The Yoke Of Necessity: The Oresteia Of Aeschlyus Translated By Jeffrey Scott Bernstein

The nature of Tragedy – its propensity for time transcendence – lends the form a unique serviceability, for who could deny the currency of love and loss, remorse and revenge in the landscape of any era? The overwhelmingly important things – the emotions by which we live and endure – are some of the characteristics which define the Tragic approach. They themselves endure as prismatically as their ablest interpreters; the long chronology of Tragedy has been dignified throughout by re-invention, translation and re-interpretation, to varying degrees of success, but with the certainty of motivational relevance even where the contexts of lived experience are changed out of recognition.

The difference is one of degree: do translators of, for example, Greek Tragedy, remain resolutely faithful to a language’s indigenous nuance, do they make allowances for regional or temporal variation, or do they adapt the narrative to a modern context entire? Since all translation makes inevitable compromises, there cannot be a single answer.

In Jeffrey Scott Bernstein’s masterful new take on Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, he plays it relatively safe, which is not to undermine either the renewed emotive force of the Tragedy, or its essential gravitas. Bernstein’s prosodic skills carry an easy and appropriate sense of solemn momentum as though investment in encouraging foreboding were the drama’s central dynamic. And it works: Cassandra’s terrible prognostication in the Agamemnon bears down on the reader like a train from a tunnel, enabling an efflorescence of metaphor; the Furies ‘troubling the rooms with that primal wrong’ bring swift resolve in the embodiment of vengeful, alliterative hubris:

‘Ah, ah! What fire! It comes upon me!
Woe! Woe! Lycian Apollo! Ah, me!
The two-footed lioness who lies with
The wolf when the noble lion’s away –
She will slay me, pitiful as I am.’

Cassandra’s fate is met with an accordingly visceral relish in Clytemnestra’s later reaction to her murderous spree, and Bernstein delivers her interchange with the Chorus with a sanguine swagger which is somehow neatly consonant with the blindness of Tragic necessity:

‘Fallen there, he gasps out his life, and with each
Sharp breath strikes me with dark drops of bloody dew,
And I rejoiced no less than bursting flower-buds
Rejoicing over Heaven-sent springtime rains.’

You may trust to Bernstein’s judgement: his fulsome referencing is one indicator of a mind given to thorough research, and in sensible thrall to many sources. The Notes following each of the three books frequently yield several established interpretations of individual lines; it seems clear that he has arrived at his own translation judiciously, and with due acknowledgment.

His own linguistic style errs towards the unambiguous and the clear; finding an ironic eloquence in the plain-speaking that some of the characters themselves demand, Bernstein is nowhere more affecting than when declaring moral disquiet. Orestes’ moment of doubt after he has put his mother and Aegisthus to the sword in Choephori, is honestly and very movingly wrought:

‘You must understand that I do not know
How this will end. I feel like a driver
Of horses carried far beyond the course,
For ungovernable thoughts are bearing
Me away overmastered.’

A sense of anxiety is beautifully realised here. At the mercy of impulses both innate, and driven – by the god Apollo – Bernstein yields the fleeting suggestion of Hamlet, if only by definition of existential uncertainty. Apollo’s tribunal defence of Orestes against the Furies in the Areopagus is cravenly inconsistent but the judgement is never in doubt; Bernstein remains resolutely aware of the capriciousness of the entire pantheon of Greek gods, and of the subjection of the earthly players in a drama of bloody revenge.

The adept working of the final Stichomythia brings tentative accord to the Agon, before the solemnised and ritualistic release of harmony and plenteousness in an Athens whose embryonic democracy is a not unreasonable mirror to Aeschylus’ own. Bernstein’s rendering of the efflorescent comity between Athena and the Chorus of Furies is stately in language, and attuned in timbre. The softening of the Erinyes into agents of good, now Eumenides, enacts a reversal whose tone is resonant in its simplicity:

‘May they give joy for joy in a spirit
Of common friendship, and hate the common
Enemy with same unanimous mind:
Here is the cure of many human ills.’

If Bernstein doesn’t stray far from the path of convention, his reworking of this cornerstone of the Tragic oeuvre adds a new, and highly accessible, richness to a story which has been told and re-told over two and a half millennia of depressingly consistent human endeavour.


The Oresteia of Aeschylus - translated by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein with masks by Tom Phillips is published by Carcanet.

More information here: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784108731