The Oresteia: Agamemnon / The Libation Bearers / The Eumenides

by Aeschylus

Translation has its violent moments, and I suppose it must. It begins with attraction, then a kind of attack, and it ends, if you are lucky, with a strong impersonation of your author. Whatever the end, at any rate, it is meant to be a thing of love and homage.

A translator’s best hope, I think, and still the hardest to achieve, is Dryden’s hope that his author will speak the living language of the day.

The house of Atreus is the embodiment of savagery. No other Greek family can rival it for accumulated atrocities.

‘All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both’