May 2005

Translating choral lyric for performance
Oliver Taplin, The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford, UK

'… meters in verse are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted … a translator should begin his work with at least a metrical equivalent to the original form…' Joseph Brodsky (quoted by Peter France in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation p.5

When I have been consulted by theatre directors, I have found that one of the chief things that they want to know about is the variety and placement of delivery in Greek tragedy, above all the choral passages. They sense that something quite different from the spoken play must be going on during these substantial interruptions to the flow of the action, yet their translations give them little or no lead beyond the attribution to ' Chorus '. And it is true that most modern translators into English (I am only talking about English) do not differentiate the modes of delivery by means of language, tone, metre or verbal musicality: the most that they do is to mark them off by the typography of line length.

In the original these passages were structured, of course, in highly complex stanzaic (strophic) meters, worlds away from the spoken iambic, in more highly-wrought and coloured poetic language, with touches of doric dialect. In performance they were, so far as we know, almost always delivered by the whole chorus in united song and dance – that is what choros means. In other words there is a tonal and stylistic shift as great or greater than that between Evangelist and Chorale in Bach, or recitative and song in Mozart. And the change from the individual spoken voice to the sung group voice leaps in step with the shift in poetic register.

Yet most available translations into English do not supply directors and performers with the raw material to make something audibly and performatively different in the choral lyric passages. This is partly, without doubt, because we (in the modern West, that is) have nothing culturally equivalent to the ubiquitous yet creative choral life of ancient Greece. It is that very familiarity with choral expression that made this dimension of tragedy possible. And that should also scotch the idea, which used to be widespread, that audiences could not hear the words of the lyric passages (and by implication need not hear then in modern performances). Why should poets and performers have gone to such immense trouble with the metrics and language, and their rehearsal, if they were going to become an indistinguishable babble of sounds? So my first step is to say that the translator should produce something that – given the collaboration of sympathetic composer and others – can be heard and understood by audiences.

This means that the English probably cannot aspire to the metrical and linguistic complexity of the original. In my experience the most successful attempts in recent times to produce a performable and graspable choral mode have achieved their sense of crafted musicality through the use of rhyme. And rhymes are usually best structured (for these purposes) in fairly simple metrical forms, especially stanzaic verses, especially but by no means exclusively four-line ballad-type meters. I am thinking most of Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney, who both in their different ways achieve form and musicality without becoming either high-flown or banal. One br ief illustration from each. Instead of the more familiar Oresteia, let me give an example (picked at random) from Harrison 's (unfinished) version of Trojan Women in The Common Chorus. Here is the opening of the final chorus ( Tro 10660ff.):

The altar flames that made a bond
between us on earth and you beyond
have lost all their fragrance and now smell
of rubble and de br is and the stench of hell.

Flames can nourish, can transform,
flames bake br ead, and keep us warm
but the flames like those of Troy
do nothing, nothing, but destroy…

Plays Four (London 2002) 332

While Heaney's recent lyrics for The Burial at Thebes (Antigone) are metrically differentiated, they do not have the armature of rhyme, and they seem to me to be less effective that those of The Cure at Troy. Here is the opening of the lyric which translates Philoctetes 828ff.:

Sleep is the god-sent cure.
Deep-reaching, painless, sure.
Its touch is certain.
The light of paradise
Creeps into sleepers' eyes
As through a curtain.

But you, sir, must wake up.
Don't let this moment slip.
Hold off no longer.
Now that the coast is clear
You have to do and dare.
You were never stronger.

The Cure at Troy ( London 1990) 45-6

I have recently gained some limited experience of translation for performance; and I know that the kind of thing I am talking about can work, because I had the opportunity to translate an anthology of Greek poetry and tragedy, The Swallow Son g, for performance at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on 21 st to 24 th October last year. There I had the good fortune of gifted and sympathetic collaborators: Takis Farazis as Composer and Lydia Koniordou as Director. They were able to turn my near-doggerel into captivating and moving choros.

