Description                                             

A compliation of the three plays of Sophocles’ Oidipous Cycle: Antigone, King Oidipous and Oidipous at Colonus. Translated, updated and with notes and annotations. The trilogy includes an introductory essay on Sophocles’ life, ancient theatre, and the mythic and religious background of the plays.

 Author                                                    

Ruby Blondell is Professor of Classics at the University of Washington, Seattle with special interests in Greek and Roman philosophy and literature.

 Table of Contents                                     

Preface
Introduction: Sophocles, Theater and Performance, Mythic Background, Religious Background
Antigone
King Oidipous
Oidipous at Colonus
Map: Mainland Greece Map : Attica and Environs
Suggestions for Further Reading

 Preface                                   

This volume combines updated versions of my translations of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, which have already been published as separate volumes. Oidipous at Colonus appears in its second edition, which was heavily revised from the first. Antigone and King Oidipous have been corrected and more lightly revised, with an eye to consistency for this volume as a whole. The notes have been trimmed, and the interpretive essays at the ends of the individual volumes have been sacrificed, in order to keep the volume from becoming too large. The Introduction recapitulates those of all three earlier volumes, but also includes an expanded section on religion, in order to include some essential background material that originally appeared in the essays.

The translations are aimed at readers, especially students and teachers, who wish to work with a version that is close to the Greek. I have tried as far as possible to remain faithful to Greek idiom and metaphor, to translate words important for the meaning of the play consistently, and sometimes to retain the original word order, verse and sentence structure. This approach sometimes leads to awkwardness, but I hope this will be outweighed by its benefits. Though many aspects of the poetry have inevitably been lost, as they must be in any translation, I believe, and hope the reader will discover, that much of the poetry of meaning is best communicated in such a way.

The original meters have inevitably been sacrificed, but I have used a kind of six-beat iambic line for the iambic (spoken) portions of the drama, and tried to retain an approximately anapestic rhythm for Sophocles’ anapests (which are printed in italics). I have not used any formal metrical scheme for the lyrics, or sung portions of the text, which are simply rendered in short lines and indented. (In order to avoid confusing the reader, in some lyric passages I have increased the number of lines so that they match the marginal line numbers, which are the same as in the Greek text.) Despite this attempt to retain some of the rhythmic sense of the original, my first priorities have usually been accuracy and consistency.

The spellings of Greek names represent an attempt to reap some of the benefits of both comfort and defamiliarization. For the most part I have used traditional English spelling for the names of historical persons and places (e.g. Aeschylus, Athens), but transliterated mythological names in so far as this accords with modern English pronunciation (e.g. Kreon, Polyneices). In the case of Oidipous, there are further reasons for preferring this spelling over "Oedipus," since it not only captures more effectively the many puns upon this name in King Oidipous, but encourages the reader to resist the anachronistic Freudian associations of the traditional spelling.

The explanatory notes are aimed at those approaching this play, and perhaps all ancient Greek literature, for the first time. They provide factual information on such matters as mythology, geography and unfamiliar customs, together with clarification of obscure phrases and a few interpretive pointers. There are no stage directions in ancient Greek texts. Those provided in the translation are based on indications in the script, and are intended to clarify the stage action for the modern reader.

The translations of Antigone and OT were based on Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel Wilson’s Oxford Classical Text (Oxford 1990), but I have departed from their text on occasion. In places I followed the text of Mark Griffith’s edition of Antigone (Cambridge 1999). I also found his notes extremely valuable. My original translation of Oidipous at Colonus followed A.C. Pearson’s Oxford Classical Text (Oxford 1924), with some departures. For the revised edition, I also consulted Lloyd-Jones and Wilson’s OCT and followed their text in numerous places. The translation and notes for all three plays are indebted to Jebb’s great work,2 and to a lesser extent to Kamerbeek’s more recent commentaries. I also consulted Dawe’s edition of OT (Cambridge 1982), and benefited from felicitious phrasing in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ translations for the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA 1994).

It remains to reiterate my thanks to friends, students and colleagues who assisted me in various ways with the individual translations: James Clauss, Ann Cumming, Alain Gowing, Mark Griffith, David Guichard, Michael Halleran, Yurie Hong, John Kirby and his students, Brady Mechley, Pauline Ripat, Douglas Roach, Stephen Sharpe, and the students in my Sophocles class in the Autumn of 2001.