چه لذتی بردم از خوندن این سه تراژدی یونان باستان.

اصلا باورم نمی‌شد ۲۰۰۰ سال پیش یا همچین حدودی نوشته شده باشن و هنوز انقدر جذاب و گیرا برای من مخاطب قرن بیست و یکمی باشن.

سه نمایشنامه «ادیپوس شهریار»، «ادیپوس در کلونس» و «آنتیگنه».

ادیپوس فرزند کایدوس نفرین شده که تقدیرش کشتن پدر و به همسری گرفتن مادر خودش هست. قطعا میدونید که فروید نظریه «عقده ادیپ» رو از این نمایشنامه برداشت کرده.
داستان ادیپوس در مواجهه با تقدیرش و داستان فرزندانش که یکی از اونها آنتیگنه باشه در ادامه نفرین ابدی که خاندانشون بهش گرفتاره توی این سه نمایشنامه نقل میشه.
یک نکته جالب این بود که خب چون نمیتونستن جنگ‌ها رو اون زمان روی صحنه اجرا کنن، یک گروه همسرایان داستان جنگ‌ها رو با آب و تاب نقل میکنه، یعنی رویدادها هم دیالوگ‌طور روایت میشن.

نمایشنامه‌‌ منظوم با ترجمه بی‌نظیر شاهرخ مسکوب که منتج شده به یک نثر کهن فاخر آهنگین که لذت خوندن رو صدچندان میکنه.

علاوه بر همه این نکات من عاشق خدایان یونانی و قصه‌هاشون هستم و چه نقش پررنگی داشتن توی این کتاب. و من از تلفظ اسمهاشون و نیرنگ‌هاشون و بازی‌هایی که با انسان فانی میکنن چقدر کیف کردم.

یک مقدمه مترجم نوشته بر این اثر که شاهکار مسلمه. یک موخره بسیار جذاب هم اضافه کرده راجع به تراژدی آنتیگنه.

اصلا در خوندن این اثر شک نکنید که از هر لحاظ باارزشه.

Good grief, what a sorry lot.

می‌تونم بگم که از جزء جزء سطرهای این کتاب لذت بردم (البته مقاله‌ی بونار روی آنتیگونه چندان برام جالب نبود). ترجمه‌ی فوق‌العاده‌ی مسکوب هم البته تاثیر زیادی داشت
خلاصه که توصیه می‌کنم حتما بخونیدش

Oedipus the King was the first Greek tragedy I read in my life, when I was still of a single-digit school age and not exactly because it was compulsory reading for my class (who wants to inflict uninentional incest on young children, anyhow?). I don't recall how old I was, besides too young, nor the exact circumstances that led me to pick up an "adult" book, but I do recall the copy belonged to an older cousin of mine who was definitely reading it for school, and that I also read Homer's two epics round the same time.

No, I wasn't traumatised. No, I don't recall being grossed out of my young wits by the amount of age-inappropriate content. No, I didn't find the story disturbing at all. No, I didn't have nightmares, and didn't remember the plot for long after.

Yes, it's probably behind my grown-up tolerance for the likes of House Lannister. Ahem!

More seriously, I never read the entire trilogy until now. Mostly because I already knew what was coming after the first play, and that more or less spoilt it for me. But currently I'm on a Big Three Tragedians reading binge, and it was Sophocles' turn. Looking in my shelves, turns out I've hoarded about seven different translations of his plays, from which I selected Robert Fagles as the best of the lot after sample-reading the others (Bagg and Kitto are next for the top three, by the way).

Did I like the two other plays that complete the Oedipan cycle, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone? Yes! Definitely yes, it's the only trilogy that got 5 stars for all three in a row, despite not being my favourite drama plot. It's too good to rate lower, in my opinion. And seeing the quality, it made me wish Sophocles' complete take on the House of Atreus hadn't been lost.

As a curious observation, there's an interesting little detail here: Sophocles chose to have Oedipus get divine compensation for his tragic fate upon death, by an ending that looked similar to biblical tales of similar tone, and also reminded me somewhat of J. R. R. Tolkien's Túrin, another tragically cursed character also driven to unintentional incest by forces beyond his control. Very interesting! What it is, I won't be telling, just do read it.

Nutshell: dude screws his mother in order to give psychoanalysis a set of master narratives.

Not a true trilogy, and written out of the order of this presentation, these texts commence from the unlikely proposition that Oedipus is somehow guilty for having scum parents--for the fact that "before three days were out / after his birth King Laius pierced his ankles / and by the hands of others cast him forth / upon a pathless hillside" (Oedipus Rex ll. 717-20) and thereafter, not knowing his father, killed him in apparent self-defense. Oedipus has no problem, it seems, believing "Was I not born evil? / Am I not utterly unclean?" (op. cit. ll. 822-23), insofar as "I and no other have so cursed myself. And I pollute the bed of him I killed" (id. ll. 820-21).

