Customer Reviews

Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction

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I had the pleasure of studying under Fred during the summer of 2000 at a Telluride Association Summer Program hosted by Cornell. As such, I've also had access to his full translation of Sophocles's "Oedipus", presumably similar to the one he uses in the book.

Ahl's reading of the "Oedipus" goes well beyond the unconventional. Essentially, he offers an indictment of its translation tradition. He argues that Sophocles's language, infamously knotty for the translator, hides a subversive alternate construction of the Oedipus myth, generally missed by translators who assume that Sophocles tells the story they already know.

For example, Ahl argued in class, a reader of most translations would believe that Creon had told Oedipus what the oracle had said and that the messenger who arrives from Corinth was sent as an official delegation to Oedipus. In fact, Sophocles's Greek is more ambiguous, according to Ahl's rendering. Creon in Grene's translation, 95-ff.:

I will tell you, then, / what I heard from the God. / King Phoebus in plain words commanded us / to drive out a pollution from our land....

and in Ahl's, same passage:

Then I'd say what I heard from god -- god's shrine. / Lord Phoebus clearly ordered that we drive / our land's blight out....

Ahl interprets Creon's less-emphatic language as indicating that he relays an interpretation of the oracle, not the actual words.

From similar clues, as dug up by Ahl in the Greek, he concludes that most of what Oedipus believes he knows about himself is, in fact, founded on shaky evidence, to a point that we, the readers, cannot know whether Jocasta and Laius were Oedipus's parents.

This reading's persuasiveness necessarily depends on the reliability of Ahl's translations, especially at points like that quoted above, where Ahl claims the translation tradition has erred. I know next to no Greek, and thus cannot evaluate this key point. Jeff Rusten, who co-taught with Fred, occasionally tried to take the orthodox line against him, but nobody really listened.

Upshot: the reading is brave, but ultimately I can't yet know whether it is correct. Fitting.