Capitolo 1
IL
AGAMEMNON
OF
AESCHYLUS
TRANSLATED IN THE ENGLISH RHYMING VERSO
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES FROM
GILBERT MURRAY
TEACHER OF REGIUS DI THE GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY IN OXFORD
TENTH THOUSAND
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN House, 40 Road of Museum, W.C.
PREFACE
The sense of the difficulty, and indeed of reverential fear with which a researcher
you approach the assignment to translate the _Agamemnon_ it directly depends on his
the greatness as poetry. It is partly a matter of the diction. The language of
Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax rigid and simple, the
dark dictionary, unexpected, and it bathed in shine. His/her
particularities cannot be neglected, or the translation will be false in
character. He/she anchors not same Milton you/he/she could produce in English the same great
music and a translator that you/he/she should ambitiously strive himself/herself/themselves to represent the
complex effect of the original one would hinder his own powers of expression and
you violate his/her tool to breaking. But, separately from the diction in this
narrowers feel, there is a quality of atmosphere that surrounds the
_Agamemnon_ that it almost seems to challenge reproduction in another setting,
because it depends in the great measure on the position of the play in the
I develop historical of the Greek literature.
If we accept the sight that every Art to of the extension and the Greek tragedy in a
very special degree, stirs in its progress of development from Religion to
Fun, from a Service to a Show to which the _Agamemnon_ seems
both of forehead to a critical point where the equilibrium of the two elements is near
perfection. The play has fully come to the life, but the religion doesn't have yet
been grown weak to a formality. The _Agamemnon_ is not, as the _Suppliant of Aeschylus
Women_, a statue mean-cut out of the stone. It is a true play, while showing
clash of character and situation, the anxiety and movement, psychological
depth and thinness. He/she still anchors anything he/she remains more than a play. His/her
atmosphere is not completely of this world. In the long lyric especially one