Tell, Don't Show: A Translation from Euripides' Medea

murder, violence, and the power of off-stage action

Medea Sarcophagus from the Altes Museum in Berlin

MESSENGER
When your two children came
with their father and came into the bride’s home,
we servants who were afflicted by your troubles
were delighted: our ears immediately received the widespread word
that you and your husband had made a truce of your old quarrel.
And someone kissed the hand, another the blond heads
of your children: and I myself from joy
together with the children followed the women into the chamber.
And the mistress whom we now honor instead of you,
before she saw the pair of your children,
fastened her eager gaze onto Jason:
then, however, she put a veil over her eyes,
and she turned back her white cheek,
feeling disgust at the entrance of the children. And your husband
tried to remove the girl’s temper and gall,
saying these words: “Do not be angry towards your kin
but end your anger and turn back your head,
acknowledging as kin those whom your husband does,
and accept their gifts and beg of your father
to release these children from exile as a favor to me.”

And she, when she saw the adornments, could not hold herself back,
but she agreed with everything her husband said, and before her father
and your children were far away from the house,
taking the many-colored garment, she covered herself
and placed the gold crown around her curls,
arranging her hair in the bright mirror,
smiling at the lifeless likeness of her body.
And then, getting up from her seat, she passed
through the room, walking gracefully with her white feet,
rejoicing greatly at the gifts, often again
and again looking with her eyes at her outstretched ankle.
From then on, however, the sight was terrible to see:
for, her color changing, she fell back
sideways, her limbs trembling, and, falling upon the chair,
she hardly escaped falling to the floor.
And one old woman among the servants, thinking perhaps
it was either a frenzy of Pan or that one of the gods moved her,
shouted out loud, until she saw white foam coming
through her mouth and her pupils twisting
away from her eyes, and there was no blood in her skin:
then instead of a loud cry there came
a wailing. And straightaway one of the servants
went to her father’s rooms, and another went to her new husband,
telling the misfortune of the bride: and all
the house resounded with incessant running.

And already a quick runner, moving his limbs swiftly,
would have touched the finish line of a six-plethra race,
when from her silence and closed eyes, 
sighing a terrible sigh, the wretched woman woke.
For a twofold calamity was marching upon her:
The golden chaplet lying around her head
sent forth a wonderful stream of all-devouring fire,
and the delicate garments, the gifts of your children,
devoured the white flesh of the unhappy girl.
And she fled, rising from the seat, burning in flames,
shaking the hair on her head this way and that way,
wishing to cast off the crown: but the gold
closely held its fastenings, and the fire, when she shook
her head, shone forth more, twice as greatly.
And she fell to the floor, conquered by misfortune,
hard to recognize except to the one who’d begotten her:
for neither did her eyes appear with their usual form,
nor was her face well-shaped, but blood from the tip
of her head dropped, kneaded with fire,
and the flesh from her bones, like pine resin,
by the invisible jaws of the poison, was flowing,
a terrible sight: and all were afraid to touch
her corpse: for what had happened checked them, a teacher.

But her wretched father, out of ignorance of the misfortune,
arriving unaware to the chamber, fell upon the corpse.
And he wailed out loud at once and, enfolding his arms around her,
kissed her, speaking these words: “O unhappy child,
which of the gods in this dishonorable way has destroyed you?
Which god has placed me in a tomb, bereft
of you? Oh me!—let me die with you, child.”
But when he stopped his wailing and weeping,
wanting to raise up his body, the old man
held like ivy to a young laurel plant 
to the fine garments, and there was a terrible wrestling.
For he wished to rise up on his knees,
but she took hold of him: and if he acted with force,
he would rend his aged flesh from his bones.
And in time the unfortunate man gave up and set loose
his soul: for no longer was he victorious over the evil.
And they lie dead, the child and her old father,
close together, a misfortune that calls for tears.

But yours I leave without mention:
for you yourself will come to know a return for your punishment.
As for mortal life, now is not the first time I think it a shadow,
and I would not hesitate to say that those who seem to be wise
among mortals and anxious about words,
these men are liable to incur the greatest folly.
For among mortals, there is no one who is a blessed man:
one may become more fortunate than another
when happiness flows to him, but not blessed.

—Euripides, Medea ll. 1136-1230, my translation

Master of the Die, The Wedding of Jason and Creusa (Glauce), Met Museum, 1530-60

I’ve been reading Euripides’ Medea, on and off (mostly off), in the original Ancient Greek, for the past year or so. Last week I came across this passage, closer towards the end of the play. It is violent, vivid, it rips the flesh off your bones.

Some background: before the events of the play, Medea was the princess of Colchis, daughter of King Aeëtes. When Jason arrives with the Argonauts to get the Golden Fleece, she uses her powers of sorcery and magic to help him, then flees with him, even cutting her own brother into pieces and throwing the fraternal fragments into the sea to help them avoid pursuit. When Jason’s rightful claim to his father’s throne in Iolcus is blocked, they go to live in Corinth, and he and Medea have two children together.

Jason should only be so lucky to have a wife who’s willing to kill her own brother for him, who leaves her homeland and everything she knows for him, who is willing to put up with being treated by everyone in Corinth as a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider for him. But he doesn’t see it this way, and—whether out of love or lust or ambition (ambition mainly)—his wandering eye lands on Glauce, King Creon’s daughter and a princess of Corinth.

