2005 Summer Reading
The Burial at Thebes
Texts
by Prof. Michael Arnush, Classics
What do we mean by a text, and how has it come into our hands? When you first received
The Burial at Thebes, did you ask yourself these questions? Does a text have a history,
and did it follow a simple, linear trajectory from the author's pen to your desk?
Did Sophocles, or Seamus Heaney, write with you the reader in mind? The essays contained
here touch upon two aspects of these questions - the ancient tradition of creating
and preserving manuscripts, and the act of translating a text from one language to
another.
Works of literature from the classical Greek world - say, from the 5th century BCE
- have survived because of a long tradition of preserving texts and copying them for
the next generation to peruse. Rarely does anything survive from much before the 2nd
century BCE, and those texts that do usually come to us as no more than fragmentary
scraps of papyrus with small portions of the texts preserved. Much more common is
the survival of a work of literature whose earliest copies can be traced back to the
9th or 10th centuries CE, thus leaving a gap between the earliest surviving version
and the original creation of ca. 1500 years. The essay on Manuscripts provides a brief
summary of the manuscript tradition of the Antigone and a few examples from the text's
history.
As you read The Burial at Thebes, keep in mind that you are reading the 21st century
CE Irish-born poet Seamus Heaney's English translation of the 5th century BCE Athenian
poet Sophocles' original text. How does a poet like Heaney deal with differences in
language, time and place? Heaney has grappled with a play that appears within a larger
body of literature known as the "Classics." What is a classic, and what distinguishes
it from other works of literature? The essay on Translation addresses these issues.