Translator's Note

I created this translation of Iphigenia’s speeches from the beginning of Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians for a recent production of a new play, Iphigenia, that combines Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (as Act 1) with his Iphigenia among the Taurians (as Act 2). It was first performed in November 2022 at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the script has since been used in two subsequent performances: a private performance at the British American Drama Academy in the UK, and in an episode of the Center for Hellenic Studies series "Reading Greek Tragedy Online" (now available on Youtube).

I developed the translation in close collaboration with the director of the play, Edward Isser. Our goals were to maintain the substance of Euripides’ plays while making the dialogue understandable and engaging as heard in real time by a 21st-century American audience who likely have little experience with ancient Greek tragedy or any context for the characters of this story. Translating for performance offered opportunities and challenges that I found differed from translating for the page. During the performance, the audience will not be able to pause to ponder, or to go back and re-read if they don’t understand. There are no footnotes in performance to explain references. Although the play has been given a 20th-century setting, the dialogue and song lyrics have been rendered to sound removed from everyday speech, an intentional formal remoteness that, together with sometimes stark cultural differences, can create distance or even disorientation for the audience.

We started from Isser’s vision for the production, which included combining Euripides’ two plays into one and retelling Iphigenia’s story for a contemporary audience. We built the translation scene by scene, keeping at the forefront of our process what the audience sees before them on stage, and prioritizing showing over telling. Toward our goals, we liberally cut lines or compressed the sense into fewer lines. We also rearranged lines to serve the scene, while guarding against changing the context so much that the lines no longer had connection to the original sense. We were much more reserved about adding lines. Additions were based in other ancient sources, sometimes expanding on something that was present in Euripides’ text in order to illuminate it or to provide continuity between the two plays. Examples of such additions in this speech include the line about her mother’s role in Aulis (“my mother Clytemnestra tried her best to prevent my sacrifice”) to provide a transition into the narration of how Artemis saved her, and emphasizing Iphigenia’s role as sister through the repeated naming of all her siblings, including Chrysothemis, who is not named explicitly in either play. For continuity with the larger tradition with which these plays engage, I added the name known from Iliad 9.287 and Sophocles’ Electra.

Cutting, compressing, and rearranging are evident in this selection from Act 2, which draws on lines from two different scenes in the original Iphigenia among the Taurians.^[1] Euripides starts his drama with Iphigenia on stage alone to speak the prologue. In typical Euripidean style, she introduces herself and provides the background for the story (IT 1–66). She leaves the stage after announcing that she is preparing to pour libations for her brother Orestes, whom she believes to be dead because of a dream that she has just described. Orestes himself, very much alive, and his friend Pylades then appear and share their reasons for being in Tauris—following orders from Apollo, they will steal the Taurian statue of Artemis and take it to Athens. Accomplishing this will atone for Orestes’ murder of his (and Iphigenia’s) mother and free him from the continuing pursuit of the Furies (67–122). This statue resides in the temple where his sister, whom he believes to be dead, is a priestess who sacrifices any Greeks who are caught in this land. They leave the stage, and the chorus of enslaved Greek women enters (123–142), followed by Iphigenia for the libations and lament for Orestes (143–177). After the chorus gives an antiphonal response (178–202), Iphigenia continues with lyrics about her own life and suffering (203–235) before a messenger arrives to report the capture of two Greek men, who are in fact Orestes and Pylades.

In our production, the audience has just seen in Act 1 what happened in Aulis. They already know who Iphigenia is and what she went through there: they witnessed her father Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice her so that he could make war on Troy and her discovery of how he deceived her to accomplish his plan. In accordance with our preference to show rather than tell, our second act opens with the human sacrifice of two anonymous Greek men performed by Iphigenia. The second scene from the original play, with the arrival of Orestes and Pylades, follows. This speech, coming after those scenes, reintroduces Iphigenia to the audience in her new circumstances and conveys her character approximately fifteen years after the events of the first act. Her description here of what they saw only minutes before shows them that Iphigenia’s own perspective on the act of her own sacrifice (which in the Iphigenia at Aulis she eventually agrees to as a willing participant) has changed. 

In Act 1 Iphigenia offered her life willingly once she saw that doing so was the only way to save the lives of both Achilles and her mother and to avoid a horrifying and humiliating end for herself. She wanted also to define the meaning of her sacrifice, to make herself the hero whose death gloriously enables the Greek war effort. But she will not be remembered as she had hoped. Now she has for fifteen years inflicted on others the violence that was done to her. In this brutal existence, she struggles to hold onto her identity and her humanity by the thread of hope that she will one day be reunited with her family. Bringing forward what Iphigenia says about her life after the libations in the original (203–235) fits this new purpose of the speech. 

The straightforward line in Euripides in which the character on stage first introduces herself to the audience (literally rendered “I am Iphigenia, child of Agamemnon and of the daughter of Tyndareus,” IT 4–5) becomes a repeated mantra structuring the long speech. Calling to mind her family relationships and the names of her parents and siblings leads into her memories of and feelings for Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes, as she recalls and recasts what happened to her. The audience sees a young woman both clinging to her identity so that she doesn’t lose it entirely and rewriting her life story.

[1] Greek text is from Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris. Euripidis Fabulae, vol. 2, ed. Gilbert Murray. Oxford Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1913. (via the Perseus Project). Line numbers in the translation refer to corresponding lines in the Greek text.

Mary Ebbott

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