agamemnon 1090–92

Another one not off the random passage generator. My classics book club is reading the Oresteia right now, and I decided to read Robert Lowell's translation.[1] I was struck by his word choice in this part, where Cassandra speaks of the House of Atreus:[2]

CASSANDRA: No, no, this is a meathouse. God
hates these people. They have hung the flesh
of their own young on hooks.

There were two things I found interesting here. First was the cleverness of substituting "meathouse" for "house", which was the sort of nice play on words that immediately sends me scrambling for the Greek to see whether the pun exists in the original. The second was the specificity of the meat-hooks; I didn't know whether Greeks had those or whether Lowell was substituting in what he thought should exist in a meathouse.

I wanted to see what other translators did with the same passage. Here's Oliver Taplin:[3]

CASSANDRA: No, a house god-hating—
it’s a house that’s freighted
with much inbred bloodshed,
where its own are butchered.
A human abattoir,
a blood-bespattered floor.

And now we've got "inbred bloodshed", which is an interesting way to put things in the context.[4]

Anne Carson, who's doing something interesting with the incomprehensibility of Cassandra at this point, gives:

KASSANDRA: Godhated so
then too
much knowing together self-
murder man-
chop blood-
slop floor

Sarah Ruden:

CASSANDRA: (shrieking) A house that hates the gods, a house in
on the wicked murder of its own, of itself, a house full of nooses;
a butchery men are driven into, to spatter its floor with their blood.

And Richard Lattimore:

CASSANDRA: No, but a house that god hates, guilty within
of kindred blood shed, torture of its own,
the shambles for men's butchery, the dripping floor.

And that's all the Oresteia translations I have on my computer at this precise moment;[5] they were numerous enough that I didn't much feel like going on the hunt for more.

Now comes time to do my own version, for which we'll need the Greek (Ag. 1090–92):

{Κα.} μισόθεον μὲν οὖν· πολλὰ συνίστορα,
αὐτόφονα, κακὰ καρτάναι
ἀνδρὸς σφαγεῖον καὶ πέδον ῥαντήριον.

My boring translation:

Cassandra: No! It's profane: witness to many things, suicidal, evil [???], a bowl for catching the blood of sacrificial victims and soaked earth.

A few notes:

  1. συνίστορα: This is basically "sharing a secret with", which has obvious utility in terms of "complicit in/witness to a crime".
  2. αὐτόφονα: Breaking down the compound, this should most basically means "self-murder" or "self-gore"; Aeschylus uses it in reference to parricide on multiple occasions. καρτάναι: So, this word is of uncertain meaning, doesn't fit metrically, and appears nowhere else in the surviving corpus of ancient Greek literature, so it's a prime candidate for an emendation. One possibility is κρεατὀμα, which would also be a hapax,[6] but Aeschylus likes making up compound words and this one would at least make some sense (meaning something like "flesh-cutting"), so I'll take it.
  3. ἀνδρὸς σφαγεῖον: Other editions print as a single word (ἀνδροσφαγεῖον), which is where the "slaughterhouse" idea is coming from. It would be a hapax, but again, Aeschylus is into making up compounds. Again, I like it better, so I'll use it. ῥαντήριον: A word relating to ritual sacrifices, which would involve the sprinkling of liquids on the ground.

And all of that brings me to the New And Improved™ translation:

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1090–92

{Κα.} μισόθεον μὲν οὖν· πολλὰ συνίστορα,
αὐτόφονα, κακὰ καρτάναι
ἀνδρὸς σφαγεῖον καὶ πέδον ῥαντήριον.

CASSANDRA: No, not at all! It is profane: witness
to many crimes, self-bloodying, evil
tearing of flesh—a bowl to catch the blood
of men, and ground sprinkled with water pure.

works cited

Carson, Anne. An Oresteia. New York City: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Lattimore, Richard. "The Oresteia". In Aeschylus II, edited by Richard Lattimore, David Grene, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most. 3rd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Lowell, Robert. The Oresteia of Aeschylus. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

Ruden, Sarah. "Agamemnon". In The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm. New York City: The Modern Library, 2016.

Taplin, Oliver. The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, Orestes in Athens. New York City: Liveright, 2018.

  1. Really good, in my opinion. There are places where he riffs a bit, but they're generally at least interesting, and most were pretty compelling.^
  2. In tragedy, the Greek word δόμος can do double duty as "house" does in English, meaning both the physical structure and the family that resides within the structure. The Agamemnon is particularly interested in playing with this conflation of physical and intangible inheritances.^
  3. Also quite a nice translation. Taplin is an expert in Greek tragedy and the translation was a sort of end-of-career project, so it predictably makes some very compelling choices; the style isn't precisely for me (Taplin clearly enjoys rhyme more than I do) but it's solid nonetheless.^
  4. Aegisthus, who is having an affair with Clytemnestra and who will (at least claim to) participate in Agamemnon's murder, is the son of Thyestes, Agamemnon's uncle, by his own daughter, Pelopia. Whether Thyestes knew that Pelopia was his daughter when he raped her depends on the version of the myth you read.^
  5. Which, on reflection, is a little absurd, especially because (with the exception of the Ruden) I've actually read them all.^
  6. Hapax legomenon (pl. hapax legomena), a term referring to a word which appears only once in a given corpus. In this case, it's a word which appears only once in the entire corpus of Greek literature, though it's often used to mean a word which appears only once in the surviving works of a given author (especially Homer) or in the Bible.^