INTRODUCTION
failure to preserve this simplicity and transfer these latent meanings, but he has sought to be faithful and the prospect of the text facing him has been a righteous terror. At the same time he has held as a first principle that, whatever else it is, a translation must be English, that is to say, it must be intelligible and enjoyable without a knowledge of the original.
One or two instances may be given from the Oedipus Rex. Line 67 is literally rendered by Jebb, “I have gone many ways in the wanderings of thought,” but to a Greek scholar it is no less sublime than, in another style, Milton’s “thoughts that wander through eternity.” To convey this sublimity in another tongue is as hard as it would be to render in French “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” Lines 736–7 are the turning point, the climax, as it were, of the play, but in language they hardly differ from prose:—“As I heard you speak just now, lady, what wandering of the soul, what upheaval of the mind, have come upon me!”
The second point may be illustrated from a recent version of the play by an eminent Professor. He begins,
“Fresh brood of bygone Cadmus, children dear,
What is this posture of your sessions here
—Betufted on your supplicating rods?”
