Translator’s Note

In 416 BCE, the Athenians besieged the island of Melos. 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, through his perennially dramatic lyricism and intensely psychological characters, 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 we have done as much to Melos for the sake of allegiance, tribute, and a new colony?

The thrust of the tragedy—a rarified sorrow that serves no purpose beyond begging the spectator to interrogate their complicity—cannot, I think, 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. (And, really, this is not so absurd: consider if the Trojan Women survived for us only in unattributed fragments in a worm-eaten codex or a crumbling papyrus, anonymous sorrows the only things to assemble.)

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 for verses which, compiled, serve my obvious and transparent political purpose—to point ever toward Gaza, which at this moment burns and starves.

In translating something so grim, I worry about that latter motivation—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 that are leaving young and old alike displaced amidst the rubble. Look, reader, on Troy; on Melos; on Gaza.

And, indeed, politics are not straightforward in view of the whole play. The named characters are deposed royals, who are surely not easy to sympathize with when our world is increasingly burning. 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 I have obfuscated in one sense or another in my abridgement by selection (e.g., by selecting passages of sorrow instead of those with statements of vengeance) and by translation (e.g., by rendering words with the root δουλ- as forms of “subjugate” instead of “slave”), and of that too I am conscious. Yet the collapsing of complexity ought not, I think, be a sin itself. I have chosen to translate—artificially—as the outsider looking in: I see the death and the fire, and that is what I seek to present. I have an explicit aim in this project, and I have chosen passages to accommodate that specifically at the expense of other avenues.

I am helped in this presentation, of course, by the exceptional quality of the art which I am mangling.

The verse is sparse but rich. Euripides conveys many woes with shocking economy, only growing convoluted to express the inner knots of the characters (the syntax of 145ff is particularly tangled). I have generally tried to be “strict” in translation, even replicating the Greek syntax when intelligible, as in the first line. Occasionally I verge on looseness to close the gaps left by my fragmentation. At all points I have tried to convey its sparse sense, emulating in part Caryl Churchill’s desolate terseness in translating Seneca’s Thyestes.

There are many poetic features to discuss, but two in particular heighten the miserable urgency of the text: repetition and lines split between characters.

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 τρομερὰ,” “trembling, trembling”; “  Ἴλιον Ἴλιον,” “ilion, ilion”; “βοᾶι βοᾶι,” “crying out, crying out”). These repetitions simultaneously drag out the lines—long vowels dominating the wails—but also hastening 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 talking over one another. This has a rather bewildering effect when the attributions are removed, as in 578, so here it is with attributions, with Hecuba and Andromache together generating metrically complete lines:

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— 

The repetition and these quick exchanges—held in contrast with sustained individual laments elsewhere—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. Though these tools are not unique to Euripides, he certainly uses them to grimmer ends than his predecessors.

This analysis is incomplete and fragmented, much like what I have presented in translation; I have not dwelt long enough on any given thing but have run out of space. All I can hope is that the horrors are not witnessed in vain. Ilion smolders; let us wail.