MEDEA.

Kafatou, Sarah

MEDEA by Euripides, translated by Robin Robertson

Vintage Classics, 2008, $19.95 cloth, ISBN 9780099511762

Robin Robertson is an editor who has brought into print a very strong cohort of emerging writers, many of them Scottish like himself. He is also a poet whose work has been honored with the Forward Prize for poetry (twice, for best first book and best book of the year), the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and publication in distinguished American venues such as The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He has enriched his collections with renditions of classic poems that resonate with his own, as does this passage from Montale's "Meriggiare pallida e assorto": "And then you will walk, sun-blinded,/into the slow and bitter understanding/that this life and all its heart-sick wonder / is just the following of a wall / ridged with bright shards of broken glass."

What might it be like to write, or translate, Medea? Robertson's third and most recent collection, Swithering, holds a clue in its several poems about Strindberg, that would-be alchemist and great dramatist of marital conflict, who is pictured as

... the crippled Firegod
forging lines of gold from lead.
A gift for his lost wife and children,
this was to be the Great Work: a golden net invisible to the eye
and finer than spider-thread.
With every word he wrote, his hands bled.

As a translator, Robertson puts to use understandings from his own work and life. Slow Air, his second book, includes a poem, "Head Over Heels," dedicated to his wife, Clare. It describes a ferris wheel ride in the Place de la Concorde: "the bright circuitry of Paris / lay beneath us like the night sky, / like the plan of our lives." But the book opens with the poem "Apart," which concludes, "looking too late to the ones we loved,/ we stretch out our hands as we fall," and ends on this note, a translation from Rilke: "We are all falling now. My hand, my heart, / stall and drift in darkness, see-sawing down. // And we still believe there is one who sifts and holds/the leaves, the lives, of all those softly falling."

Robertson's marriage came to an end a few years ago. His version of Medea is dedicated to his former wife, with her permission. It is an extraordinary testament, for Medea is perhaps the world's most unbearable drama of the breakup of a marriage. In it, the wife, Medea, finding that her husband, Jason, has abandoned her for another (socially more prominent, richer, younger) woman, murders not only her rival but also, appallingly, their own two children in order to hurt Jason the more.

The power of the drama comes in part from our unwilling sympathy for both Medea and Jason, despite her implacable, cruel will to triumph over him, and despite his coldly hypocritical defense of his betrayal of her as being in the best interest of all concerned. Euripides shows us that Medea tragically loves her children more than the evidently detached Jason does, but that her feelings of motherly love are colored and in the end overwhelmed by her hatred of him.

Robertson's own poetic temperament, which derives considerable strength from his ability to render finely controlled violence, is well matched to this story. Consider his poem "Entry" from Switkering, about a buzzard falling on a rabbit:

her wings fall away and she drops
like a slate into snow.
The wounds feather through him
throwing a fine mist of incarnation,
annunciation in the fletched field,
and she breaks in,
flips the latches
of the back, opens the red drawer
in his chest, ransacking the heart.

So his Medea, when a messenger comes to tell her of the successful murder (by means of a gift of clothing saturated with something like napalm) of her rival, the king's daughter, and incidentally of the king as well, responds like a connoisseur of unspeakable cruelty: "Calm down. Take your time./Don't spare the details./ I'd like to know just how they died. / The worse it was, the more I want to hear."

Americans who know the play will probably have read it in the 1944 translation by Rex Warner, published by the University of Chicago Press as one of a series of Greek tragedies edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. That translation, like others in that excellent series, was done with keen attention to the original text and with a flair for the right expression in English, and was intended primarily for the page, not the stage. Warner, for the lines just cited, has "Do not be in a hurry, friend, / But speak. How did they die? You will delight me twice/as much again if you say they died in agony." His version, using loose pentameter rather than cutting the line irregularly, as Robertson does to convey breaks in the sense, is closer, word for word, to the original than is Robertson's, but it comes across in English as too stately, not colloquial, a bit numbing.

Robertson's version succeeds particularly at moments of stark dramatic tension: he knows how to bring the tension out, in language that all of us can recognize as potentially our own. In the first argument between Medea and Jason, for example, when she points out how much she's done and given up for him (she's murdered her own younger brother, among other things), he answers,

Let's get this straight.
You wildly overstate your role in all of this ...
You helped me, of course you did, and I'm grateful,
but you gained more than you gave ...
I've offered to help you and the children
but my kindness is thrown back in my face.

Her speech, in contrast to his, never ameliorates or downplays, but instead sharpens our sense of what's at stake. Among her very last words to him are these: "Your pain is a comfort to mine."

There is yet another aspect to the drama, aside from the war between the sexes, which the chorus steps in to underline and comment upon. This is the war within Medea herself, as what she had loved exclusively becomes the object of her obsessive hate. Hers is a case of what psychologists call reaction formation, that is, our excessively strong reaction against an object excessively desired. Ascetics and religious fanatics often suffer from this condition, which Euripides explores for us most vividly in his greatest play, The Bacchae. Medea is a stunning dramatic character because she can express with searing clarity both sides of her feeling for Jason, her utter dependence on him and her need to exert maximal power over him. At the end of the play--and very unlike Pentheus in The Bacchae, who is physically ripped apart by his own mother and other celebrants of the god Dionysus--she triumphs over Jason, riding away with the bodies of her sons in a flying chariot, for she is almost a goddess, a granddaughter of the sun. Robertson succeeds in conveying her icy control as well as her inner torment, finding words for her fierce pride and her desperation too. Her exit in the chariot recalls his poem "Underground" about the London tube train, "pushing air in front of it, / pulling it behind; gone / leaving less than nothing, just that faint / pitch forward / into its pocket of loss."

There have been a number of recent renditions of Greek classics by fine poets from Britain and Ireland, including Tony Harrison's and Ted Hughes' very different versions of Aeschylus' Oresteta; Seamus Heaney's versions of Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes; Paul Muldoon's version of Aristophanes' The Birds; and Simon Armitage's reduction for radio of Homer's Odyssey. Robertson's work is worthy of this distinguished company.