Constantine Athanasius Trypanis

Konstantinos Trypanis

Greek Poetry, from Homer to Seferis

Sophocles

With so many translations of Sophocles' Theban plays available, another might seem superfluous. However, a translation by Professor Trypanis, who is not only a distinguished Classical scholar but also a much admired poet, is an event to be welcomed by both students of the Classics and lovers of literature and the stage. These translations were originally commissioned by the BBC and have been broadcast and acted on stage several times on both sides of the Atlantic. Professor Trypanis has written a new introduction to this volume in which he discusses Sophocles' skill in characterisation, his style and poetry, and the place of the three plays in literary history. This book will be a valuable addition to Sophoclean scholarship and most welcome as an acting edition of the plays.

The Three Theban Plays

Peter Mackridge

Peter A. Mackridge

Greece is a land of myth, and Greek poetry since the sixteenth century has constantly exploited allusions to the myths of the ancient Greeks. The consciousness of being the linguistic and cultural descendants of the Classical Greeks, and of inhabiting the same space in which the ancients had lived and dreamed, was real enough in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Greece, even though it was confined to a small intellectual elite. But it was during the decades leading up to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821 that, under the influence of neo-classical and Romantic movements in the West, it became de rigueur for the Greeks to discover and take pride in the ancient history, culture and mythology of the land in which they lived. Since then, Greek poets have constantly used the ancient myths as a warp on which to weave their poetry, whether the mythical heroes and heroines are treated as human archetypes or as pseudo-divine beings to be demythologized and brought down to earth. This volume contains essays by fifteen scholars, some of them long-established critics and translators such as Edmund Keeley, Peter Bien and the late Philip Sherrard, some of them academics in mid-career, and others having recently completed their doctorates. One essay deals with myth in the Cretan Renaissance (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), while the rest cover the use of ancient myth by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. Some essays deal with individual mythical figures such as Odysseus, Orpheus, Prometheus and Aphrodite, while others deal with the problematic issue of the use of myth by Greek women poets. Peter Bien rounds off the discussion by comparing attitudes to the ancient Greeks as embodied in English and modern Greek poetry.

Constantine Athanasius Trypanis

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