Medea

Description

Mitchell-Boyask's Introduction gives the reader a lively and accessible overview of Euripides' life, the circumstances of the original performances, and critical debate on the three plays. Footnotes to the translations provide students with useful background without over-burdening the text. The translations themselves are lively, vigorous, colorful, and direct, while remaining very close to the Greek. Arnson Svarlien has also taken care with the meter. Iambic trimeter, the 'spoken' meter of Greek, has been represented with iambic pentameter in English; but even in the lyric passages, whose meters do not translate into English, responsion within odes has been preserved. Yet all of this attention to such details of meter and accuracy sacrifices nothing in clarity or pace.

Diane Arnson Svarlien earned her PhD in Classics at The University of Texas at Austin and lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Robin Mitchell-Boyask is Professor of Classics, Temple University.

"The excellent Introduction by Robin Mitchell-Boyask displays an admirable command of up-to-date scholarship and judiciously leaves controversial matters open to one's own interpretation. Arnson Svarlien's verse translation has both elegance and power -- it reads well, not just to the eye, but (happily for the director and actors) also to the ear." -- Ian Storey, Department of Classics, Trent University