Balls.
Very sorry.
That was meant to be the staff of the Jerymyn Street Theatre up there in place of the blue. I don't know what went wrong, but huge thanks to them for trying so hard to sort it out, and also to whoever had to step in for me at the last minute. On a more positive note, at least l was introduced to the work of Emily Wilson even if I never got to perform it, and if you want a similarly happy introduction here are some links:
The sob story related to Odysseus in Hades by the ghost of Agamenon that I was meant to perform is most famously dramatised in three two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old tragedies by Aeschylus collectively known as the Oresteia, named after Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who in the final play is pursued by Furies after murdering his mother after she murdered his father after he murdered their daughter. The whole mess is eventually cleared up by a Divine Court who rule that, no matter who started it, they're stopping it, and that it is now "the citizens" and not snake-haired anthropormorphic guilt demons who shall decide matters of law, thereby creating the model for the contemporary Athenian city-state. Great! Except!... as Wilson observes beautifully in this review for the LRB of three (THREE!) new translations of The Oresetia, neither mothers nor daughters at that time were "citizens" of Athens, presenting women as very much part of the problem, a nuance none of the male translators Wilson reviews bothers to address. She talks more about both this and her translation of The Odyssey on the LRP podcast here, while Charlotte Higgins' great review of the latter in The Guardian had me immediately buying it online, resolved that this would be the translation I would finally read: Higgins notes for example that Wilson translates kunopis - a rare word with canine connotations once used by Euripides to describe the Furies - as "the face that hounded". whereas earlier translations provided by Wilson's male predecessors settled for the less ingenious "whore" or "bitch". You know. Nuance. So again I'm very sorry not to have been able to perform her words, and really have no idea what went wrong. A weak signal? I had back-up device after back-up device open though, just in case, oh wait, maybe that was the problem.
What a shame. I was going to say, if you ever felt like giving us your reading as one of your YouTube videos - but I guess the translation in question is very much not in the public domain.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I thought exactly that, in that order.
ReplyDelete