The Gentle, Jealous God

Reading Euripides' Bacchae in English

Simon Perris

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781350066854
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472511201
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

Euripides' Bacchae is the magnum opus of the ancient world's most popular dramatist and the most modern, perhaps postmodern, of Greek tragedies. Twentieth-century poets and playwrights have often turned their hand to Bacchae, leaving the play with an especially rich and varied translation history. It has also been subjected to several fashions of criticism and interpretation over the years, all reflected in, influencing, and influenced by translation. The Gentle, Jealous God introduces the play and surveys its wider reception; examines a selection of English translations from the early 20th century to the early 21st, setting them in their social, intellectual, and cultural context; and argues, finally, that Dionysus and Bacchae remain potent cultural symbols even now.

Simon Perris presents a fascinating cultural history of one of world theatre's landmark classics. He explores the reception of Dionysus, Bacchae, and the classical ideal in a violent and turmoil-ridden era. And he demonstrates by example that translation matters, or should matter, to readers, writers, actors, directors, students, and scholars of ancient drama.

1

Reading Bacchae, Reading Dionysus

In this chapter, I address a number of key issues pertaining to Dionysus, Bacchae, and in particular the presentation of Dionysus in Bacchae. We start at the beginning: out of nowhere, Dionysus appears alone onstage, announcing his arrival in Thebes where he was born. It is a fitting entrance for a god of wine, theatre, ritual madness and mystery-cult. It is also a fitting start to a great play. I translate literally:

I have come here to Thebes. I am Zeus’s son

Dionysus, born to Cadmus’ daughter

Semele; the midwife was fire, riding on lightning.

I’ve swapped divine for human form

and here I am by the rivers Dirce and Ismenus.

Bacch. 1–5

Even against its will, this city has to learn

my rituals in full, since it is uninitiated.

I have to defend my mother Semele

and appear before these humans – the god she bore to Zeus.

39–42

And so I will show Pentheus that I am a born god –

him and all the Thebans.

47–8

Dionysus is a god of epiphany. In myth, he frequently appears to the very people who have impugned his rights (or his rites). In the Hymn to Dionysus, he turns his captors into dolphins. The Thracian king Lycurgus threatens Dionysus’ worshippers and ends up blinded by Zeus and hated by the gods (Hom. Il. 6.138–40) or, in another version, sealed in a cave (Soph. Ant. 955–8). Most famously of all, Euripides’ Bacchae depicts Dionysus appearing in anthropomorphic form, as he emphasizes repeatedly in his prologue, to punish Pentheus. (Another hefty metaphysical tragedy from the late fifth century, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, depicts a human being leaving the natural world for the supernatural; Bacchae depicts a god who has temporarily left the divine realm for the human.¹) As Anton Bierl puts it, ‘We can describe the plot of Bacchae overall as an epiphany of Dionysus.’²

What the actor playing Dionysus said through the aperture in his mask, as he entered the acting space on that early spring day, was, in Greek:

Ἥκω Διὸς παῖς τήνδε Θηβαίαν χθόνα

Διόνυσος³

Hēkō Dios pais tēnde Thēbaian khthona

Dionusos

Or, in English: ‘I have come here to Thebes. I am Zeus’s son Dionysus’.⁴ At first glance, this is an entirely conventional, natural way for a prologue-speaker to announce his arrival; a straightforward, generic Greek phrase which would not strike real-time listeners as being at all significant. Read schematically as the formal opening to a polysemous literary work, however, Dionysus’ words introduce a raft of intellectual concerns which are of great relevance to the text: epiphany, ontology, identity, divinity and naming. Especially in literary translation, Dionysus’ words may function programmatically:

Behold, God’s Son is come unto this land of Thebes

Gilbert Murray, 1902

My name is Dionysus, son of Zeus

and Semele, Cadmus’ eldest daughter. Whoosh!

Derek Mahon, 1991

An empty space, and all of you, and me.

And who am I? Dionysus son of Zeus

Colin Teevan, 2002

So, Thebes, I’m back

David Greig, 2007

Here I am.

Dionysos.

