Books: Classics Collected

THE COMPLETE GREEK DRAMA—2 vols. —Whitney J. Gates and Eugene O’Neill Jr.—Random House ($5).

English translators have generally found the Greek tragic poets too much for them, have produced tortured versions in an idiom neither poetic nor colloquial and almost impossible to read. In the joyless task of selecting the best, Editors Oates and O’Neill unaccountably passed up two excellent modern translations: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King by William Butler Yeats, Euripides’ Alcestis by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald.Otherwise, their handsome and handy collection presents all of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in about the best light available. More interesting to most readers will be ten “anonymous” translations of Aristophanes in which that playwright’s obscenity is done full justice for the first time in contemporary English. Though “anonymous.” these versions apparently owe much of their modern flavor to revision by young (28), untrammeled Editor O’Neill, an instructor in classics at Yale.