The Antigone of Sophocles (1911)/Preface
PREFACE.
I have translated the Antigone for a special performance in the Grand Opera House, Cincinnati, on the afternoon of March the tenth. The drama will be staged by one of my former pupils, Miss Edna Mannheimer. If the play acts well (for no play is good, unless it is a good acting play) I shall not be dissatisfied with my version, whatever the other merits, or demerits, of my attempted transfusion of the drama may be. If Æschylus cannot be translated into French, certainly Sophocles cannot be translated into English; for our language simply breaks down in the attempt to render the light and rapid, yet strong and unerring, words of the flexible Greek. The trimeters I translated in thirty days. Thirty years would not suffice for the choral songs—indeed, the hopelessness of translation, at the end of that period, would probably be even more apparent than it is now.
For my plagiarism of Shakesperian phraseology I have no apology to offer. I have resolutely refrained from consulting all previous translations of the tragedy except three. Two of these I have glanced at only occasionally; the third—Sir Richard Jebb’s—has been open before me constantly, so that the metempsychosis I have endeavored to make of the Antigone doubtless bears the impress of this monumental edition. Greek scholars will know that I could not escape it—and, I may add, in the words of Hæmon, “I would not, if I could.”
I am under great obligations to my colleague, Frank Wadleigh Chandler, Professor of English in the University of Cincinnati, for reading the work in manuscript, and for suggesting changes in many places. Joseph Edward Harry.
Cincinnati, Jan. 8, 1911.