what suits his purpose’: the same is true of his approach to the classics.
It’s not that Hughes’s translations of Racine and Aeschylus can’t convey with great vividness the moral and emotional states of the characters; they can. ‘I have not drunk this strychnine day after day / As an idle refreshment,’ Hughes’s besotted Phèdre tells her stepson, with an appropriately astringent mix of pathos and wryness. His Clytemnestra has ‘a man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body / Like a polished blade’ – lines that Aeschylus never wrote, it’s true, but that convey the poet’s preoccupation particularly with the threateningly androgynous character of his monstrous queen. But what Hughes’s classical translations lack – disastrously – is grandeur. And the grandeur of high tragedy arises from the friction between the unruly passions and actions that are represented (incestuous longings, murderous and suicidal violence – moral squalor, in short) and the highly, if not indeed rigidly, stylized poetic forms that contain them: Racine’s glacially elegant alexandrines, or the insistent iambic trimeters of the Greek dialogue alternating at regular intervals with choral lyrics in elaborate metres. William Christie, the leader of the baroque music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, has spoken of ‘the high stylization that releases, rather than constrains, emotion’: this is a perfect description of the aesthetics of classical tragedy.
Hughes – never committed to strict poetic form to begin with, and increasingly given to loose, unrhythmical versification – is suspicious of the formal restraints that characterize the classical. Like so many contemporary translators of the classics, he mistakes artifice for stiffness, and restraint for lack of feeling, and he tries to do away with them. In his Oresteia the diction is more elevated than what you find in some translations (certainly more so than what you find in David Slavitt’s vulgar Oresteia translation for the Penn Greek Drama series, which has Clytemnestra pouring a ‘cocktail of vintage evils’ and addressing the chorus leader as ‘mister’); but still Hughes tends too much to tone things down, smooth things out, explain things away.
Few moments in Greek drama are as moving as the chorus’s description, in the Agamemnon, of Iphigenia, about to be sacrificed at Aulis by Agamemnon, pleading for her life ‘with prayers and cries to her father’ and then, even more poignantly, after she has been brutally gagged, ‘hurling at the sacrificers piteous arrows of the eyes’. But Hughes’s rather suburban Iphigenia cries, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and simply weeps (‘her eyes swivel in their tears’). Such choices remind you of how much the extreme figurative language that Aeschylus gives his characters has regularly confounded, not to say embarrassed, translators. The Watchman at the opening of the Agamemnon is so terrified of the adulterous, man-emulating queen that he can’t even talk to himself about it: ‘A great ox stands upon my tongue,’ he mutters ominously. The line has tremendous archaic heft and power, something that cannot be said for Hughes’s ‘Let their tongue lie still – squashed flat’.
No doubt because of the many opportunities Ovid’s Metamorphoses affords for crafting images of the animals into which so many characters are transformed, the most successful of Hughes’s late-career translations is his Tales from Ovid. But even here the poet fails to realize how important Ovid’s form is. In his Introduction, Hughes makes due reference to the Hellenophile poet’s ‘sweet, witty soul’, but he’s clearly far more interested in what he sees as the Metamorphoses’ subject: ‘a torturous subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque’. He manages, in other words, to find the Seneca in Ovid. And yet the pleasure of Ovid’s epic lies precisely in the delicate tension between all those regressive, grotesque, nature-based metamorphoses and the ‘fully civilized’ verses in which they are narrated: a triumph of Culture over Nature if ever there was one. Hughes’s Ovid is often very effective, but it is not sweet and witty.
It’s tempting to think that Hughes found Euripides’ Alcestis interesting precisely because this work – the tragedian’s earliest surviving play – presents so many problems of both form and content. With its unpredictable oscillations in tone and style, it seems positively to invite abandonment of formal considerations altogether. ‘A critic’s battlefield,’ the scholar John Wilson wrote in his introduction to a 1968 collection of essays on the play. The war continues to rage on.
Alcestis was first performed in 438 BC in Athens at the Greater Dionysia, an annual combined civic and religious festival, including a dramatic competition, that must have resembled a cross between the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and the Oscars. The drama was presented as the fourth play in a tetralogy – the final spot, that is, in which amusingly bawdy ‘satyr plays’ were normally presented, presumably to alleviate the pity and fear triggered by the three tragedies that had preceded it onstage. (The three that preceded Alcestis, two of which seem to have dealt with the sufferings of passionate women, are lost.) And yet, this fourth play – in which Queen Alcestis voluntarily dies in place of her husband, King Admetos, when the appointed day of his death is at hand, only to be brought back from Hades by Herakles in the play’s bizarre finale – unsettlingly mixes elements of high tragedy with its scenes of comic misunderstandings, elaborate teasing, and drunken hijinks.
The first, ‘tragic’ half of the short drama begins with a sombre expository prologue by Apollo, followed by a debate between Apollo and Death, who has come to claim Alcestis and who is warned that he won’t, in the end, get his way. We are then plunged into the mortal world and a mood of unrelenting gloom: a heartrending scene of Alcestis’s slow death; her farewells to her children (whom she relinquishes to her husband on the condition that he not neglect them) and to her husband (who vows never to remarry); her impassioned outburst, addressed to her marriage bed, as she sees death approaching; her funeral procession, which is interrupted by a violent argument between Admetos and his aged father, Pheres (who along with his elderly wife refused to die in his son’s place when given the chance to do so); and a grief-stricken Admetos’s return to his empty house after the funeral.
The second, ‘comic’, half presents the spectacle of the rambunctious Herakles’ arrival at the house of mourning (he is en route to yet another of his Labours); Admetos’s excruciatingly diplomatic efforts to keep up his reputation as a good friend and legendary host (he doesn’t want Herakles to know Alcestis has died lest his guest feel unwelcome); a drunken, feasting Herakles’ discovery of the truth, and his subsequent vow to bring his friend’s wife back; and the hero’s rescue of Alcestis after a wrestling match with Death himself, which takes place beside Alcestis’s tomb. The play ends with the eerie spectacle of a triumphant Herakles, like the father of a bride, handing over the veiled and silent figure of Alcestis to Admetos without, at first, telling Admetos who the woman is – teasing him in order to prolong the suspense. She never speaks again during the course of the play.
The hodgepodge of moods, styles, and themes suggested by even this cursory summary has made interpretation of this strange work particularly thorny. To cite John Wilson further:
Even the genre to which the play belongs is disputed – is it a tragedy, a satyr play, or the first example of a tragicomedy? Who is the main character, Alcestis or Admetos? And through whose eyes are we to see this wife and this husband? Is Alcestis as noble as she says she is? And is Admetos worthy of her devotion, or does he deserve all the blame that his father, Pheres, heaps upon him? And is the salvation of Alcestis a true mystery, a sardonic ‘and so they lived happily ever after’, or simply the convenient end of an entertainment?
These questions continue to puzzle classicists, despite radical shifts in the way we read classical texts. Since Wilson wrote in the 1960s, no literary-critical school has influenced classical scholarship so much as feminist studies has; and the Alcestis has proved an especially rich vehicle for scholars interested in demonstrating the extent to which literary production in classical Greece reflected the patriarchal bias of Athenian society during its cultural heyday. ‘The genre of the Alcestis,’ the classicist Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz has written in a stimulating if perhaps too ideologically rigid study of Euripides’ handling of female characters, ‘… depends on gender. On the surface, it is comic: death
