Thyestes E-Book

Seneca

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Classic Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 55

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A violent tragedy by a contemporary of Nero, in a faithful and uncut translation by one of our leading dramatists. Atreus, Agamemnon's father, takes revenge on his brother Thyestes by murdering Thyestes' sons and serving their flesh up for their father's dinner. Caryl Churchill's version of Seneca's play Thyestes was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, in June 1994, in a production directed by James Macdonald.

Leseprobe

Lucius Annæus Seneca

THYESTES

translated and introduced by

Caryl Churchill

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Characters

Original Production

Thyestes

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

‘Now could I drink hot blood,’ says Hamlet,’and do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.’ He wants to be a hero in a Seneca play. I didn’t know that till I read Thyestes.

In the summer of 1992 I went to see Ariane Mnouchkine’s production of the House of Atreus plays, and wondered why there were no Greek plays about the beginning of the story. But there had been, James Macdonald told me, though none of them survived. What did survive was a Latin Thyestes by Seneca. I got the Loeb edition with Latin on one page and English opposite. At first I was attracted by the Ghost of Tantalus and a Fury, then by the revenge story, the drought (it was a hot dry summer), the fears of the world ending, which all felt oddly topical. Then I started getting interested in the language, in trying to get through the opaque screen that a translation can’t help being to see what Seneca had actually said. I’d studied Latin at school, and with the Loeb and a dictionary began to pick my way through a few bits that interested me.

Loeb’s translation was printed in 1912 and though very helpful is written in a style archaic then: ‘Who from the accursed regions of the dead haleth me forth… ’ What struck me was how simple and direct the Latin was. Because it’s a language without ‘the’ or ‘a’, because it’s a language where person and tense are tucked into the verb (we say ‘I will kill’, they say ‘kill’ with endings that means ‘I’ and ‘in the future’), it uses fewer words than we do and they’re more full of action. In Latin you can say ‘black dog kills white cat, white cat kills black dog, black dog cat white kills, cat kills white black dog’ and it will still be clear that the black dog killed the white cat because tucked into each word is who’s doing it, who’s having it done to them, which colour goes with which animal, and this means they can achieve subtleties of emphasis just with word order where we might need a few extra words.

English is full of Latin words, but for us they’re not our most basic ones, not the ones that mean the thing itself. It’s spade v horticultural implement, and it’s loving v amorous, death v mortality, brotherly v fraternal. We’re lucky to have both and we’ve gained shades of meaning by having more words to play with. But reading Latin I realised the obvious, that to the Romans Latin words were the only words, the ones that most directly meant the things they wanted to say, not words that were elevated or remote.

So though my vague idea of Seneca, rather confirmed by dipping into translations, had been of a grandiloquent, rhetorical, florid writer, I began to feel he was far blunter, faster and subtler than I’d thought, and I began for my own pleasure to puzzle out what was there. Sometimes I stayed so close to the Latin that I could feel the knobbly foreign constructions just under the English skin, and liked that, though often I made something less literal of it. I put it into verse, counting syllables rather than stresses; often five and six alternating, fives to move faster, or sevens. It forced me to be concise, since something had to be happening in every five syllable line. The choruses have verse patterns done by syllables. I’ve condensed the choruses a little, but otherwise I feel I’ve kept close to what Seneca wrote, though my choices of words must be as typical of me and my time as Jasper Heywood’s are of him and his time.

Heywood’s was the first English translation of Thyestes, in 1560. He wrote:

Thus when my days at length are overpass’d

And time without all troublous tumult spent,

An aged man I shall depart at last

In mean estate to die full well content.

But grievous is to him the death that, when

So far abroad the bruit of him is known

That known he is too much to other men,

Departeth yet unto himself unknown.

I wrote:

When my days have passed

without clatter,

may I die

old and ordinary.

Death lies heavily

on someone who

known to all

dies unknown to himself.

Loeb wrote:

So when my days have passed noiselessly away, lowly may

I die and full of years. On him does death lie heavily who,

but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.

Seneca wrote:

sic cum transierint mei

nullo cum strepitu dies

plebeius moriar senex.

illi mors gravis incubat

qui notus nimis omnibus

ignotus moritur sibi.

Which could be more literally translated as

so when willhavepassed my

no with wildconfusednoise days

one of the common people may I die old.

that one death heavy lieson

who known toomuch toall

unknown dies tohimself.

Most of Heywood’s translation is written in the rollicking rhyming alliterative fourteeners that were often used before blank verse took over:

What fury fell enforceth me to flee th’unhappy seat,

That gape and grasp with greedy jaw the fleeing food to eat?

He manages it very skilfully, without getting too trapped by alliteration. The Penguin collection of Seneca’s tragedies gives excerpts from other Elizabethan translations of Seneca in the appendix, some far harder to take seriously than Heywood. I particularly like this, from John Studley’s Medea:

O flittring Flockes of grisly ghostes that sit in silent seat

O ougsome Bugges, O Goblins grym of Hell I you intreat.

Where, I thought, had I heard something like this before? Then I remembered:

Thy mantle good,

What! stain’d with blood?

Approach ye Furies fell!

O fates! come, come;

Cut thread and thrum;

Quail, crush, conclude and quell.

It is of course ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play Bottom and his friends are putting on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I hadn’t realised before what it was that was being parodied.

Nor had I realised till I read Thyestes