ABSTRACT
The appearance of the titles of Greek tragedies on our theatre programmes, and the performance on stage at not infrequent intervals of works by, especially, Sophocles and Aeschylus, but also Euripides, has become in our country a phenomenon no longer considered remarkable. At any rate I for my part have to confess—and others will have had the same experience—that in the forty years it will soon be since my boyhood and adolescence, during which I have taken a lively interest in the life of our theatre, I have never thought twice about the fact that in this period of time I have attended many important performances of Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, the Sophoclean Antigone, and also Aeschylus’ Persians and Oresteia as well as Euripides’ Medea, Trojan Women, and Suppliants, Even when in the last decade it seemed to me, as a watchful observer, that I could detect such performances of the Greek tragedians becoming not only more frequent than before, but also more substantial, the observation in the first instance pleased me, but it did not take me altogether by surprise. Only after I became directly involved, with my own efforts at translation, in such modern performances of Greek tragedy on our stages, did I feel a great sense of wonder come over me one day: how it can possibly be that dramatic works which had their first performance before a completely different people, watched beneath a different sun and different gods some 2400 years ago, can still time and time again inspire theatre managers, directors, set designers, casts, and, connected with that, a modern public, in a way hardly different from the newest productions.