I am

son of Zeus

Anne Carson, 2015

I have come here to Thebes. Although this is not Dionysus’ first visit to Thebes, it is a symbolic first arrival. He has come from overseas. He brings a new cult. His first word is ἥκω (hēkō, ‘I have come’), an otherwise unexceptionable verb which was ‘a favourite with supernatural visitants’ in tragedy.⁵ In terms of tragic style, he is yet another divine prologue-speaker, and his entrance recalls that of Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus.⁶ At the beginning of Hippolytus, Aphrodite says, ‘I am powerful and famous among humans and gods; I am called the goddess Cypris’ (1–2). ‘The core of the [first] sentence is Aph.’s announcement of her identity: “I am called the goddess Kypris.”’⁷ Like Dionysus, she, too, speaks of divinity, honour and revenge (Hipp. 1–6). But Dionysus is exceptional. A quintessentially epiphanic deity, he stays on to complete his revenge plot in person; neither Aphrodite nor Hermes (in Euripides’ Ion) do the same. Dionysus’ physical presence, dramatic and cultic immanence and interest in human behaviour collectively shape his Bacchae entrance. As one commentator puts it, ‘The imperious affirmation of [Dionysus’] divine personality rings out like a challenge and a threat.’⁸

I am Zeus’s son. Hesiod’s Works and Days opens with a hymn to Zeus rounded off by an appeal to justice (Op. 9–10). Aratus’ Phaenomena begins: ‘We should start with Zeus [Dios], whom we never fail to mention. All the roads and all the plazas, oceans and harbours, are full of Zeus [Dios]. We all need Zeus [Dios] always, because we are his children’ (1–5). The apostle Paul famously alluded to this very passage when he spoke about the Unknown God to a crowd of Athenians (Acts 17.28). Greek tragedy, too, voiced similar ideas: ‘What could ever happen to humans without Zeus [Dios]? Was any of this not caused by a god [theokranton]?’; ‘None of these things is not Zeus.’⁹ The very second word of Bacchae, in fact, is Dios (‘of Zeus’). Zeus is lord of Olympus and ‘father of gods and men’. He has authority in the divine hierarchy, a major stake in justice (dikē), and some influence on (if not control over) fate. As ‘Zeus’s son’, Dionysus is special.

Dionysus. The name ‘Dionysus’, which dates back to pre-classical times, probably has something to do with Zeus and may ultimately derive from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) concept, ‘son of the sky god’. Compare Dionysus’ half-brothers Castor and Pollux: nicknamed the Dioscuri, they are sons of Zeus who are also, literally, ‘sons of Zeus’ (Dios-kouroi).¹⁰ Dionysus is certainly old enough to appear on Bronze Age tablets in the Mycenaean Greek form DI-WO-NU-SO(IO). The first part of his name, ‘Dio’, is usually explained as a derivative of the name ‘Zeus’ related to the word-form Dios (‘of Zeus’). In turn, the words Dios and Zeus are related to the hypothetical PIE word for ‘heaven’, which is also the name of the sky god, *diēus. As for the second part of Dionysus’ name, ‘nysus’, scholars once identified nūsos with a hypothetical Thracian word for ‘son’, but this explanation has fallen out of favour. A sceptical view holds that ‘Dionysus’ is not even a Greek...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Abbreviations, Texts and Translations
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1 Reading Bacchae, Reading Dionysus
• 2 Rated R: Adaptation, Violence, Revolution
• 3 Dionysus, Lord and Saviour: Gilbert Murray, The Bacchae of Euripides (1902)
• 4 Nothing to Do with Modernism? H.D., ‘Choros Translations from The Bacchae’ (1931)
• 5 Dionysus in Ireland: Derek Mahon, The Bacchae: after Euripides (1991)
• 6 East and West: Colin Teevan, Euripides: Bacchai (2002)
• 7 These Go to Eleven: David Greig, Euripides: The Bacchae (2007)
• 8 Epilogue: Robin Robertson, Euripides: Bacchae (2014) and Anne Carson, Euripides: Bakkhai (2015)
• Conclusions
• Appendix: Translations of Euripides’ Bacchae published in English, 1781–2015
• Glossary of Terms and Greek Words
• Notes
• References
• Index of Passages of Bacchae Cited or Discussed
• Subject Index
• Copyright