I am at present trying, when I can find spare br ainspace, to translate Sophocles' Oedipus (the king). I beg the seminar's indulgence for trying out work-in-progress; and I would welcome observations and advice (provided they are not too negative!). I am taking as my illustration two strophes, the second half of the great choral lyric immediately after Oedipus' discovery of the truth ( OT 1204-22). First, as a kind of 'control' the Loeb by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Harvard 1994), which 'has no literary pretensions, being intended as an aid to those who wish to understand the Greek text…'(p. vii):

But now whose story is sadder to hear, who dwells amid more cruel torments, more cruel labours through the reversal of his life? Ah, famous Oedipus, whom the same wide harbour served as child and as father on your br idal bed! How, how could the field your father sowed put up with you so long in silence?

Time the all-seeing has found you out against your will: long since it has condemned the monstrous marriage that produced offspring for you and offspring for itself. Ah, son of Laius, would that I had never set eyes on you! For I grievously lament, pouring from my lips a dirge. To tell the truth, you restored me to life and you lulled my eyes in death.

Next a translation that undoubtedly does have literary pretensions, that by Robert Fagles (Penguin 1984; first published 1977):

But now to hear your story – is there a man more agonised?
More wed to pain and frenzy? Not a man on earth,
the joy of your life ground down to nothing
O Oedipus, name for the ages –
one and the same wide harbor served you
son and father both
son and father came to rest in the same br idal chamber.
How, how could the furrows your father plowed
bear you, your agony, harrowing on
in silence O so long?

But now for all your power
Time, all-seeing Time has dragged you to the light,
judged your marriage monstrous from the start –
the son and the father tangling, both one –
O child of Laius, would to god
I'd never seen you, never, never!
Now I weep like a man who wails the dead
and the dirge comes pouring forth with all my heart!
I tell you the truth, you gave me life
my breath leapt up in you
and now you br ing down night upon my eyes

This is protracted, but its outpourings and repetitions convey a certain anguish; and there are some nice touches ­ the word-play on "harrowing", the physical and figurative associations of 'tangling'. But it is hard to imagine this version performed, let alone set to music and heard and understood.

My draft seems simple and direct by comparison. What worries me is whether that means it is naïve, or folksey, or superficial?

Now it is a different story:
now who knows greater grief?
Who lives with more misery,
haunted by fiercer strife,
than you, famous Oedipus,
now your life's changed course?
Twice you've sheltered in one harbour:
as a child you swam there,
then you plunged in as a husband –
your wedding began there.
You came from that generous haven,
and returned to anchor.
Your own father's fertile ground,
how could it bear your plough?
never crying out aloud,
so long without a sound?

The all-seeing eye of time
has, despite you, hunted you,
and discovered the same womb
gave birth to your children too,
judged your marriage as a false
marriage, son of Laios.
I wish, I wish I'd never met you –
all I can do is lament you,
pouring sorrow from my mouth.
To tell you the bitter truth:
first you gave me back my breath,
now you close my eyes in death.

Ideally I would have liked both the strophe and antistrophe to have had exact metrical correspondence – and I do usually manage this – but in this case I found there was uncontainably more to say in the strophe. There are some things I am pleased with, for example the slightly incantatory '…harbour...husband...haven', and the coda of four half-rhymed then rhymed lines, ending with 'death'. But I am not altogether happy with 'haunted by fiercer strife', or with 'has, despite you, hunted you', both of which are partly there for the sake of the rhyme. And are there too many monosyllables? Well, that is something which is shared with Harrison and Heaney; it is arguably the best route to audibility and accessibility. But is there too little that is poetically surprising, something that would not be true of the two great Hs? Maybe… But…

RESPONSES

Robert Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

It is often said that English readers lose a great deal of the meaning and rhythm of the original Greek when reading drama in translation; however, the English language can offer intriguing gains through a translator's use of rhyme. I would like to know the overall role Taplin plans for rhyme in his Oedipus ; whether it is a device used in lyric alone, or throughout the play.

The work of translators from Anna Swanwick, who aimed at 'scrupulous fidelity' in her 1865 Agamemnon but nonetheless felt that rhyme was necessary to convey the music and spirit of the choral odes, to Tony Harrison, have demonstrated the versatility of rhyme. I am interested in how rhyme shapes style and how it can play a dramatic role in the action. For instance, one strategy common in Harrison 's work is to render the stichomythia into rhymed couplets, which captures the relentless, driving beat of those exchanges. To look at how rhyme can affect the dramatic action, here is another example from Harrison 's Common Chorus II. Hekabe's continuation of a rhyme from Andromache's couplet establishes a connection between her lament and Andromache's resentment:

ANDROMACHE:

…He [Paris] is the reason that the vultures fly
swooping down on the corpses out of the sky

HEKABE:

Troy, emptied of life. It makes me cry. (313)

In The Common Chorus I, a group of guards taunt the women protestors/actors by echoing their rhymes to maintain a steady rhythm of mockery and antagonism, such as in this exchange:

LYSISTRATA:

Trivia! Trivia! Compared to this!

