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All That You've Seen Here Is God

New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound

Author Sophocles, Aeschylus

Translated by Bryan Doerries

Paperback

$17.00 US

Knopf | Vintage

5.24"W x 7.96"H x 1.05"D | 14 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Sep 01, 2015 | 480 Pages | 978-0-307-94973-8

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These contemporary translations of four Greek tragedies speak across time and connect readers and audiences with universal themes of war, trauma, suffering, and betrayal. Under the direction of Bryan Doerries, they have been performed for tens of thousands of combat veterans, as well as prison and medical personnel around the world. Striking for their immediacy and emotional impact, Doerries brings to life these ancient plays, like no other translations have before.

“This is a brilliant, original, and harrowing work.” —Andre Gregory

“Knowing that these plays were originally authored by military brass, for an audience long familiar with the effects of war, you have to wonder what questions they were trying to address with their contemporaries. For the past decade, I’ve watched Bryan tirelessly pursue what these questions could have been by bringing these texts to the doorstep of the best modern source material we have, our US military. In so doing, he has created a series of translations that are accessible to both actor and audience, deeply insightful and wholly unique.” —Adam Driver

“Bryan Doerries’ translations of Greek tragedy in All That You’ve Seen Here Is God seriously engage both with four Greek originals by Aeschylus and Sophocles and with his own experience in performing the plays for disparate audiences who have undergone tragic suffering in person. His spare, contemporary yet poetic lines jump from the page to serve an intense delivery that invites his audience to post-play dialogue.” —Helene P. Foley, Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University

“We live in an age defined by mythic catastrophe. We live in an age of perpetual war. We therefore live in an age that requires drama of the stature contained between these covers. Bryan Doerries’ brave, spare, inspired translations of Sophocles and Aeschylus have the power to bring us into healing confrontation with ancient, brutal, and essential truth. These are plays for our time.” —Doug Hughes, Tony-award winning director of Doubt

“These provocative, hard-driving renderings of Greek tragedy incarnate the enormous learning, keen auditory imagination, and expansive moral vision of Bryan Doerries, a deeply humane poet-translator who has crafted some of the most potent interpretations of ancient tragedy available in the English language.” —Thomas G. McGuire, Poetry Editor, War, Literature, & the Arts, United States Air Force Academy

“Bryan Doerries’ translations roar down the tracks like a raging locomotive. The language is lean, taut, raw, vibrant. The demonic passions of ancient Greek warriors and their thousand-yard stares chase us down and leave no place to hide. The sparse staccato lines jump off the page, onto the stage, into the gut. No wonder Doerries’ revolutionary Theater of War Project has produced such powerful performances at so many theaters over recent years. This is Greek tragedy as combat therapy. There is implicit in these sparse, often unforgiving pages the hope of emotional healing, signs of renewal to be snatched from the shattered souls of wounded warriors and their shell-shocked wives. A riveting read and remarkable accomplishment!” —Stephen Esposito, Assoc. Professor Classical Studies, Boston University

“Bryan Doerries’ translations are as illuminating to read as they are to perform. They emphasize personal struggle over historical gamesmanship and are translated with emotion and humor that feels not only timely but prescient.” —Jesse Eisenberg

“Doerries has listened to the pain of the veteran, the patient, and the prisoner and heard the words of Sophocles and Aeschylus. He gives powerful voice to both in these stark and sensitive translations.” —Amy R. Cohen, Editor-in-Chief of Didaskalia: the Journal for Ancient Performance

Sophocles, the Greek tragic dramatist, was born at Colonus near Athens about 496 B.C. Although hopelessness and misfortune plague the characters in his great plays, Sophocles's own life was a long, prosperous one. He was from a good family, well educated, handsome, wealthy, healthy, and highly respected by his fellow Athenians. His first dramatic production, in 468, won the prize over Aeschylus's. He wrote two dozen more plays before 450, by which date he had made important changes in the form of tragedy by adding a third speaking actor to the traditional two, by reducing the importance of the chorus, and by improving the stage scenery. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays; seven complete plays survive (plus half a light satyr play, some fragments, and ninety titles). Aristotle, in his Poetics, praised Sophocles above other tragedians and regarded his masterpiece, OEDIPUS THE KING, as a model for Greek tragedy. Sophocles's plays won more victories than the plays of either his older contemporary Aeschylus or the younger Euripides. The circumstances of his life, as well as his plays, suggest that Sophocles was conservative, and opposed to innovation in religion and politics. At eighty-three he was still active in the Athenian government. He died in 406 B.C. in Athens at the age of ninety. View titles by Sophocles

Aeschylus was born of a noble family near Athens in 525 BC. He took part in the Persian Wars and his epitaph, said to have been written by himself, represents him as fighting at Marathon. At some time in his life he appears to have been prosecuted for divulging the Eleusinian mysteries, but he apparently proved himself innocent. Aeschylus wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived: The Suppliants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Choephori, and The Eumenides. (All are translated for Penguin Classics.) He visited Syracuse more than once at the invitation of Hieron I and he died at Gela in Sicily in 456 BC. Aeschylus was recognized as a classic writer soon after his death, and special privileges were decreed for his plays. View titles by Aeschylus

CHARACTERS
(in order of appearance)
Odysseus: the director of Greek intelligence
Ajax: a formidable warrior
Athena: the goddess of war
Chorus: the sailors and soldiers of Ajax
Tecmessa: the battle-won wife of Ajax
Eurysaces: their three-year-old son
Messenger: a soldier of the Greek army
Teucer: the half brother of Ajax
Menelaus: the deputy commander of the Greek army
Agamemnon: the commander of the Greek army

Odysseus appears at dawn—low to the ground—darting in and out of shadows. He is searching for a safe place to wait for Ajax.

