The Daily Pennsylvanian is a student-run nonprofit.

Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our site.

The newest translation of Euripides' drama Andromache probably won't hit bookstores for another two years. But last night, about 15 members of the University community watched as 11 more performed a reading of the latest version of the translation, developed by Classical Studies Professor Emeritus Wesley Smith and English Professor Susan Stewart. The performance was part of the monthly Kelly Writers House program entitled "The Play's the Thing." In the play, Andromache is the Trojan woman who is taken as a slave in a Greek household after the Greeks have won the Trojan war. Smith and Stewart were commissioned for the job two years ago by the Oxford University Press. "Susan's responsible for the poetry? in the text," Smith told the group of readers and audience members after the performance. "I am the guarantor that it is accurate to the Greek." In making the translation, Stewart said she developed a very rough draft based on previous translations of the play. Smith went over the Greek carefully, and he and Stewart sent their versions to each other back and forth over e-mail. "When we're both satisfied, it's good news," Smith said. For Stewart, last night's reading was intended "to help us hear the play as a whole via different voices as we go into our final revisions." So, the performers met at 5 p.m. yesterday to begin their first -- and only -- rehearsal of the play, throughout which Smith helped the readers pronounce all the Greek names correctly. After the readers discussed the play over dinner, the reading began at about 7 p.m., with a diverse group of performers that included seven Penn students, one faculty member and three Philadelphia residents. But not all of them began the afternoon knowing they would be participating on stage later in the evening. Engineering junior Dale Hetherington, for instance, was persuaded by a friend to come watch the play but wound up acting himself when the cast needed an extra performer. Theater Arts lecturer Rose Malague opened as the play's title character. "Susan Stewart's poetry is beautiful," she said after the performance. College senior Ben Pace played the role of Menelaus, the Spartan king who threatens Andromache by telling her to choose between saving herself or her young son, Molossus -- who was played by Hetherington. He said Stewart and Smith "worked [the play] well? into the vernacular." And Smith said he was "quite pleased" with the way the play sounded. "My sense of the previous translations? [is that] there isn't a really speakable one." "It's good to hear it and know that it can be spoken aloud," he said, adding that he was "just pleased at its flow." When one audience member asked how the new translation compares with older ones, Smith quipped that the new one is "much superior." Whatever the truth may be, Smith and Stewart are still not finished with their work. "We're taking out 50 percent of the 'berefts,'" Stewart joked. And for Writers House Program Manager Heather Starr, who played the role of the goddess Thetis, it was "really fun to participate." "The fact that we all had such a good time," she said, is testimony to how well the play is translated.

Comments powered by Disqus

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.