The action of the play itself begins in medias res with the proposition that Thebes suffers:

A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth,
A blight is on the cattle in the fields,
a blight is on our women that no children
are born to them. (id. ll. 25-28)

This is immediately recognizable as the locus classicus of the fantasy of demographics, the ideological trans-genre concerned with irrational fears regarding biopolitical management of populations, most recently and stunningly articulated in Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books as a 'wombplague.' (We see the same concern show up negatively in the fear of other species’ fertilities, such as in the Alien films or Jurassic Park.)

It is not for his own fault, but rather in a representative capacity, that Oedipus steps into liability for crime, to the extent that he "groans for city and myself and you at once" (id. l. 62), and likewise as a guarantor, in that the crime is a debt to be repaid ("redeem the debt of our pollution" (id. l. 313)), that conflates oikos and polis ("Are you not ashamed to air your private griefs when the country's sick?" (id. l. 635)). He is certainly a tyrant, endorsing torture (id. l. 1154) and confusing the legislative and judicial functions with his office (id. l. 235 et seq.)--but also the entire regime of making policy contingent upon religion is revealed to be the essence of tragedy here, insofar as Oedipus on the one hand enjoins the priest to diagnose the cause of the wombplague to be the foundational regicide, but then on the other hand comes to distrust priestly advice when Tiresias identifies him as the corruption, and thereby thinks it a coup d'etat by Creon, "robbery of my crown" (id. l. 535)--a fatal equivocation, surely, indicating the instability that shall always result for states who leave arbitration of the real to "go to the oracle at Pytho and inquire about the answers" (id. l. 604). If this theological determination of policy is not the fundamental pollution of the tragedy, then fault must rather be in the chorus of Theban citizens, who inform Oedipus that "you would better be dead than blind and living" (id. l. 1367)--states that approve of infanticide likely earn a wombplague.

The second text by internal chronology, Oedipus at Colonus, brings his long exile to an end, in the neighborhood of Athens--and its resolution seems like the close of a trilogy, similar to how Aeschylus' Eumenides closes out the Oresteia. The conflict in this text involves the civil war between his sons via Jocasta--both try to enlist him for whatever reason; he declines both; he cuts a deal with Theseus to be buried secretly near Athens, near the shrine of the Erinyes ("most feared Daughters of darkness and mysterious earth" (op. cit. 39-40)). The text is something of an enigma--what exactly is the story, and what is at stake?

The answer is in the third volume of Agamben's Homo Sacer, Stasis, discussing not only the conflation of oikos with polis but also the 'rules' of civil war, as discussed in the review, supra:

One curiosity of the stasis is that the Solonian constitution required the citizens to take one side or the other therein, lest the non-participant be afflicted with atimia (no-honor, or so? i.e., ‘dishonor’) “the loss of civil rights”—“not taking part in the civil war amounts to being expelled from the polis and confined to the oikos” (17). The corollary curiosity is that the constitution furthermore prohibits prosecution of crimes committed during the stasis--the amnestia, less a forgetting and more a refusal to make use of memory (21).

Oedipus, by his refusal to participate in the civil war, must be expelled definitively from the polis--his exile is made executory, say--but he cannot abide in the oikos, as the royal household tends to merge with the polis in a monarchy, but also because his household is already totally fucked up. And because he does not participate, there shall be no amnesia/amnesty for him. To the extent that these unstated rules of the stasis were salient for Athenian audiences, this must have been a powerful text--similar in effect to how the Oresteia catches Orestes in the contrary obligations to avenge one's father's death but not commit matricide. Athenian Theseus cuts the gordian knot here: "I shall not refuse this man's desire: I declare him a citizen" (id. l. 636)--which only replicates the problem of tyranny noted in connection with Oedipus Rex, conflating the legislative and judicial functions with his Athenian executive office.

In the third text, the Antigone, the Seven against Thebes that had been contemplated in Oedipus at Colonus has come to pass, Oedipus' sons are dead, and Jocasta's brother, Creon, steps into the state of exception as sovereign with the notion that "the very gods who shook the state with mighty surge have set it straight again" (op. cit. at 162), an orthopolitics that he as homo sacer embodies. His first act, once again conflating oikos and polis, and once again merging legislative and judicial function with his own office, declares that faithful Eteocles receives a state burial, whereas faithless Polyneices must remain unburied "a dinner for the birds and for the dogs" (id. l. 206). The contrary injunctions of loyalty to household and loyalty to state force Creon and Antigone to different acts--and the chorus of numbnut conservative Thebans here however admits "my mind is split at this awful sight" (id. l. 373), an ideological diremption of no easy resolution (perhaps the sort that causes stasis--Marx's 'between equal rights, force decides'). It is difficult to avoid Antigone's egalitarian position--"Death yearns for equal law for all the dead" (id. l. 519), whereas Creon is quite a bit less sympathetic ("No woman rule me while I live" (id. l. 524)). Both Antigone and Creon are in violation of Agamben's rules of the stasis, we should note, insofar as he is not engaging in amnesia/amnesty, and she had stayed with her father in the initial part of the war, only picking a side when the war was over.

