RHYMED TRANSLATION
ION, Euripides. translated into English rhyming verse by Gilbert Murray; George Allen and Unwin, English price 7/6. "| HE appearance of a lesser Euripidean | play by Sir Gilbert Murray prompts the questioning of rhymed translation from the classics. Sir Gilbert, though beak in Australia, became Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. His services to scholarship are wider than the translations alone suggest, though these (over a score) have often run into their for'tieth and fiftieth thousand. So that, for the many, Greek tragedy is Gilbert Murray. Greek is fluid but never flabby. In literal translation, yet forced to rhyme, iambics lose the flexibility that is their glory. Stichomuthia (where the charac- | ters play deck tennis in single-line dialogue) is too rapid for homoioteleutonics. The Jon is typical Euripides, playing a quiet game with Greek religious contradictions. In the Dionysiac tradition the hero is god-begotten, and there is as much comedy of situation as _ neartragedy before mother and new fosterfather sort things out. Apollo is a rather shabby offstage character, finally justified (in absentia) by Athene (ex machina)-a stage effect dear to Athenians on patriotic rather than religious
grounds.
D.
G.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19541015.2.24.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 14
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191RHYMED TRANSLATION New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 795, 15 October 1954, Page 14
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