Women of Trachis

Name: Women of Trachis
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Unknown Author
ISBN: 9780811209489

by Unknown Author

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(1 ratings)

66 pages1985New Directions Publishing CorporationISBN 9780811209489

Drama Poetry Classics

About this book

For Ezra Pound, Sophokles' Women of Trachis represented 'the highest peak of Greek sensibility registered in any of the plays that have come down to us..." Nothing rhetorical, nothing long-winded survives in Pound's tragedy of Herakles. His language is lit with lights long extinguished in the traditionally ornate and airless verse translations. With no mincing, poetry speeds tragedy down its course to disaster. Pound's version of Women of Trachis was first published by New Directions in 1957. Some twenty years earlier, in 1938, Pound had complained that there "were no translations of these plays that an aware man can read without deadly boredom." He himself, as it turned out, supplied the remedy: his Women of Trachis brings Sophokles into the world of the living.

Publication Details

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 1985
Pages: 66
ISBN: 9780811209489
Language: en

About Unknown Author

Sophocles (circa. 496 BCE - 406 BCE) was the second of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived to the present day. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 120 or more plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form, namely Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-awarded playwright in the dramatic competitions of ancient Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. Sophocles competed in around thirty drama competitions; he won perhaps twenty four and never received lower than second place. Aeschylus won fourteen competitions and was defeated by Sophocles at times. Euripides won only four competitions.