In her new translation of Aeschylus’ Persians, Deborah Roberts seeks to balance readable English idiom with faithfulness to Aeschylean expression. This is not an easy feat, but Roberts is successful. She has produced a text that will be most suitable for the student or casual reader, due to its close translation and helpful bibliography. Roberts’ translation is lucid and often beautiful, and faithfully carries over some of the peculiarities of Aeschylean phrasing that make the Persians distinct. The introductory materials, notes, and excerpts from Herodotus contribute to a book that will help beginners not only to understand the play at first reading, but to begin thinking about it for themselves.
The book is divided into an introduction, maps, translation of the Persians, endnotes, translation of selections from Herodotus, and appendices on chronology and further reading.
The introductory materials are comprehensive without being exhaustive. Roberts first places the Persians in its historical context, including the fact that it is our only surviving historical tragedy, but also takes care to illustrate the similarities with Aeschylus’ treatments of myth. Roberts uses the tension between the Persians’ historical and mythic features to frame a delicate elucidation of the ever-vexed question of sympathy: how much does the play ask us to enjoy the Persian defeat, and how much does it ask us to sympathize with the Persians? “Complexity,” which Roberts emphasizes several times in the discussion, is a useful watchword to remind us that one can feel both sympathy and disgust at once, and that after all, the original audience was not an interpretive monolith but a complex collection of individuals. Any reader or viewer of the Persians must take on a complex perspective: the Greek view of the Persian point of view. Roberts is careful to diminish neither the alienating features of the Persian characters nor the experiences that would bring them closer to a Greek audience. Roberts observes that “it is not just what human beings suffer, but what human beings do that brings together Persians and Greeks” (xiv). To this end, Roberts compares Xerxes to the heroes of the Trojan war, drawing the Persian king into context with his dramatic peers: Greek heroes such as Agamemnon perform outrageous acts that equal Xerxes’, and likewise endure unhappy nostoi.
The rest of the introduction contains brief descriptions of the characters, a discussion of the major themes, motifs, and images, an overview of staging, and a survey of the Persians’ reception history. Each of these is succinct yet helpful. Roberts provides ample references to other works, for those who want to read more.
A final section “About the Translation” sets out Roberts’ goals in translation, and explains some of the challenges of translating the Persians. Roberts’ aim is to convey the poetic effect of the Greek in metrical, idiomatic English. She notes the range of Aeschylus’ diction and the contrary pull within the source text of familiar and exotic elements; the trouble with expressions of mourning; and the question of how to translate barbaros as spoken by a Persian character in a Greek play. One particular difficulty is the profusion of exclamations in the Persians. Much of the latter part of the play consists of varied and nearly untranslatable expressions such as ἰὼ ἰώ, ὀτοτοτοτοῖ, and αἰαῖ. As Roberts notes, expletives might be the most accurate contemporary equivalents of cries like otototoi, but such a translation could quickly descend into bathos if applied consistently. Outdated expressions such as “alas” are equally unsuitable. Roberts’ solution is to use a variety of exclamations such as “oh no!” or “oh God”, printed in italics to make their use clear. This technique works well, preserving natural readability and the sense of rhythm that these expressions contribute in the Greek. One can both imagine a chorus crying out the lines in performance, and silently read the printed cries without any sense of awkwardness.
So, in a choral ode, Roberts translates:
Ξέρξης μὲν ἄγαγεν, ποποῖ,Ξέρξης δ᾿ ἀπώλεσεν, τοτοῖ,
Ξέρξης δὲ πάντ᾿ ἐπέσπε δυσφρόνως
βαρίδες τε πόντιαι.“Xerxes brought them—oh!—
Xerxes lost them—no!—
Xerxes, with his senseless plans,
his ships that crossed the sea.” (560-563)
Roberts seeks to preserve the reader’s experience of the play as both recognizable and exotic. We can imagine the tension between these qualities running along two different vectors, one between Greek and Persian cultural elements and one between English and Aeschylean expression. It is in this tension that I think we can find the particular feeling of the Persians. “Feel” is hard to define and will vary by reader, but to me, the translation comes very close to the experience of reading the Greek. Roberts accomplishes this in part by retaining some of the stranger formulations of Aeschylean language, with explanatory footnotes where necessary. In the parodos, for example, Mardon and Tharybis are “anvils to spears” (47), while a footnote helpfully explains that image indicates their resistance to spears. Later, likewise, the presence of the king is “the bright eye of the house” (185). Too many phrases like this could make the translation obscure, but Roberts is sparing in her use of unfamiliar imagery. There were a few times when I wished she had retained more of the foreignness of expression: at the entrance of the messenger, for example, Roberts translates “it is plain to see this runner here is Persian” (261). While this conveys the broad sense of the line, it loses the more interesting implications of the Greek, which has the chorus identify the man’s run (rather than the man himself) as Persian. The “Persian run” is hard to understand: it could have been an insult, or there may in fact have been a Persian style of running that differed from the Greek. But like the “anvils to spears,” Roberts could have translated this perplexing expression and added the note, in this case preserving the readers’ ability to interpret the text themselves.
Another difficulty of translation is Aeschylus’ repeated use of poly– compounds. Roberts notes the thematic importance of quantity and abundance in her introduction, but poly- is hard to render satisfyingly in English, since “much” and “very” are not sufficiently marked. Roberts uses variations of “x and more x.” So πολυχρύσων is “gold and still more gold” (9), πολύχειρ καὶ πολυναύτας is “troops and more troops, / sailors, more sailors” (85). This is good to read aloud, especially in a choral ode, but the strength for performance is something of a drawback when reading silently—to my ear the slightly singsong tone diminishes the foreboding that might accompany the repetition of poly-, since over the course of the play the abundance of wealth and strength becomes an abundance of the dead.
In several places, the translation echoes Hamlet. At line 446 κακῶν πέλαγος is “a sea of troubles,” while ὁ μάσσων βίοτος ἤν ταθῇ πρόσω is rendered “and make calamity of too long a life” (712). This might prove distracting if done too often, but Roberts employs the echoes sparingly and each use accords well with both the tone and the substance of the Greek. The Shakespearean phrases work as an effective cultural analogue to convey to readers some of the grandeur of Aeschylus’ language—although of course neither Shakespeare nor Aeschylus was always grand in tone.
In sum, Roberts’ translation will be a welcome resource for students, and a pleasure to readers of every level.