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4 books match the query 'Oresteia'

cover of Aeschylus II: The Oresteia

Aeschylus II

The Oresteia

Edited and Translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.

Many years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. The updated third editions of these classic works were designed to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.

In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

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cover of Claudel & Aeschylus: A Study of Claudel's Translation of the Oresteia

Claudel & Aeschylus

A Study of Claudel's Translation of the Oresteia

William H. Matheson

University of Michigan Press, 1965

This is the most important book to date on one of the giants of modern literature. It examines in detail a dramaturgy that continues to dominate the contemporary stage. In a brilliant confrontation of the question of translation, Matheson discusses the hows and the why that face the artist-as-translator. He shows the terms by which ancient myth is made theatrically significant to the playgoer of today.The author traces the spiritual and artistic development of Claudel, the self-willed, individualistic French artist who found in the works of the difficult, uncompromising Aeschylus prefigurations of his own life. Claudel's training in the classics, his early admiration of Mallarmé, the Aeschylean reminiscences in his early plays Partage de midi and Tête d'Or anticipate his own brilliant trilogy.But it was through his translation of the Oresteia, a translation that Matheson analyzes in detail, that this most important of French dramatists assimilated Aeschylus to recast him for the modern stage.Claudel and Aeschylus, through an examination of Claudel's crucial Aeschylean strain, shows the centrality and the significance of the Hellenic in the work of one of the most important literary figures of our age.
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cover of The Oresteia

The Oresteia

Aeschylus

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Highly acclaimed as translators of Greek and Sanskrit classics, respectively, David Grene and Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty here present a complete modern translation of the three plays comprising Aeschylus' Oresteia and, with the assistance of director Nicholas Rudall, an abridged stage adaptation. This balanced and highly successful collaboration of scholars with a theater director solves the contemporary problems of translating and staging the Oresteia, which originally was written to be performed in Athens in the first half of the fifth century B.C.
 
While remaining faithful to the original Greek, Grene and O'Flaherty embrace a strong and adventurous English style, vivid and visceral. The language of this extraordinary translation, immediately accessible to a theater audience, speaks across the centuries. Premiered at Chicago's Court Theater in 1986 under Rudall's direction, the stage adaptation of the Oresteia proved eminently playable.
 
This new adaptation of the Oresteia offers a brilliant demonstration of how clearly defined goals (here, the actor's needs) can inspire translators to produce fresh, genuine, accessible dramatic texts. The resulting work provides complete and accurate texts for those who cannot read the original Greek, and it transforms the Oresteia into an effective modern stage play. With interpretive introductions written by the translators and director, this new version will be welcomed by teachers of translation courses, by students of Greek and world drama in general, and by theater professionals.
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cover of The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Holy Goddesses

The Oresteia

Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Holy Goddesses

Aeschylus, A verse translation by David Mulroy, with introduction and notes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

First presented in the spring of 458 B.C.E. at the festival of Dionysus in Athens, Aeschylus' trilogy Oresteia won the first prize. Comprised of three plays—Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Furies—it is the only surviving example of the ancient trilogy form for Greek tragedies.

This drama of the House of Atreus catches everyone in a bloody net. Queen Clytaemestra of Argos murders her husband Agamemnon. Their son Orestes avenges his father by killing his mother. The Furies, hideous deities who punish the murder of blood kin, pursue Orestes. Into this horrific cycle steps Athena, goddess of wisdom, who establishes the rule of law to replace fatal vengeance. Orestes is tried in court before a jury of Athenians and found not guilty. Athena transforms the Furies into benevolent goddesses and extols the virtue of mercy.

An important historical document as well as gripping entertainment, the Oresteia conveys beliefs and values of the ancient Athenians as they established the world's first great democracy. Aeschylus (525/4–456/5 B.C.E.) was the first of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Greece, forerunner of Sophocles and Euripides. In this trilogy he created a new dramatic form with characters and plot, infused with spellbinding emotion. David Mulroy's fluid, accessible English translation with its rhyming choral songs does full justice to the meaning and theatricality of the ancient Greek. In an introduction and appendixes, he provides cultural background for modern readers, actors, and students.
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