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3 - Aeschylus and the Agamemnon: Gilding the Lily

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2009

J. Michael Walton
J. Michael Walton
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Summary

A translator's best hope, I think, and still the hardest to achieve, is Dryden's hope that his author will speak the living language of the day.

(Robert Fagles, Foreword to Aeschylus' Oresteia)

In Terence Rattigan's one-act play, The Browning Version, there is an early encounter between the schoolmaster, Frank Hunter, and the reluctant classicist pupil John Taplow:

taplow (protestingly): I'm extremely interested in science, sir.

frank: Are you? I'm not. Not, at least, in the science I have to teach.

taplow: Well, anyway, sir, it's a great deal more exciting than this muck. (Indicating his book.)

frank: What is this muck?

taplow: Aeschylus, sir. The Agamemnon.

frank: And your considered view is that the Agamemnon of Aeschylus is muck, is it?

taplow: Well, no, sir. I don't think the play is muck – exactly. I suppose, in a way, it's rather a good play, really, a wife murdering her husband and having a lover and all that. I only mean the way it's taught to us – just a lot of Greek words strung together …

A little later in the play the teacher of Greek, Andrew Crocker-Harris, during whose final hours at the school the play takes place, begins a translation session with Taplow. Taplow's free rendering of the Chorus's confrontation with Clytemnestra is treated with some scorn by Andrew:

andrew: Then why do you invent words that are simply not there?

taplow: I thought they sounded better, sir. More exciting. After all she did kill her husband, sir. (With relish.) […]

Type
Chapter
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Found in Translation
Greek Drama in English
 , pp. 43 - 61
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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