SOPHOCLES: THREE TRAGEDIES.

Editedby David Grene and Richmond A. Lattimore '26. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954. 206pp. $2.50.

Three translated plays of Sophocles compose this second volume of what is to be a complete translation of Greek tragedy. In this volume the Theban plays of Sophocles, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone are translated into verse: their translators are, respectively, David Grene (who wrote the introduction to the volume), Robert Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Wyckoff. The general editors of this volume, as of the one which preceded it, are Grene and Richmond Lattimore.

This book, unlike so many translations of Greek drama, is attractive to the modern reader. The introduction, if controversial, goes straight and freshly to the basic significance of the Theban plays. The translations themselves, one quickly finds, can be read with pleasure as contemporary English poetry. One has little feeling, here, of reading a copy of an original. Mr. Fitzgerald and Miss Wyckoff are, in fact, practicing poets, and if Mr. Grene is not, he should be. His intense but restrained translation of Oedipus the King gives that play much of the excitement which it has in Greek.

Happily, the modernity of these translations is combined with fidelity to their originals. Of course, these translators have interpreted Sophocles with some poetic license. Otherwise, translation is impossible. But this volume verifies a seeming paradox about the translation of Greek drama: a relatively literal translation of the words of the original often results in an interesting and vital translation. This is true here in the case of individual lines, where Miss Wyckoff, for instance, has very successfully "tried to bring into English almost all that I thought I saw in the Greek, even through this was to run the risk of a clumsy literalism." It is also true in longer passages, where the emotional strength of the Greek is sustained and its spirit preserved. The famous choral passages, such as that in Antigone (11.332-72) describing the wonders of man, and that in Oedipus the King (11.1186-1223) in which the generations of men are counted as nothing, are fine cases in point.

The excellence of the translations in this volume is nicely complemented by the format of the book. The third volume in this series will be welcome.