AN ANCIENT PLAY WITH MODERN APPEAL Medea translator Charles Martin and wife Johanna Keller have lived in Syracuse for about 15 years. Martin is a poet, critic and translator whose many awards and accolades include a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Merrill Ingram Foundation. He was poet in residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City from 2005–2009, and has taught in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, at Queensborough Community College, Syracuse University, in the Stonecoast low-residency M.F.A. at the University of Southern Maine, and at the School of Letters of the University of the South. He has also taught workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference and the West Chester Poetry Conference. His translation of Medea was published in 2019 by the University of California Press. Interviewed by Joseph Whelan JW: What influenced your decision to work on Medea? What appeals to you about it? What about it do you think speaks to contemporary audiences? CM: There are so many aspects of Medea that appeal to a modern audience. The character of Medea is wonderfully realized. She is a woman who has been abandoned by her husband (along with their children) and she is a stateless person, a political refugee. She has every claim on our sympathies, and yet the whole plot of the play is the refinement of her revenge on the spouse who betrayed her, Jason. She is anything but a victim. Our sympathies are given quite a workout as she murders not only Jason’s new bride and father-in-law but her own
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CHARLES MARTIN. PHOTO: MIRIAM BERKLEY.
children as well. A lesser playwright than Euripides would have made her a more appealing figure, but he probably supplied the ending in which she murders her sons and flies off with their bodies. Euripides isn’t going to allow us to get off easily. Medea’s husband Jason, too, is a “round” character; we realize that he is a boastful narcissist and a fool to boot, but by the end of the play, when he has lost everything that is of value in his life, we cannot help but question the moral
universe that has left him devastated: did he really deserve this? Even minor characters in Medea are interesting in themselves and appear on stage not just as functionaries but as people you feel you have met before, on your way to the theatre, perhaps. JW: What sources did you consult? What was your approach? Were you working from Greek, or using translations? CM: When T.S. Eliot heard that
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“There are so many aspects of Medea that appeal to a modern audience. The character of Medea is wonderfully realized. She is a woman who has been abandoned by her husband (along with their children) and she is a stateless person, a political refugee. She has every claim on our sympathies, and yet the whole plot of the play is the refinement of her revenge on the spouse who betrayed her, Jason. She is anything but a victim.” - Charles Martin W.B. Yeats was transIating Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, he supposedly said something like, “Yeats doesn’t know Greek; what can he be translating it out of?” I hunted and pecked my way through the Greek, and whenever I got stuck, I relied on prose translations and a couple of commentaries. I could always find someone to tell me what the Greek meant, but the Englishing of it was up to me. In other words, it’s not what you are translating out of, but what you are translating into that is the problem. JW: I may be wrong, but I believe this your first translation of a play. If so, how were you guided in capturing or shaping each distinct voice? CM: Translating into verse gives you so many toys to play with. One of my favorites is rhyme. Characters rhyme with each other when they are in agreement (or pretending to be), and they sometimes rhyme at each other when one of them is trying to put the other down. Trying to
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CHARLES MARTIN'S TRANSLATION OF MEDEA PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
find the right line, the right sentence for each character – what he or she would say in his or her way, was a constant concern. JW: Is there another play you want to work on? CM: Recently I saw a Theater of War production of some scenes from Sophocles’ Ajax. It sent me back to read the whole play, which has a lot to say not just about the suffering of men in warfare but
the treatment of women as well. JW: Will you be looking for anything in particular when you watch the reading? One of my favorite scenes in the play is the one between Medea’s Nurse and her sons’ Tutor. Perhaps because they are the only people in the play who seem to truly care about the children, I find their scene very moving. I’ll be looking forward to that.
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