This section of the introduction (6-22) is a reworking of Kovacs’s 2010 article “On not Misunderstanding Oedipus Tyrannus,” the title alluding to and challenging E. The bulk of the introduction is an interpretation of the play, more particularly of the important question of Apollo’s role in Oedipus’s life and ruin. At times, however, a novice reader would benefit from fuller explanation, as in the description of fifth-century performance, where there is not a word on the fundamental dynamic of the actors’ speech and the chorus’ song-and-dance or the critical role of stage actions, although Kovacs does take up some of the latter in the notes.

Kovacs is concise in exposition, often admirably so. The introduction covers the major bases and then some: Sophocles and his age tragic performance in the fifth century the divine dimension Sophocles’ manipulation of plot the ending aims of the translation departures from the Lloyd-Jones and Wilson OCT and works cited.

Virginia Woolf, in her famous essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” offers this memorable image: “Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and quietly, apparently motionless, and then, with a flicker of fins, off and away.” Anyone translating him needs to be attentive to both the smooth movement and the flicker of his verse. He is not as straightforward in expression as Euripides, and his verbal complexity is more subtle, at times deceptively so, when compared to that of Aeschylus. Sophocles is the most challenging of the three tragedians to translate. In this work, he takes on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, offering a verse translation, with introduction and explanatory notes. Aristotle in the Poetics championed it for its tight construction, and it has been among the most favored plays ever since.ĭavid Kovacs, a leading scholar of Greek tragedy for over four decades, has a long history of being a strong textual critic, and he has demonstrated a keen ability to provide crisp and clear translations in the complete plays of Euripides, edited and translated for the Loeb Classical Texts. Whatever the case, this less-than-stellar start in life did not keep Oedipus the King from being considered a masterpiece of Greek tragedy. Maybe the other plays of his tetralogy weren’t so good, or maybe Philocles’ plays were simply better. When first produced at the City Dionysia, Sophocles’ tetralogy containing Oedipus the King came in second place to that of Philocles.

Oedipus the king translation