Seneca: The Tragedies / Edition 1

by Seneca, David R. Slavitt

Overview

Are there no limits to human cruelty? Is there any divine justice? Do the gods even matter if they do not occupy themselves with rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness? Seneca's plays might be dismissed as bombastic and extravagant answers to such questions-if so much of human were not "Senecan" in its absurdity, melodrama, and terror. Here is an honest artist confronting the irrationality and cruelty of his world-the Rome of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero-and his art reflects the stress of the encounter. The surprise, perhaps, is that Seneca's world is so like our own.

In these lively renditions into contemporary English, David R. Slavitt does for Seneca what he accomplished for Virgil and Ovid, calling attention to the extraordinary work of a great Latin poet and making it accessible and appealing to modern readers. The volume includes five of Seneca's extant tragedies-Trojan Women, Thyestes, Phaedra, Medea, and Agamemnon-plus a preface.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801843099
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1992
Series:	Complete Roman Drama in Translation Series , #1
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David R. Slavitt is a poet, translator, novelist, critic, and journalist. He is author of more than seventy works of fiction, poetry, and poetry and drama in translation.

Table of Contents

Octavia, Kelly Cherry
Hercules Oetaeus, Stephen Sandy
Oedipus, Rachel Hadas
The Phoenician Women, David Slavitt
Hercules Furens, Dana Gioia

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The language in these translations [is] as fresh and gleaming as blood just spilled.
—Eleanor Wilner

Eleanor Wilner

The language in these translations [is] as fresh and gleaming as blood just spilled.

Editorial Reviews

Slavitt's ability is clearly in evidence . . . These translations are rendered in lucid, contemporary English, bringing before us the atrocities, horrors, and grotesqueries of Imperial Rome.
—Classical Outlook

Slavitt's translation is . . . lively and sometimes witty.
—Times Literary Supplement

A good, sensational Senecan read.
—Queen's Quarterly

From the Publisher

Slavitt's ability is clearly in evidence . . . These translations are rendered in lucid, contemporary English, bringing before us the atrocities, horrors, and grotesqueries of Imperial Rome.

Classical Outlook

Slavitt's translation is . . . lively and sometimes witty.

Times Literary Supplement

A good, sensational Senecan read.

Queen's Quarterly