Virginia Woolf, in her essay on Sophocles' Electra in The Common Reader, wrote that
"Electra [in the play] stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to the utmost, or... she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of despair, joy, hate... But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite..."
Yet the problem for us reading in translation is that we never experience those cries directly, because we do not speak the language, what Sophocles actually wrote and would have heard. It is a problem familiar to any student of many of the great European dramatists of the 20th Century: how can we really know a Chekhov, an Ibsen, a Pirandello, when we are not reading the words these great authors wrote, but instead translators' versions of those words?
Anne Carson, in her foreword to her own translation of Sophocles' play, considers the same problem. Particularly, she hones in on the problem of Electra's screams:
"...the presence in Greek drama of bursts of sound expressing strong emotion (like OIMOI or O TALAINA or PHEU PHEU) furnishes the translator with a very simple and intractable problem. It has generally assumed that they represent a somewhat formulaic body of ejaculatory utterance best rendered into English by some dead phrase like Alas! or Woe is me! ...it is not easy to decide what gives the screaming of Electra its power. Sophocles has invented for her a language of lament that is like listening to an X-ray. Electra's cries are just bones of sound."
It is worth bearing this in mind when you read phrases like 'Woe is me!', 'Alas!' or 'Ye Gods!' in old-fashioned translations. A short exercise might serve to point up the difference between these tired, archaic phrases, and the actual Greek that Sophocles wrote. Here are a series of phonetic representations of the Greek, all cries that Electra utters in the play. Have a go at reading them out loud, in a nice loud voice -- and feel the difference.
a) AIAI
b) EE IO
c) IO GONAI
d) IO MOI MOI
e) OIMOI MOI
f) TALAINA
g) OIMOI TALAINA
h) OTOTOTOTOTOI TO TOI
i) IO MOI MOIM DYSTENOS