Athena startles him, a voice at the borders of darkness.

Athena

   Why am
   I never
   surprised,
   son of Laertes,
   to catch you
   stalking
   an enemy
   at daybreak,
   like a blood-
   hound after
   some scent,
   tracking foot-
   prints behind
   the tents
   where Ajax
   and his men
   hold down
   the battle line?

   You wish
   to know if
   he’s inside,
   soaked
   in sweat
   from the
   slaughter?

   Then tell me
   what you’ve
   come to do,
   and you may
   learn from one
   who knows.

Odysseus

   Dearest Athena,
   guardian goddess,
   though your shape
   evades my eyes,
   I hear you clearly
   in my mind, like
   the tune of a song
   to which I somehow
   know the words.
   I’m circling
   in on an enemy,
   just as you’ve guessed,
   close on his heels.

   I have come
   for Ajax,
   the one
   we called
   the "shield."

   It is he alone whom I now hunt.

   Last night,
   he did some-
   thing vile,
   some vile
   thing, some-
   thing un-
   imaginable,
   if he is the one,
   we cannot be sure,
   still shaken by
   the sight of it,
   and so they
   sent me here to
   confirm what
   he has done.

   All of our cattle
   are dead, and
   the men who
   tended them,
   hacked to pieces,
   butchered by
   a hand—his,
   we think—for
   one of our men
   swears to have
   seen him sprinting
   across the field
   with a wet sword.

   As soon as I heard,
   I was on the case,
   following the tracks,
   which led me here,
   but I’ve been thrown
   by strange markings
   in the mud and cannot
   find him anywhere.

   You have
   arrived,
   as always,
   at the right
   moment
   to guide
   me with
   your hand.

            Athena steps out of the shadows.

Athena

   Obviously, Odysseus, I came to help with the hunt.

Odysseus

   Then I am on the right track?

Athena

   He is the one you describe: the killer of cows.

Odysseus

   A reckless gesture, but why did he do it?

Athena

   Black bile—blinding rage—over the arms of Achilles.

Odysseus

   But what drove him to attack the animals?

Athena

   In his mind, their blood was yours.
　
Odysseus

   He wished to kill the Greeks?

Athena

   Affirmative.

   He would have completed his mission
   had I not been paying attention.

Odysseus

   Where did he find the courage to do it?

Athena

   He stalked you quietly in the night.

Odysseus

   How close did he come to his target?

Athena

   Close enough to strike the generals.

Odysseus

   And what contained his bloodlust?

Athena

   I did.

   I robbed him
   of the pleasure
   of cutting you
   to pieces,
   raining on
   his death
   parade,
   distracting
   him with
   visions of
   bovine foes
   grazing in
   the fields
   under
   the watchful
   eyes of simple
   herdsmen.

   He descended
   upon them
   with full fury,
   ripping out horns
   with his hands,
   slitting throats
   and snapping
   spines, at one
   point squeezing
   the life from
   a general, then
   taking the lives
   of other officers,
   or so he thought,
   trembling from
   contamination.

   I stoked his rage,
   driving him deeper
   into the snare.

   Finally tired from
   all the killing,
   he bound and
   gagged his sad
   prisoners, those
   pitiful few cows
   and sheep some-
   how still standing,
   and rounded them
   up for the death
   march back to his
   camp, convinced
   they were men.

   He tortures them inside the tent.
   And now I will
   expose you
   to his illness,
   so you may see
   it with your
   own eyes.

   Stand there,
   like a man.
   He won’t
   hurt you,
   as long as
   I am here.

   Don’t worry.
   I will hide you
   in his blind spot;
   he won’t see you
   in the shadows.

            Athena turns and shouts toward the tent.

   You, there,
   in the tent,
   stretching
   prisoners
   on the rack,
   put down
   your ropes;
   report to me
   immediately!

Odysseus

   What are you doing? Lower your voice.

Athena

   Watch what you say. Someone might call you a coward.

Odysseus

   Please, Athena, by the gods, let him stay inside the tent.

Athena

   He’s only a man, not to be feared, the same as before.

Odysseus

   He was and is my enemy.

Athena

   Well isn’t it satisfying to laugh at an enemy?

Odysseus

   It would please me more if he stayed within.

Athena

   Are you afraid to gaze upon a maniac?

Odysseus

   When he was sane, I would have met his stare.
　
Athena

   He won’t see you standing before him.

Odysseus

   Isn’t he looking through the same eyes?

Athena

   I’ll shade his eyes and darken his vision.

Odysseus

   Whatever the goddess wants, she takes.

Athena

   Stand there silently. Do not move!

Odysseus

   I must remain, against my wishes.

THE AUDIENCE AS TRANSLATOR
TRANSLATOR’ S NOTE

SOPHOCLES’ AJAX
AN INTRODUCTION
CHARACTERS
AJAX

SOPHOCLES’ PHILOCTETES
AN INTRODUCTION
CHARACTERS
PHILOCTETES

AESCHYLUS’ PROMETHEUS BOUND
AN INTRODUCTION
CHARACTERS
PROMETHEUS BOUND

SOPHOCLES’ WOMEN OF TRACHIS
AN INTRODUCTION
CHARACTERS
WOMEN OF TRACHIS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS