Read Oedipus the King Online

Authors: Sophocles,Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles

Tags: #Drama, #Ancient & Classical, #Literary Collections, #Poetry, #test

Oedipus the King

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title
:
Oedipus the King
author
:
Sophocles.; Bagg, Robert.
publisher
:
University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0870233629
print isbn13
:
9780870233623
ebook isbn13
:
9780585387833
language
:
English
subject
Oedipus (Greek mythology)--Drama, Tragedies.
publication date
:
1982
lcc
:
PA4414.O7B33 1982eb
ddc
:
882/.01
subject
:
Oedipus (Greek mythology)--Drama, Tragedies.
Page iii
Oedipus The King
By Sophocles
Translated by Robert Bagg
 
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Page iv
Copyright © 1982 by Robert Bagg
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
All rights fully protected under copyright law. Except in circumstances which clearly comply with fair use as defined under copyright law, anyone wishing to reproduce or produce this work in any form, including amateur or professional performances, must write for permission to The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 01004.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 8119735
ISBN 0-87023-361-0 (cloth); 0-87023-362-9 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

 

Page v
For Sally with love
 
Page vii
Introduction
1
Oedipus the King
19
Notes
69
 
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Page 1
Introduction
My aim has been to make a translation of Sophocles'
Oedipus Tyrannus
that is both accurate and playable. Total literal accuracy is probably beyond reach, given our imperfect and embattled knowledge of what Sophocles' Greek actually means at many points. Nor is it desirable, given the odd and distracting locutions literal translation of Greek will frequently impose on English. What is desirable is that a translation preserve as much of Sophocles' meaning, both primary and ramifying, as possible, in language clear enough to have dramatic effect. This I have tried to do. Some scholars have approached literal accuracy, most notably Thomas Gould in his translation and absorbing commentary on the play.
1
I have translated with the exacting example of Gould and other scholars in my mind, but with the needs of actors and audience for strong speech rhythms in my ears.
A recent and very healthy interest of professional Hellenists has been to use their scholarly and critical understanding of Greek drama as a guide to performance.
2
The absence of stage directions in the ancient manuscripts has made such projects both intriguing and necessary. My own practice has been to limit stage directions, mostly using them to suggest an appropriate entrance or exit line, or to propose an action that seems textually prompted. In this introduction, however, I will comment more freely about staging the play. Any play, and even more an ancient Greek play, that comes to us lacking not only stage directions, but its original musical score and choreography, asks for the fulfillment only a stage production can give. An ancient Greek drama is truly an unperformed richness until it is mated with action and music. (Modern productions in which the choral odes are chanted and the chorus rooted are rarely inspiring. The odes make their best dramatic sense when their words are set to music and sung, and the thought in the words expressed in the dance.)
Too often
Oedipus The King
in particular is treated less as a score to be sung than as one to be settled, a bitter arena in which the moral and philosophical forces of the cosmos contend, and where we imagine our own contribution might carry the day. Because so much of our cultural tradition radiates from it, and because the nerves it touches are so sensitive, and the issues so large,
Oedipus The King
provokes passionate debate. Is Oedipus innocent or guilty? What does the play imply about the nature of divinity? Of the
1
Sophocles,
Oedipus The King
, trans. with commentary by Thomas Gould (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970).
2
The leading contemporary analyst of stage action in ancient Greek drama is Oliver Taplin,
Greek Tragedy in Action
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

 

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Page 2
family? Of the human psyche? If this is the ultimate tragedy, how should we define
tragedy
?
Though fascinating in themselves, such debates also have a practical theatrical bearing. How we resolve them will affect how we imagine the play in performance. Accordingly, rather than simply interpret the play's meaning, I will try to visualize some important moments of the action in the light of that interpretation. There is much that no modern production can give us, especially the irrecoverable elements of the Athenian Festival of Dionysos, a holy occasion attended by priests and protected by gods, where the story the play told was part of a living religious tradition. The performance itself combined music, dancing, and acting with an authority and in a style now lost. But a good modern production may still clarify much that is distinctly Greek and Sophoclean. The Sophoclean idea I wish to explore, because it is likely to be strange to a modern audience, is that of the daimon

*, the divinity who commands the shape and outcome of an individual life.

The first question a reader of
Oedipus The King
will ask and ponder is the question of Fate. Can it be true, as the events of his life strongly suggest, that Oedipus' actions have been shaped by a malign divinity? Though it is possible, by using a good deal of wanton ingenuity, to claim Oedipus' will has been free as his choices led him unaware into catastrophe, it seems to me that our first and overwhelming impression is correct, that the gods
have
willed Oedipus to do what he did. Not only do Oedipus and all the other characters come to this conclusion, but the design and verbal texture of the play confirm it. We may be convinced by analysis that the events of Oedipus' life must be fated, but in the theater it is the constant allusion to a daimonic shaping force that makes this fatedness vivid and powerful. Oedipus' story (and though a modern audience is likely to know its bare outlines, an ancient one would know it fully and familiarly from other plays and mythical sources) goes briefly as follows:
Laius, the King of Thebes, has learned from an oracle that he will be killed by his own son. When his wife, Jocasta, bears a son, Laius entrusts it to one of his shepherds with orders that he kill it by exposing it with its ankles pierced and bound on Mt. Cithairon. Instead, out of pity, the shepherd gives the child to his friend, a shepherd from Corinth, who returns with the child to Corinth and presents it to Polybos the king, who raises the child (whose swollen ankles cause him to be named Oedipus), as his son and heir. When Oedipus is a young man, a drunken guest at a feast tells him he is not Polybos' real son. Upset, Oedipus questions his parents about his birth, but they

 

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