Good times for the whole family. When Seneca gets a hold of this narrative, he skips much of the detective-type inquiry into uncovering the murderer of Laius and skips right to the main question of how in the holy hell does Tiresias know so much? In Sophocles, Tiresias simply shows up and tells everyone what happened. Seneca, however, is not satisfied with this sort of lazy storytelling. Rather, Seneca's Tiresias employs Tiresias' daughter, Manto, to read the sacrificial flames (op. cit. l. 309 et seq.), to read the affect of the sacrificial animals (id. l. 330 et seq.), to read the flowing of the animal's blood (id. l. 350 et sq.), and to read the entrails of the dead animal (id. l. 370 et seq.)--discovering therein "what monstrosity is this? A foetus in an unmated heifer!"--surely the worst sign possible when one is reading entrails? Thereafter, a priest is employed in necromantic arts of summoning the dead (id. l. 550 et seq.). It all leads to the same result, just a bit more interest in the techne of prophetics, without disturbing the flaw of including them at the foundation of policy.

Immediately tweeted "imagining guys in ancient Greece debating whether it's better to watch the Oedipus trilogy in chronological or release order" when I finished this today (release order). Hoping it plays a little better on Goodreads.

Ma che colpa aveva Edipo?
Che famiglia disgraziata!

Colpevoli e innocenti al tempo stesso.
Gli dei, anzi i greci, si divertivano assai a infilarsi in questi tunnel senza via d'uscita, evidentemente trovavano rassicurante pensare che non ci si potesse sottrarre a un destino micidiale, e già segnato.

I really bought this for Antigone, but I read all three. For some reason I find Greek tragedy so much easier to read than Shakespeare. And when Greeks go tragic they hold nothing back

Trebuie să recunosc că mi-au plăcut toate.

Excellent edition of the Oedipan Cycle by Grene & Lattimore.

Thing I like the most about Sophocles is his openness regarding darker fierceer aspects of human nature and the vile consequences,even if its the kings who r being unreasonable (read tyrants) he explicitly calls them out on it unlike many other ancient "king-pleasers", also I loved his love for his own city.
Antigone is probably one of my most fvrt stubborn famme fatale characters, well what can you do, like father like daughter!
It never ceases to amaze me though that all these ancient times moral values pay so much attention to the care of the Dead bodies, and such nominal value to saving the living from turning into dead bodies in the first place. (Not saying that "modern" civilisations care much about the living).
Will read again some time soon...

3.5**** rounded up

Money! Money's the curse of man, none greater.
That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from homes,
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul,
Pointing out the way to infamy and shame.

At 176 pages and consisting of 3 plays I was able to read this in one sitting (which never happens to me!).

After reading “Greek Tragedy” the other day- one of the plays was Oedipus Rex (or known in this book as Oedipus the King) and I was keen to find out more of what happened after the events in this first play.

Luckily Sophocles’ “The Theban Plays” details this. In Oedipus at Colonus we get to see what became of the exiled and, now blind, Oedipus as he travels with his daughter, Antigone, from place to place. This play also mentions (and features) Oedipus’ children by Jacosta and what has happened to them: Antigone the faithful helper, Ismene his loyal spy, and then the two sons fighting for the crown of Thebes: Eteocles the current ruler of Thebes and Polynices- the exiled brother seeking vengeance and control of the throne.
This play was interesting as we get to see what became of Oedipus after the first play and how his children developed/his relationship with them.

The third play is Antigone. This is set after Oedipus has died and what happens to the next generation of this family line (of course this is a tragedy so expect a downfall). This focuses particularly on Antigone who is ruled by her conscience regardless of law and the consequences of defying King Creon- a very prideful King.
I enjoyed the Antigone tragedy as it was great to see her stream of consciousness and doing what she believes in. This also focuses largely on Creon and his rule of “it’s my way, or the highway” style- which of course has consequences.

While I would’ve this the full 4**** as I really enjoyed them- my copy of this book just did not have the notes that I needed for the plays to fully make sense. Some points I had to pick up my phone to research what a line was referring to and this was made especially difficult by the “Chorus” of the play which could be difficult to understand. Having to pick up my phone to research some things took out some of the enjoyment of the play for me.
If this book (translation) expanded on its notes (like with the “Greek Tragedy” book) it would’ve been a much nicer reading experience for me.