KALONIKE:

What is this, then?

LYSISTRATA:

A pretty big affair.

GUARD 3: (from behind wire)

We can provide that, you lot over there!

(210-211)

In contrast, among practitioners in the US there has been more skepticism about rhyme in translation, but this could be changing. The popularity of Richard Wilbur's versions of Moliére and Racine rendered in alexandrine couplets, for example, may signal a shift in taste, which I think can only make our language better suited to receive Greek texts.

Lorna Hardwick
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Many thanks for such an interesting paper and for having taken us further into the area of ' practice as research'. My question is about translators' sense of being part of a poetic or literary tradition as well as a scholarly tradition. Someone whose main writing is as a poet (Heaney for instance) is consciously in a poetic tradition and is both part of it and pushing over its boundaries. A purely academic translator (like Lloyd - Jones) is consciously part of a scholarly tradition (emulating and leading). What I found fascinating about your discussion was that the value judgements you were wanting to make were about poetic qualities, yet the original impetus was a scholarly one, deriving from your knowledge of how Greek choral passages work. The simplicity and directness that you are trying to achieve (and which you queried) are qualities that are part of the poetic tradition of English lyric. Do you see your work as primarily part of that tradition? If so, which poets have influenced you most (excluding any Greek 'versions' or adaptations)? And would your work have to be sung to be tested?

George Theodoridis, Australia
(for Translations by George Theodoridis please see http://www.tonykline.co.uk/Browsepages/Greek/Greekhome.htm)

I would very much like to express my sincerest thanks and appreciation to Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, convenors of this series of seminars, to all the contributors of the stimulating papers and their respondents, as well as The Open University itself, for providing this wonderful point of intellectual confluence, particularly on the Classics, a singular and profound love of mine! Translating the works of the ancient greek poets and playwrights has been a most enjoyable, as well as entertaining exercise for me and sharing my experience with that of others added an extra but most valuable dimension to it.

May the hands of all the people involved in this project grow stronger by the day.

Since this is the last paper in this series, I'd like to be permitted to throw caution to the many winds, as they say and abandon, so far as this is possible, formal vocabulary and indulge in a slightly freer tone of expression.

Prof Taplin's essay interested me enormously because of the amount of dedication and effort he affords, or tries, as he said, to afford upon translating the choral pieces in tragedy, even so far as meter, rhyme and the whole 'prosody thing' are concerned! Such dedication, while admirable, seems to me, still, a rather a fruitless endeavor. Alas, he, too, was convinced by Mr. Brodsky's dogma that:

'… meters in verse are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted … a translator should begin his work with at least a metrical equivalent to the original form…'

Joseph Brodsky (quoted by Peter France in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation p.5)

To study an ancient work is one thing, to translate it is yet another; and whilst it's all right and commendable to study something meticulously and get down to its tiniest element, it is not necessary to do so when one is translating. The student (and thus teacher) should study and learn about trees; the translator should study and learn about forests. Both eminently important but for totally different reasons and we should not confuse or conflate them. The translator looks at the forest with its rivers, br ooks, cliffs, wildlife, its skies, smells, atmosphere; its shadows and the bends of sunrays, the way the moon looks through its canopy –in short, everything connected with the forest but not its individual minutiae, which, to my mind, is this 'whole prosody thing' in a choral piece.

Let me be 'free' now: I don't suppose it's possible for a chef of the highest cali br e to reproduce even a two-egg omelette exactly, let alone a more complicated dish and translators are reproducers. Not copiers with adjustable fonts but reproducers. Copying is damned hard work! So we don't copy. Instead, we translate, we reproduce; and, if the original is impenetrably covered by very thick layers of age, of corruption, of change, of invention and of all sorts of other events that man's history br ought to bare upon it, then we move on and see what we can salvage. Prosody is well and truly covered in terms of its importance to the present-day stage and audience. Let's leave it to the student and teacher and concentrate on the rest of the forest.

