Translating Tragedy: Seamus Heaney’s Sophoclean Plays
The interest of contemporary Irish authors in the Greek and Roman antiquity testifies to their renewed effort in appropriating the classical tradition both as a source of inspiration and as a means of redefining the nature of Irishness through a constant confrontation with Otherness. Translation and adaptation are among the favoured approaches to the ancient texts, whichoftenbecome metaphors for the Irish political situation. My paper analyses Seamus Heaney’s challenge to the established canon by his creative use of the classical tradition in The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), adapted from Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Antigone . My aim is to illustrate the relationship between Heaney’s translation practices and his role as a poet.
The Cure at Troy: Sophocles or Heaney?
The Cure at Troy is subtitled ‘A version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes’. What kind of version? Is it, like the translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon known to Terence Rattigan’s audiences as The Browning Version,1 severely literal? Or is it more like Pope’s Iliad, on which Richard Bentley rightly commented, ‘it is a pretty poem, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer’?2 Whereabouts on the scale between these two extreme types of ‘version’ does Heaney’s work belong?
Philip Roth’s Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain
Philip Roth belongs to the first generation of American novelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm. This essay charts Roth’s developing acquaintance with classical literature, the starting point for Great Books courses in the 1950s, and the implications for his fiction of his understanding of the difference in scope and purpose between the two representative classical genres. It focuses on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which he reflects most directly upon what tragedy and epic once did, and what might happen to novels if they became more like the one or the other.