摘要：In a dark, claustrophobic garage on the Melbourne Fringe, squeezed up so close to the
stage that I could have felt the plague-breath hot on my cheek, I am watching Oedipus.
Whose Oedipus? And who’s Oedipus? Where did he come from? Where did this
pollution begin? Questions like this call for investigation, but as in every Oedipal
narrative, the answers only seem to open up more questions, ‘knotted and twisted
together… tangled in the knotted mesh of causes’ (Hughes 1969: 35 & 52). This drive to
determine origins feeds a compulsive Oedipal urge to dig out answers at any cost,
projecting responsibility onto distant agents but ultimately uncovering it deep in your own
body. The Oedipus I am watching is Ted Hughes’s translation of Seneca’s text, but it has
passed through multiple incarnations to reach this point. Since Peter Brook’s
experimental staging of the work in 1968, the Hughes translation has been performed
some eighteen times on three continents, and—it could be argued—has achieved
canonical status in its own right. This paper charts the performance history of Hughes’s
Seneca’s Oedipus, and at the same time opens discussion about the issues raised by
this particular strain of classical reception: authenticity, originality, translation,
transmission, possession.1
关键词：Oedipus;Transducer Electronic Data Sheets;Adaptation;Treatments