So far as theatre is concerned, thankfully, everything about it has changed: Its stage, environment, atmosphere, effects, eyes, ears and minds of the audiences, everything, but everything is different. If a director, or an actor or yea, even a translator is to work s/he must be encouraged to smash dogmas, not conform to them. S/he must let his/her imagination work totally unharnessed, so as to reproduce a work in a fashion worthy of the original artist. Brodsky's dogma above, with due respect and deference to him, decries freedom, enjoyment and comfort and exhorts hard, tortuous work. Torture, we all know, is not a virtue but an excruciating burden, so why impose it on one's self, voluntarily?

Chasing up words till all hours of the night ('oil-lamp words' Kazantzakis' detractors called them) so as to find the one which best suits the prosodic demands of a piece, is not only unnecessary, it is also –I'm being 'free' again- insulting to the playwright. To suggest that Aristophanes was more interested in the prosody of his chorus (in the end he hated this bulging, unwieldy appendix) than in his hilarious situations and one-liners, would have the old wizard spinning in his grave with laughter; and to suggest that even the lofty old father of the theatre, Aeschylus, was more concerned with his anapaests than his presentation of the Eumenides, the loftiest of all courts, is equally silly. There certainly was a need to give something for the chorus to 'do' (stage business) but the need to 'do' far outweighed the need to say the right word, (morals) which, in turn, far outweighed the need to sing that word in some mysterious way, challenging the choral virtuosity of the chorus (the whole 'prosody thing'). Prosody was more a matter of history (Thespian) than a theatrical necessity.

For if we ask ourselves, 'what did the ancient playwrights tried to leave us with?' the answer surely would be, 'a whole forest' and not simply musical notations. Otherwise, if Brodsky is right, they would have found some way of noting them down and we would possess them right now. As it is, all we have is some vague descriptions of Sapphic songs and dance steps, totally unhelpful to the translator of choral lyrics.

Again, my personal thanks to Professor Taplin and to the crew involved in this series of email seminars. May they long continue.

Final Response by Topic Leader Oliver Taplin

Many thanks for these responses. First, my answer to Robert Davis is that I am deploying rhyme only for passages that are in lyric metres in the Sophocles, thus making clear what I perceive as the great divide between individual, reasoned expression in iambic and collective, associative expression in lyric. I do, however, greatly admire Tony Harrison's use of rhyme to br ing out the to-and-fro of stichomythia – and I have, in fact, written about this in my chapter in the APGRD volume on Agamemnon in Performance, to be published by OUP later this year.

Lorna Hardwick's questions, as always, probe deep. Yes, I suppose that I am trying to break down what is often seen as the mutual exclusivity of poet and scholar – and dramatist as well. Many poets (not all) relish scholarship, and add it into their creative melting pot: a scholar with no streak of poetry cannot translate poetry (but can, of course, produce a crib). And yes, Lorna is right that I locate myself, however dimly, in an English lyric tradition which tries to make complexity and subtlety into something which is at the same time direct and accessible. It is not good for the plant to inspect its roots, but I reckon that the strongest influence on my attempted lyric verse may be Hardy; but I also find my mind echoing the patterns of Edward Thomas, Auden, Heaney, Longley… Such rich humus!

And, yes, my work does ideally have to be sung to be tested. And that needs a composer or composers. I would not try to dictate the musical setting, but I hear it in my own head as the kind of music that people might leave the theatre singing themselves. Remember the Athenian prisoners who won their freedom because they could sing the lyrics of Euripides in the stone-quarries of Syracuse.

And that anecdote of singing in captivity, of 'dancing in chains', is perhaps my best answer to George Theodoridis. His paean to totally unrestrained 'freedom' reminds me of Euripides' liberated, ecstatic bacchants. The trouble is that if you are prancing by night over the wild mountainsides, who is there to hear you, and why? In my experience the way to contain all that swirling feeling and experience in a way that speaks to others is to give it form, pattern, music, the tension of muscular discipline. In order to gat anyone to hear his bacchants, Euripides had to organize them into a chorus and to give them coordinated poetry, dance and song.