Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Summon the Presbyterians’
- 1 Finding Principles, Finding a Theory
- 2 Historical Perspectives: Lumley to Lennox
- 3 Aeschylus and the Agamemnon: Gilding the Lily
- 4 Translating the Mask: the Non-Verbal Language
- 5 Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: Words and Concepts
- 6 Text and Subtext: From Bad to Verse
- 7 Euripides' Medea and Alcestis: From Sex to Sentiment
- 8 The Comic Tradition
- 9 Modernising Comedy
- 10 When is a Translation Not a Translation?
- Appendix: A Comprehensive List of all Greek Plays in English Translation
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Translators
- General Index
7 - Euripides' Medea and Alcestis: From Sex to Sentiment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Summon the Presbyterians’
- 1 Finding Principles, Finding a Theory
- 2 Historical Perspectives: Lumley to Lennox
- 3 Aeschylus and the Agamemnon: Gilding the Lily
- 4 Translating the Mask: the Non-Verbal Language
- 5 Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: Words and Concepts
- 6 Text and Subtext: From Bad to Verse
- 7 Euripides' Medea and Alcestis: From Sex to Sentiment
- 8 The Comic Tradition
- 9 Modernising Comedy
- 10 When is a Translation Not a Translation?
- Appendix: A Comprehensive List of all Greek Plays in English Translation
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index of Translators
- General Index
Summary
We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be present to us at the present.
(T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1932)The stage history of Medea has been charted in detail in Medea in Performance where the variations on the myth in opera, on film and on the public stage have been meticulously detailed. There and elsewhere Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Marianne McDonald have traced the manner in which the portrayal of Medea reflects the social changes of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Macintosh pointing in particular to the significance of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. Lorna Hardwick in her Translating Words, Translating Cultures devotes a central chapter to ‘Reverence and subversion in nineteenth-century translation’ and homes in on Greek tragedy in her ‘Theatres of the mind: Greek tragedy in women's writing in English in the nineteenth century’.
It seems hardly coincidental that there were six translations of Medea published in the ten years following the passing of the Divorce Act of 1857, with Augusta Webster's to follow in 1868. As influential in the enthusiasm for the theme was the taste for sensation literature with the act of infanticide claiming a classical pedigree. Much of the ground that might be covered in a chapter devoted to the translation of Euripides' Medea has already been treated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Found in TranslationGreek Drama in English, pp. 126 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006