thyestes 523 (take 2)

I'm honestly a little disappointed in myself at how boring my translation of Seneca's Thyestes was. I made one and only one interesting choice, and I knew that when I put it up, and putting more boring shit on the internet was so not the point of this project.

I've been thinking about this for weeks now, so I went in and gave it another shot.

My first thought was to play this off the story of Abraham and Isaac (blame my dad's Leonard Cohen obession, but "The Story of Isaac" immediately comes to mind when intrafamilial/intergenerational murder comes up). I actually played with using a couple versions of the story as an intertext: the Biblical text, Cohen's song, and (very briefly) a poem by Chaim Gouri that my mother loves.

But it wasn't doing much for me. I picked that story because I know what's coming for Thyestes' sons and I wanted that to lurk under the text, but the stories simply aren't a good fit. The whole point of Abraham and Isaac is that Abraham doesn't want to kill his son but will do so if God demands it and that, in the end, God doesn't demand it. The whole point of Atreus and Thyestes is that Atreus does want to brutally murder his nephews and feed their corpses to their father and that, in the end, he does it. For all that violence against children is involved in both stories, there just isn't enough similarity in the message to make them work together. (Agamemnon and Iphigenia could be a nice medial step though...Something to consider.)

Anyway, I decided instead to run with the one (1) interesting thing I'd done with my previous translation, which was the connection I'd made with the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). It fits this passage better, even if it doesn't foreshadow the violence to come as well as I'd like. There is, at least, a bit of brotherly vitriol, with the elder son being all pissed about how his father welcomes the younger son home.

I used the King James Version specifically as the intertext. I have some feelings about the KJV because (a) it's not that great a translation from an accuracy standpoint and (b) it's a Protestant work, so it doesn't include the "deuterocanonical" books (like Tobit, Judith, and a handful of sections in Esther) that are part of the Catholic and Orthodox canons but not the Protestant or modern Jewish canons.^[1] However, I'm not doing a religion thing here, I'm doing a poetry thing, and the KJV (a) is unarguably the translation of the Bible that has had the most profound effect on English literature and (b) sounds good, so we're going with that for now.

I gave iambic pentameter the good old college try. If it's not metrical, I don't want to hear about it.