadas pero odio las partes en que salen los coros, esas partes en especial sí me fueron tediosas.
Anyway, aplaudo a las tres tragedias de temas tebnos: El Rey Edipo; Edipo en Colono; Antogora.
Fueron las que mas me gustaron de todas porque tienen lindas lecciones de vida a mi parecer.
Termino confesando que me gustaría que si Sofocles viviera me encantaría que él escribiera un libro de mi vida.

La voz de Sófocles sobrevive milenios después y por una buena razón. Hace muchos años quería leer sus tragedias, principalmente para conocer estas historias clásicas, pero también para entender el trasfondo y la importancia de lo escrito por uno de los autores y dramaturgos más inolvidables de todos los tiempos.
Lo que más me gustó de leer estas tragedias fue ver la luz que pone Sófocles sobre la naturaleza humana, su fragilidad tanto material como moral y su pequeñez frente al tiempo. Las tragedias muestran lo más bajo de la humanidad, lo más oscuro y lo más bello, la lealtad es protagonista tanto como la traición, llenando a los diálogos de una dualidad casi confusa pero bellísima.
No voy a negar que hubieron unas tragedias que me parecieron inferiores en su calidad temática, como Las Traquinias, sin embargo la magistral construcción de personajes y sus interacciones me dejó cautivado. Me dio mucho gusto poder analizar diferentes aspectos de nuestra realidad humana, tan efímera en el plano de la existencia, y poder encontrar en voces tan antiguas los murmullos que forman la voz de una sociedad en la que aún vivimos.

Edipo en Colono...siento que fue una historia de relleno y solo para mostrar la muerte de Edipo y como se esta formando lo que va a ser la tragedia de Antigona. Es como una de esas secuelas innecesarias y que nadie pidió (creo)
⭐️⭐️⭐️/5.

De todas las tragedias de Sófocles en general puedo decir que me han gustado mucho. Podría decirse que tragedia es mi género favorito y las de Sófocles lo superan. Básicamente son todas de conocimiento general y eso esta bueno. Hasta ahora mi favorita fue Antigona ya que la había leído como obra de teatro versión Argentina de Lepoldo Marechal y me gustó. Ese drama creado por la protagonista si te atrapa y te hace leer la historia rapidísimo. Le sigue Electra, yo creo que mis favoritas son las que tienen protagonistas mujeres porque siento que le dan mas tragedia y emoción a la obra (no es porque seamos más sensibles ni nada de eso) solo es que siento que le ponemos mas pecho a las situaciones trágicas de la vida y eso se ve reflejado en estas obras en la que se produce una catarsis en el espectador (que era el propósito de la tragedia e imaginó que en su momento si lo causó profundamente).
Atención que tampoco digo que Ayax y Edipo no hayan tenido sus momentos de drama, solo es que yo no lo sentí tan así. Los veía más como dos hombres medio pelotudos que se mandaban una cagada atrás de la otra. No generalizo de que todos los hombres son así, pero estos protagonistas los sentí de esta forma.
Sin nada más que decir, lean las tragedias de Sófocles

Very good edition by A. C. Pearson. This volume contains the Greek text of the surviving seven tragedies by Sophocles with critical apparatus, and an introduction. The title, introduction and notes of the critical apparatus are written in Latin, as it is customary in this Oxford scholarly editions.

"No mortal is hard for evil fortune to capture." ~Oedipus at Colonus

"Did you then dare transgress that law?
Yes, for it was not Zeus that had published that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the gods below." ~ Antigone

La noción de grandeza es relativa, ya se sabe, y requiere siempre algún tipo de comparación. En literatura, podemos comparar la visión del mundo de un autor con la de otro (esto amplía la literatura); o bien, podemos comparar la visión del autor con la nuestra propia (esto amplía nuestra personalidad); o bien, la visión del autor con el mundo mismo (esto amplía la vida). En este último sentido, pareciera como si la grandeza fuera imposible y absoluta a la vez, si tal cosa no fuera absurda. Autores como Sófocles nos hacen creer que no lo es.
Su teatro, como la vida, está lleno de instantes que parecen llevar en sí algún misterio salvador, pero al mismo tiempo, cualquier intento por nuestra parte de aprehender el todo nos deja solos frente a una ironía oscura y brutal (Hijo de la Fortuna, se llama Edipo a sí mismo) y frente a un número tristemente grande de problemas irresolubles.
Sus obsesiones, las de Sófocles, siguen siendo las nuestras. Las relaciones entre poder y autoridad, entre hecho y palabra, entre prudencia y pasión, entre destino y deseo, siguen siendo de un interés vital. Pero una vez que encontramos estas cuestiones en su teatro, se nos aparecen más claras y por lo tanto, inesperada paradoja, más confusas y más terribles ( Como si se iluminara una caverna en la que yace alguna bestia de la que no conocíamos más que sus lejanos ronquidos). Con todo, la lectura de Sófocles (mi griego favorito, por cierto) es una experiencia gozosa.
Cuando lo leo, lamento no entender el griego antiguo. Pero incluso en la traducción puede uno encontrar su fuerza. El horror de Edipo ante su destino, el bello reencuentro entre Electra y Orestes, la sufrida soledad de Filoctetes, la soberbia ira de Ajax, etc... todo resulta verosímil, potente, conmovedor, y se adhiere a nuestro ser de un modo definitivo. Como dijera el poeta (otro poeta): he aquí una imagen de anhelo/ y nada volverá a ser ya lo mismo.


Verdaderamente, un autor para toda toda la vida.

Edipo Rey *****
Edipo en Colona **
Antigona ***
Electra ****
Las Tarquinas *
Filoctetes ***
Ayax *****

Average: 3.28 *
Epicness Bonus + 0.72 *
-------------------
Total ****

Il ne nous reste que sept pièces de Sophocle, ce grand dramaturge athénien. Suite au challenge lancé par @antastesialit, #littéraventures , j'ai lu 5 de ces pièces antiques et me suis retrouvée transportée dans ce passé lointain, cette contrée de mythes et de héros.


Des cinq pièces lues ( Les Trachiniennenes, Antigone, Ajax, Oedipe Roi, Electre ), les plus marquantes pour moi ont été Antigone, Oedipe roi et Electre, bien que chacune offre son cocktail d'émotions fortes et soit empreinte d'un immense lyrisme.
Les personnages sont cultes, les dieux omniprésents. Les sentiments humains et la destinée, au coeur du théâtre tragique, font de ces oeuvres des messages de sagesse universels.


Malgré cela, les rites et les croyances, les us et coutumes des grecs de l'Antiquité, permettent aux lecteurs de découvrir un monde très éloigné du nôtre. Aux valeurs et à la conception de la vie très différentes.
Ainsi le suicide est très présent et souvent représenté comme un acte de bravoure alors que dans nos sociétés occidentales modernes, il est souvent jugé égoïste et lâche.
Le recours aux oracles est également la règle tout comme les sacrifices.


Une lecture stimulante, qui me donne envie de lire plus de théâtre.

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.

أتممت "أوديب ملكا"، و يا لأوديب المسكين ويا لعبث القدر به، عمل عظيم شهد التاريخ بذلك للأسف ترجمة الدكتور بدوي ركيكة نوعا ما وتفتقر للمسة الأدبية .