This is where the play begins, with Medea the woman scorned and Creon planning to send her and her children into exile from Corinth. This is a bad fate for Medea: she has forsaken her father and fatherland, she has been dishonored by her husband, she has nobody left to turn to, and she has two young children to care for. But Medea is a clever woman, and she dissembles her way through the play while plotting and scheming and hatching her revenge. Putting on the role of the distressed mother who only thinks of her children, appealing to Creon as a fellow parent, she begs him to allow her to stay in Corinth just one more day, which gives her the time she needs to fulfill her vengeful ends.

Meanwhile, Jason has the audacity to try to justify his betrayal to Medea, speaking of the benefits it will confer on herself and their children: with Jason married to Corinth’s princess, Medea and her children will be granted a higher status, the children will have more resources, Medea will safely be an insider now. At first Medea spurns him, then later—in the interest of her revenge—smiles to his face and gives him the appearance that these logical, rational, manly considerations have worked their way through her poor, small, feminine brain: they make sense to her, she sees the wisdom in them, she is glad to hear that her man is making such an advantageous match only for her benefit. She pretends to make up with Jason in front of their children, then asks him to entreat his new bride to ask her father if the children, at least, can be pardoned from exile. In order to make it easier for Glauce to say yes, she gives the children sumptuous gifts to bring to her and asks them to go with their father and deliver them (who, after all, is going to say no to a gift from a child?).

Eugène Delacroix, Medea about to Kill her Children, 1862

All this, of course, is only a vehicle for Medea’s murderous plots, for Medea, drawing on her powers as a sorceress, has poisoned the golden crown and the delicate garments. Medea—and we, the audience—do not see the actual murders. Instead, we hear of them secondhand, when a messenger rushes in to share the shocking news and tell the terrible story. He does this with great vividness, taking us through every moment, every excruciating detail. First we see Glauce’s initial disgust and anger when the children come in, the way she veils her face and turns away from their sight. Then we see the power of Medea’s gifts already, their ability to soften Glauce and flatter her girlish vanity. She can hardly wait to try them on, rushing to look at herself “in the bright mirror.” She is conscious of the way the dress adorns her body, and it’s easy to picture her stretching her leg back, flexing her foot to look down “again and again” at the graceful way it hangs on her.

These few lines accomplish many things: they emphasize the youth and beauty of Glauce as Medea’s sexual rival and replacement; they humanize her in a moment of girlish innocence; they use that innocence to emphasize by contrast the horror of the terrible events that will follow; and they foreshadow those events, Euripides using the words ἄψυχον εἰκὼ (“soulless image”) to describe Glauce’s reflection in the mirror.

Then there are the terrible, visceral details of the violence wrought upon Glauce and Creon: the way she shakes her head to try to get the crown off, which only makes the flames redouble their intensity; the way her deforming body becomes recognizable only to her father; the way Creon’s attempt to disentangle himself from his daughter’s body—the natural human instinct for self-preservation—ironically counters his earlier wish to die with her; the way the ululation of the old female servant—the loud cry that typically accompanies an important moment like birth or victory—becomes a grief-filled lamentation. Euripides’ natural metaphors of the “pine resin” and the ivy clinging to a laurel plant bring out the scene’s horror in all its fullness, generating the “bright unbearable reality” (in Alice Oswald’s words) the Greeks called enargeia.

It reminds me of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the scene where Alma (Bibi Andersson) tells Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann) about a sexual encounter she had years ago on the beach. All we see on the screen are Alma and Elisabet, Elisabet reclining on the bed in the background, Alma seated in an armchair in the foreground. Elisabet stares at Alma intently, silently, as she tells this tale, and she becomes a stand-in for us, the audience, a listener just as we are. You could theoretically put this scene on mute, remove the subtitles, and show it to a child. But it is I think one of the most erotic, sexually charged scenes in cinema. Language has a power of its own, speech in its inflections, in the emotions thrumming beneath the surface, a power that brings images to life more vividly than if we had seen them with our own two eyes.

In Ancient Greek tragedy, deaths always took place off-stage (strange to us now, when we can access all manner of explicit things quite readily and often without wanting to). Scholars argue this was probably because of practical difficulties in staging these usually violent scenes, because of not wanting to offend the sensibilities of the audience, or because of certain religious prohibitions. Whether intentionally or not, this convention had many beneficial aesthetic consequences, and Euripides exploits them to the fullest here, as only a master dramatist can.

In the Poetics, Aristotle calls Euripides the “most tragic” of the Greek tragedians. In this scene, it’s easy to see why. Euripides refuses to simplify the complexities of human relationships and emotions: Medea, monstrous though her deeds may be, is also someone whose pain and grief and anger we can empathize with. Jason, the least sympathetic character in the whole drama, seems almost sincere at times in his belief that his marriage with Glauce will result in a better life for Medea and their children. Glauce, who could have just been a flat, cardboard cutout of a character, is here given her own moment of humanity. Creon, whom we might have been content to let remain a cold tyrant, hostile to foreigners, is also shown with a father’s more tender feelings of love for his child and desperation at her demise.

The attention given to their deaths is not gratuitous or gory for the sake of being gory. On the contrary, it lends pathos to the messenger’s final words about human life and makes us reflect more deeply on our condition. It is true that nobody’s life is happy all the way through, at every moment and in every minute, but to know that others suffer and have suffered as we do can make those painful moments more bearable.

Perhaps that’s why when I translated this scene, going through it more slowly and minutely than I would have had I read it straight through in English, I found that it clung to me, you might say, like ivy to a laurel plant, refusing to let go.

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Dear readers, I hope you enjoyed this translation and bit of commentary! If you did, please give this post a like, subscribe to Soul-Making for more on literature and culture, and share with a friend. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! I hope you all have a wonderful and beautiful weekend.

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beware the breezes of love