UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt top, 78. 6d. each, net. Each Volume Illustrated from ancient Sculptures and Painting. VOLUME I AESCHYLUS: The Orestean Trilogy. By Prof. With an Introduction on The Rise WARR. of Greek Tragedy, and 13 Illustrations. VOLUME III EURIPIDES: Hippolytus; Bacchae; Aristophanes' Frogs. By Prof. GILBERT MURRAY. With an Appendix on the Lost Tragedies of Euripides, and an Introduction on the Significance of The Bacchae in Athenian History, and 12 Illustrations and Painting. TRANSLATED AND EXPLAINED BY JOHN SWINNERTON PHILLIMORE, M.A. PROFESSOR of GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN PREFACE I "If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. would be tolerant for once-in the case of so immensely famous an original—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear."-BROWNING: Preface to the translation of Aga memnon. Elle "Car une méthode, seule, existe, honnête et logique, de traduction: la littéralité impersonnelle à peine atténuée pour juste le rapide pli de paupière et savourer longuement. produit, suggestive, la plus grande puissance littéraire. Elle fait le plaisir évocatoire. Elle recrée en indiquant. Elle est le plus sûr garant de vérité. Elle plonge, ferme, en sa nudité de pierre. Elle fleure l'arome primitif et le cristallise. Elle dévide et délie. Elle fixe. Certes si la littéralité enchaine l'esprit divaguant et le dompte, elle arrête l'infernale facilité de la plume."-Un mot du traducteur à ses amis, J. C. MARDRUS. Preface to the Arabian Nights. HAVE prefixed as the phylactery of this book these two quotations; but there are one or two other matters of which the reader (or he that keeps the reader's conscience) may expect that some account be given. Firstly, V 63687 why rhymed couplets instead of the traditional blank verse? I will not cite Dryden in defence of the rhymed couplet for dramatic verse, because I might be answered with Dryden's recantation. The great difficulty of English blank verse might be excuse enough; but if a translator meekly confesses, "I cannot write blank verse, the critic, unappeased, may retort, "Then don't translate Sophocles!" But in truth I hold that the rhymed and not the blank verse is nearer the Sophoclean pitch of language. Sophocles moves, by predilection, in the middle diction, which is common ground to the poetical and the prose style; his dialogue is colloquially plain and direct; in King Edipus especially his vocabulary resembles that which Antiphon employed in prose to plead his cases, real or imaginary. Now English blank verse must (to my thinking) be always in full dress if it is to succeed-perpetually sonorous, balanced, aloof from the ordinary. True, Byron's noble dramatic verse is unrhymed, but too rhetorical for Sophocles, who is (with rare exceptions) notably pure from rhetoric. Wordsworth tried to abolish the distinction between verse and prose; we may bless him for easing poetical diction, but most of his blank verse might conveniently be printed as prose. |