A new version of “Phaethon”, unperformed since the fifth century BC, amounting to a new masterpiece. Classicist Alistair Elliot, renowned for his scholarly research and dramatic translations, has deciphered from the original Greek Euripides'327 lines and reconstructed the rest of the missing text, staying as faithful to the Greek masters time and context as possible.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A mixed bag of middling interest,
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This review is from: Phaethon: A Reconstruction (Paperback)
Of the fragmentary plays of Euripides, "Phaethon" is the one of which we have the most substantial chunks, as well as stray lines here and there. Alastair Elliot's desire to "flesh out" the rest of the play is ambitious...perhaps hubristically so. Since the majority of the lines in this little book are Eliot's invention, it's mostly his own poetry that we're reading here, and it's not bad, though some lines do not sound Euripidean to me. Is the result a play that might actually be produced, and be worth watching? Maybe, maybe not.
My biggest complaint is with the lack of visible scholarship in this book. While Elliot does describe the state of the fragments, and some of the challenges of filling in the gaps, the text itself gives no indication as to which parts are genuinely from Euripides and which parts are invented. To put the original material in bold type, for instance, would have been somewhat challenging (in some cases we have only single words or sentence fragments), but there's something disingenuous about presenting the whole work without any indication of how it was constructed. To get an idea about which parts of this reconstruction are genuinely from Euripides, the reader will need to consult the fragments as translated by Collard, Cropp, and Lee (originally published in EURIPIDES: SELECTED FRAGMENTARY PLAYS vol. 1 from Aris & Phillips, and apparently now available in a Loeb edition). They do a splendid job of placing all the material in context and speculating on which parts go where--something Elliot does not do. Any reader interested in "Phaethon" should also have a look at the translation of the fragments published in 1852 by Byron's friend Thomas Love Peacock. That work can be found online in THE WORKS OF THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK, vol. 3, beginning on page 355. Elliot acknowledges finding out about Peacock's work only after he did his own reconstruction, and says he made no changes after reading Peacock; but frankly, I find some of Peacock's ideas (and his poetry) more compelling than those of Eliot. All in all, this book is a curiosity. I'm glad I got hold of it and had a look, but it is not particularly satisfying.
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