Translator's Note

In 416 BCE, the Athenians besieged the island of Melos as they vied to establish hegemony in the Aegean. When it fell, the Athenians carried out a genocide, killing all the men, selling the women and children into slavery, and establishing a colony on the island. During the City Dionysia of the following year, 415 BCE, Euripides staged his Τρῳάδες (Trōiades or Trōades, the Trojan Women).

The tragedy has little plot—it is instead a protracted lament about the destruction of Troy and the subjugation of its survivors. Hecuba—deposed queen of Troy—and a chorus of other Trojan women mourn the loss of their country as they await enslavement. In the course of this mourning, the gods plot the doom of the Greek homecoming; Hecuba’s daughter Cassandra is taken by force to Agamemnon; Hecuba learns her youngest daughter, Polyxena, has been sacrificed; Helen undergoes a mock trial; and Hecuba’s grandson Astyanax is thrown from the walls of Troy in an effort to kill the last male Trojan.

Euripides offered these horrors to an audience that surely contained some of the men responsible for the Melian genocide. With verse vacillating between morose and frantic, overwrought and sparse, he asked his countrymen: what could justify what we have done?

In the context of the tragedy, the question is one of cause-and-effect, hinging on a story which itself was foundational to panhellenic identity: did the kidnapping of Helen justify a decade of siege and the subsequent destruction of Troy? Even if so, did not a more distant conflict between the gods precipitate the kidnapping, as Helen feebly attempts to point out in the play? And if these things cannot justify the horrors on stage, how then could the Athenians have done as much to Melos for the sake of allegiance, tribute, and a new colony?

The thrust of the tragedy—a distilled sorrow that serves no purpose beyond begging the spectator to interrogate their complicity—cannot be contained in a single excerpt. In an attempt to offer the full weight of the play, then, I have opted to make an abridgement of it.

I have not abridged the plot, however; I have abridged the mood. I have taken bits and pieces of the tragedy and fragmented it, removing the names of those who speak to anonymize and universalize its content, attempting to boil it down to one long and continuous meditation.

The criteria for selecting lines were twofold: first, I have selected for aesthetic qualities, searching, in my subjective view, for the weightiest and most stylistically interesting lines; second, I have selected verses which, compiled, serve my surely transparent ethical purpose—to point ever toward Gaza, which, as I write, burns and starves.

What qualified as aesthetically significant varied—images that struck me, sonorous language that moved me, things that felt forceful. Among these lines, however, two prominent features recurred: repetition and the frantic completion of dialogic lines.

Euripides leans frequently on repetition to heighten the drama of his verse, from strings of rhetorical questions (“must i keep silent? or ought i cry out?”) to repeated onomatopoeic wails (“αἰαῖ αἰαῖ,” “ἰὼ ἰώ,” “φεῦ φεῦ,” which I have generally rendered as “woe” or “alas”) to duplicated adjectives, nouns, and verbs (“τρομερὰ τρομερά,” “trembling, trembling”; “  Ἴλιον Ἴλιον,” “ilion, ilion”; “βοᾶι βοᾶι,” “crying out, crying out”). These repetitions simultaneously drag out the lines—long vowels dominate the wails, and we are forced to linger over repeated words—but also hasten them as the meter marches on with a lessened semantic load.

Similarly, the pace is accelerated during dialogues by characters frequently completing each other’s lines in quick succession, as if they are talking over one another while generating metrically complete verses. While certainly not unique to Euripides, the device here agitates the characters as they search for words to cope with horror. It has a bewildering effect when the attributions are removed, as in 578, so here is an excerpt with attributions:

Ἑκάβη· οἴμοι.
     Ἀνδρομάχη· τί παιᾶν’ ἐμὸν στενάζεις;
Εκ. αἰαῖ
     Αν. τῶνδ’ ἀλγέων
Εκ. ὦ Ζεῦ
     Αν. καὶ συμφορᾶς.
Εκ. τέκεα
     Αν. πρίν ποτ’ ἦμεν.

Hecuba: such is my woe—
     Andromache: why do you bewail my song? 
He: woe— 
     An: and what of these sufferings? 
He: o zeus— 
     An: and our misfortune? 
He: o children— 
     An: once—we were once— 

(N.b. the speakers should perhaps be reversed in this portion of the dialogue, but I here follow the critical edition.)

The repetition and these quick exchanges—held in contrast with sustained individual laments elsewhere, as in Hecuba’s twisting syntax in 145ff—create an urgency in the dread. In one moment we see slowly unfurling sorrow and in the next a frenzied panic as it is realized.

In general, I have tried to convey these features with a sparse, woeful economy, similar to Caryl Churchill’s desolate and terse translation of Seneca’s Thyestes. I have tried to be “strict” in translation, replicating the Greek syntax when intelligible (as in the first line), though I occasionally verge on explicit “looseness” to close the gaps left by my fragmentation and to achieve my rhetorical goals.

These selections, as stated, were not made purely on the basis of emotional resonance; they were also selected to parallel the destruction of Gaza, presently besieged by Israel.

In translating a work so grim—and specifically by distilling its worst moments—I worry I am presenting only darkness when there is a people desperately in need of light. Yet it is a question of audience: I am not writing for the afflicted but for those who afflict them. To follow the cue of Euripides, I translate for an audience of people like me, who are paying and voting for the bombs—American bombs dropped by Israel—that are leaving young and old alike dead and displaced amidst the rubble of homes, hospitals, and universities; for the bullets and drone strikes we rain upon refugees, aid workers, journalists, hostages, and those seeking food; for the tanks that roll over emptied land. Look, reader, on Troy; on Melos; on Gaza.

So too am I cognizant of the perils of selecting and omitting passages from the work to create parallels. The tragedy contains many passages of craved vengeance, meditations on the cycle of violence, and talk of martyrdom—particularly in the mouths of Cassandra and the gods—yet I have omitted them. So too have I obfuscated things via translation: for instance, words with the root δουλ-, pertaining to slavery or servitude, have been rendered as forms of “subjugate” instead, as the parallel at hand is not enslavement but occupation. This process does not serve to hide the presence of these things in the play (nor, by extension, to hide or twist their existence in reality)—it is, instead, not the aim of the project.

Indeed, in view of the full tragedy, many passages have been omitted for similar concerns about relevance or thematic cohesion. The principle named characters, for instance, are deposed royals, who are surely not easy to sympathize with when our increasingly impoverished world is warming. Hecuba blames Helen for the sacking, placing the onus on a woman kidnapped and treated as a pawn by the gods. The primary threat to the women of the play is not death but ensuing sexual slavery. These things, all, I have left out or reframed.

Yet I do not think this is a grave sin. There is smoke, and I am using the tools available to me to point toward the fire. Omission, selection, and translation are all inherently political acts, but they are not necessarily apology or justification—for Greeks or for Trojans. The piece wrestles with a deeper history briefly in scant lines (799ff), and many passages (like 555ff) may be read as multivalent and applicable also to October 7th, but a project of this length and aim is bound by the content of the tragedy, and so I choose also to be bound by the tragedy of this present moment. I am complicit in what is unfolding now, and that is why I write. My thoughts extend beyond what is contained here, of course, but I ask you now specifically to look upon the fire.

Ilion smolders. Let us wail.

Matthew Stokdyk

In the Classroom