The Complete Plays of Sophocles

I'am not a scholar, so I would not seek to make comments on Translation. However, no matter what the Translation the beauty of Sophocles shines through. Not all the stories are Inovative or particuarly exciting,but the language is decandent and beautiful and it has proper perspective. Tragedy is not only about story but very much so about perspective. The beauty of the greek tregedians is that the plays always have a powerful moral point. The word of wisdom is usually endowned by a chorus in the last verses. Consider the end of Antigone: "where wisdom is, happiness will crown A piety that nothing will corode. But high and mighty words and ways are flogged to humbleness,till age,Beaten to its neees,at last is wise" If it is not beautiful it is not worth reading and because it is beautiful it deserves to be a classic

If tragedy is, as Aristotle described, the imitation (that is, representation) of great people whose downfall induces a sense of pity and fear in the audience, Sophocles's plays are exemplary illustrations of the genre. The Sophoclean hero suffers, agonizes, despairs because of cruel fate or, more likely, some mistake he or she has made as a result of a character flaw such as pride or anger. Thus the tragedy of "Ajax" is not only that the title character kills himself in shame over having lost out to Odysseus on being awarded Achilles's armor, the ownership of which would have been proof of his heroic deeds in battle, but that his shame might have been alleviated had he known that Odysseus greatly respected his heroism. Similarly, in "Antigone," Creon, king of Thebes, suffers the loss of his wife and son over his stubborn insistence to enforce a law founded on his pride.Sophocles portrays "noble" sufferers too. In "Electra," the title heroine plots to kill her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, but she has a good reason -- revenge for killing her father Agamemnon and bounding her to a life of slavish submission. The title hero of "Philoctetes" is marooned on an island through no fault of his own, and furthermore becomes the target of trickery when Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles's son, show up with the intent to obtain a magic bow in his possession which they need to win the Trojan War. Heracles's wife Deianeira, in "The Women in Trachis," catches her husband in the act of intended infidelity; her reaction is to send him a cloak she thinks is a talisman to keep him faithful to her, when in reality it is poisoned. That Electra's plans are fulfilled, Philoctetes receives sympathy, and Deianeira kills herself in grief shows the range of emotions that lead to the end of a Sophoclean tragedy.The most masterful of these plays is "Oedipus the King," which seeks to maximize pity and fear in the audience by portraying some of the most tragic circumstances imaginable -- a hero who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother as was prophesied, and then, to his horror, discovers their identities. Does Oedipus, like Deianeira, kill himself in grief? No, that would be too merciful. Instead, he gouges out his eyes in self-punishment and lives to continue suffering, as an abject vagrant in "Oedipus at Colonus."In this Signet Classics edition, Paul Roche translates these plays in verse rather than prose, which preserves their poeticality, improves their clarity, and significantly increases the enjoyability of reading them. This is the perfect edition for getting acquainted with one of the great Greek dramatists.

I enjoyed this translation, and I recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. Its strength is that it is very easy to read in large part because Roche structured the lines as he felt they would have been spoken. He includes some interesting appendices on production, etc, and he has just the right number of footnotes to help us keep up, but not be slowed down.My beef is that comparing it to other translations I have read is like comparing the clunky dumbed down modern translations of the Bible to the King James Version. Still, the language and the wisdom do sometimes soar together.

This series of translations is a director's and teacher's dream: its integrity lies in both its theatricality and scholarship. I recently directed a production of Antigone using this text, and it received the highest praise from the actors and audience members alike. One actor exclaimed during a rehearsal, "I keep telling everyone that I'm in Antigone, and they roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, how boring'. I don't know what they're talking about. This play is great." I heard another student leave the theater saying, "Wow. I wish we'd read that translation in class. That was so much better than the one we read." From my perspective as a director, I'd say that this translation made my life much easier. The poetry is eloquent as well as playable. The language itself guided my actors through their roles. Plus, with every other translation I read in search of the right one to produce, I found myself afraid of the Chorus. As soon as I picked up this translation, I understood the Chorus for the first time. It literally sang itself off the page.

This is a most accessible tome of the seven extant plays of the Sophocles . The editor's comments also illumine the reader. If you've never read Sophocles, this inexpensive paperback is all you need to enter the realm of ancient Greece.