The Libretti of The Oresteia Project
Translating Aeschylus is a great pleasure and a great challenge. More than the other two surviving Greek tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, Aeschylus is renowned for the rich density of his language. Even in antiquity, his unusual way with words was recognized: the comedy Frogs, composed by Aristophanes about a half-century after Aeschylus’ death, has the shade of Aeschylus and the shade of Euripides competing in a poetry contest in the underworld. The battle of words climaxes in a scene in which both tragedians recite passages of their plays into a giant scale to test the balance of their poetry, and Aeschylus’ offerings are found to be far ‘weightier’ than those of Euripides.
But magnificence of vocabulary and expression does not necessarily lend itself well to modern opera. Although the words provide the plot and sketch the characters, they must above all be singable. They must also be as transparent as the demands of the source poetry permit, so that the members of the audience will be able to enjoy as much of the libretto as possible while they are being swept along by the music.
‘Transparent’ is not the first adjective that comes to mind when one reads Aeschylus, and so I have tried to strike a middle ground with my translation. The images and symbols which recur throughout the ancient text of the Oresteia are not only part and parcel of Aeschylus’ artistic thought, but also crucial unifying devices for the trilogy. In making cuts in the text, then, I have tried to maintain the progressive recurrences of individual concepts which the composer and I deemed most essential for the plot and most effective for the stage. For example, references to blood and sacrifice have almost inevitably been kept in, even where they may appear to generate ‘extra’ words: they tie together the progressive deaths in the House of Atreus (the children of Thyestes, Iphigeneia, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and even Klytemnestra) and call attention to one of the major themes of the Oresteia as a whole: the evolving definition of justice as opposed to blood-vendetta. Aeschylus’ frequent use of animal imagery and metaphors derived from animals can also still be seen in these libretti, although for those who are very familiar with the plays, we have left in some of the lions and taken out most of the birds.
For all of the lines that had to be eliminated from the tragedies to make them into operas, however, I have still done my best to maintain Aeschylus’ own dramatic structure. No scenes or even speeches have changed places, no characters been cut, no choruses removed. The composer and I thought this essential to maintain the accumulation of tension and fear that helps to make these plays such masterpieces. I have also tried, whenever possible, to maintain Aeschylus’ own grammatical structure, not adding words that are not recommended by the Greek, nor subtracting words, if at all possible, if I am planning to use a line intact. The occasionally ‘gratuitous’ adjectives and repetitions that remain are evidence of the poet’s tapestried style, and I hope to be able to share something of this with those who view these operas.
As a ‘student’ of Aeschylus, I am also a student of those who have worked on him before me, and I must express a great debt above all to the masterful translation of the Oresteia produced by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Although I have also been influenced by other translations (e.g. those of Robert Fagles and Tony Harrison), it is that of Lloyd-Jones which guided me through the Oresteia when I first discovered Aeschylus, and which I have continued to use as both aid and inspiration. There are a few moments in this libretto when I could not help reaching the same conclusion about an Aeschylean utterance as Lloyd-Jones did, and I hope that this will be taken as it is sincerely intended: as a compliment.
--Sarah Brown Ferrario, librettist