suggest as well that the poet had not given up his preference for primitive Nature over cold Culture.
Yet even as Hughes ups the thematic ante in his adaptation, formal problems seriously undercut his ambitions. Perhaps inevitably when dealing with Alcestis, the translation is, even more than his others, marred by the poet’s inability to find a suitable tone. In what looks like an attempt to convey the tonal variety of Euripides’ hybrid drama, Hughes experiments more than previously with slangy, playful diction. The results can be odd, and often betray the dignity of the original where it is, in fact, dignified. ‘You may call me a god. / You may call me whatever you like,’ Hughes’s Apollo says in his prologue speech, which in the original is crucial for setting the mournful tone of the entire first half. It’s a bizarre thing for Apollo to say: characters in Greek tragedies get zapped by thunderbolts for far less presumptuous haggling with divinities. (Alcestis begins, in fact, with a dire reference to Zeus’s incineration of the hubristic Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, who dared to raise the dead – the first allusion to the all-important theme of resurrection.) Apollo goes on: ‘The dead must die forever. / That is what the thunder said. The dead / Are dead are dead are dead are dead / Forever …’ You suspect Hughes is trying here to convey the thudding infinite nothingness of death, but bits like this are unfortunate reminders that the translator was also a prolific author of children’s books. The intrusion of comic informality is hard enough to adjust to in Euripides’ Alcestis, where the biggest moral problem is a husband’s gross inadequacies; but it’s a disaster in Hughes’s Alcestis, where the big moral problem is God’s gross inadequacies.
Hughes, it should be said, wasn’t the first widower poet for whom the opportunity to translate the Alcestis served as the vehicle for a corrective shift in emphases. In Robert Browning’s long historical poem Balaustion’s Adventure (the subtitle is ‘Including a Transcript of Euripides’), which was composed after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, a poetess comes to Athens from Rhodes to meet Euripides, and then sets about adapting Alcestis. But her version – and, by extension, the Browning version – turns out to be a redemptive one. In it, ‘a new Admetos’ rejects out of hand Alcestis’s offer to die in his place: ‘’Tis well that I depart, and thou remain,’ he tells his wife, with whom, indeed, he gets to enjoy a fairy-tale posterity. (‘The two,’ Browning writes, ‘lived together long and well.’) Hughes’s adaptation renovates Euripides along comparable lines. If the ancient dramatist’s Alcestis forces us to ask, ‘If a husband lets his wife die for him, what manner of man must that husband be?’ then the contemporary poet’s Alcestis asks, ‘If God lets people die, what manner of god must He be?’ In Hughes, as in Browning, there are no guilty husbands – no profound delving into the emotional (if not moral) squalor that often goes with being the survivor. There are just guilty abstractions.
Disturbing silences like the one with which Euripides’ Alcestis concludes are a leitmotif in the drama of Plath and Hughes. In Bitter Fame, her biography of Plath, Anne Stevenson describes a tiff between Plath and Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, that took place during the Christmas holidays in 1960: depending on whose side you’re on, the episode demonstrates either Plath’s irrationality or Olwyn Hughes’s coldness. In response to a remark of Olwyn’s that she was ‘awfully critical’, Plath ‘glared accusingly’ at her sister-in-law but refused to respond, keeping up her ‘unnerving stare’ in total silence. ‘Why doesn’t she say something?’ Olwyn recalled thinking. (That would have been an excellent translation of Admetos’s climactic line, conveying vividly the frustration and unease of someone faced with this particular brand of passive-aggressiveness.) As recently as a few years ago, Olwyn Hughes, in a letter to Janet Malcolm, was clearly still smarting from what Malcolm, in her book about Plath and Hughes, The Silent Woman, called Plath’s ‘Medusan’, ‘deadly, punishing’ speechlessness.
But if Plath was, like Alcestis, the ‘silent woman’, Hughes himself was the silent man – aggressively, punishingly so, at least in the eyes of those who wanted to know more about the characters in this famous literary/domestic ‘tragedy’, the passions of whose ‘characters’ only the language of Greek myth and classical drama, it sometimes seems, can capture. (‘They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld,’ Malcolm wrote; ‘I go about full with the darkness of my flame, like Phèdre …’, Plath herself wrote.) When Hughes’s Birthday Letters appeared in 1997, it met with a variety of reactions: horror, joy, shock, surprise, anxiety, enthusiasm, etc. But what everyone agreed on was that it was, in essence, a relief: finally, Hughes was speaking.
And why not? ‘Ted Hughes’s history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one’s actions and thus feel that life isn’t entirely tragic,’ Malcolm wrote. Birthday Letters was viewed by many as a kind of second chance, an opportunity to undo, or perhaps to redo, his public image with respect to his dead wife. (The same is true of the personal effects – passports, letters, photographs, manuscripts – that had belonged to Hughes, and which appear to have been the bases for several of the ‘Letters’. ‘He is thought of by critics as being so self-protective and so unrevealing of himself,’ said Stephen Enniss, the curator of literary collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, which now owns Hughes’ papers. ‘I think the archive will make him appear more human, more sympathetic than the detached voice and aloofness we had known.’)
Writers – even those who appear aloof and voiceless about their private lives – can reveal themselves inadvertently. Reading Malcolm’s description of the trapped Hughes, I found it hard not to think of Euripides’ Alcestis, a play that notoriously allows a flawed man to undo and redo the fatal past. The undoings and redoings you find in Hughes’s almost inadvertently moving adaptation of that work – the elisions, omissions, and reconfigurations – suggest that the poet’s most revealing public utterance with respect to Plath may not have been Birthday Letters after all. In her way – her ‘veiled’ way – the most eloquent figure, among so many strange and tragic silences, has turned out to be Euripides’ silent woman.
– The New York Review of Books, 27 April 2000
In the early spring of 411 BC, Euripides finally got what was coming to him. The playwright, then in his seventies, had always been the bad boy of Athenian drama. He was the irreverent prankster who, in his Electra, parodied the famous recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. He was an avant-garde intellectual who took an interest in the latest theorists – he is said to have been a friend of Socrates, and it was at his home that Protagoras (‘man is the measure of all things’) first read his agnostic treatise on the gods; in works like The Madness of Herakles, he questioned the established Olympian pantheon. Stylistically, he was a playful postmodernist whose sly rearranging of traditional mythic material, in bitter fables like Orestes, deconstructed tragic conventions, anticipating by twenty-five centuries a theatre whose patent subject was the workings of the theatre itself.
But no aspect of the playwright’s roiling opus was more famous, in his own day, than his penchant for portraying deranged females. Among them are the love-mad queen Phaedra, whose unrequited lust leads her to suicide and murder (the subject of not one but two Hippolytus plays by the poet, one now lost); the distraught widow Evadne in Suppliant Women, who incinerates herself on her dead husband’s grave; the ruthless granny Alcmene in Children of Herakles, who violently avenges herself on her male enemies; the wild-eyed Cassandra in Trojan Women; the list goes on and on. And, of course, there was Medea, whom the Athenians knew from established legend as the murderess of her own brother, the sorceress who dreamed up gruesome ways to destroy her husband Jason’s enemy Pelias, and whom Euripides – not surprisingly, given his tastes in female characters – decided, in his staging of the myth, to make the murderess of her own children as well.
And so it was that, shortly after winter was
