I may have picked up the Oedipus Cycle book in Waterstones almost entirely because I felt cultured doing so, and joked about being the picture of privilege settling down to read this morning with Classic FM on in the background. As it turned out, my limited knowledge of the story wound up making the whole thing an addictive page-turner. I also found myself wondering why it was never pointed out to me when we were performing Murder in the Cathedral at school that it was quite clearly stylistically based on greek tragedy (something I couldn't have noticed for myself until I'd actually read some). Admittedly that was an extra-curricular performance rather than part of normal lessons. It's just one more time I've found myself cursing time spent in secondary school losing my curiosity for language and history. I wasn't expecting to find quite such a revalation in reading this. If anything I might have been expecting a bit of a slog as I did in Congreve's plays, but this goes back so much further and touches that fascination for ancient civilizations I had in primary school.
I found myself musing that I wouldn't be able to tackle the original material, since greek isn't one of my languages. I picked up a (translated) anthology of Brecht plays at the library today, if I find one of those that I like, I might dust off my decade-out-of-use German to have a go. I doubt I still have enough latin to try anything in that, though I remember at GCSE being given a passage or two of Illiad to play with and loving it. On the subject of languages, I've recently acquired a beginner book of Irish, since my other half lives over there (and has suggested it might be worth applying to one or two schools there as well as here in the UK). Now that I've got the book, I have become suddenly very self-conscious about actually trying to learn to speak the language. I think that's partly because over the years I have learned languages (or at least smatterings of them) either at school or through necessity in places where English wasn't widely spoken. In itself the fact that everyone in Germany is more or less fluent in English made it quite tricky to make full use of exchange programmes - once out there, if you sounded like you were remotely struggling, the locals would just switch to far better English than I could ever hope my German to be. The complete opposite is true backpacking in Tanzania, where apart from hiring a tour guide, it was very useful for a couple of us to make friends with a phrase book for several hours a day and I came back with a few hundred words. That was quite some time ago and I've forgotten most of it, but the joy of codes, riddles and languages (which I think I always approached as more or less the same thing) was a huge part of who I was when I was younger and it's just one more thing I'm eager to reconnect with.
I seem to have massively diverted from the play in question, but for the first time in a while I've found my reading has sparked memories and thought processes at a tangent, and that's worth exploring whenever I can. More specifically then, there are some really quite grisley turns of phrase and graphic gory descriptions of the offstage action. I'd have to see other translations to know for sure, but I suspect those are not an artefact of the translation and are probably some of the closest words to the original intent. Particularly in the earlier part of the play, most of the language wouldn't sound entirely out of place in an entirely modern setting, aside from explicit references to singing and dancing the lines. After the reveal though, the whole thing feels much more deliberately tragic. In performance I'm sure that change of pace would only help the final scenes feel even more devastating. Again though, I'd have to look at other translations to see whether the shift is a common device (and so presumably evident in the original work) or a choice by Bagg to update the voices of the characters for most of the play to appeal to a modern audience.
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