![]() Richard Jebb’s translation, “Ismene, my sister, mine own dear sister,” forfeits the slight delay in discovering the identity of the addressee and dilutes the hyperbolic expression of kinship.(2) Elizabeth Wyckoff’s “My sister, my Ismene” and Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald’s “Ismene, a dear sister” further diminish the urgency perceptible in the words of kinship. An endearment like “dear heart, Ismene” would be more readily understood than “head of Ismene” but with a false familiarity: the Greeks spoke of the head, not the heart, as the center of love and affection. Our translation, “O common one of the same womb, dear head of Ismene” uses eleven words for five of the original. Here’s a paragraph on the opening line (discussed in a previous Languagehat post):įrom the first line, the translator confronts the abyss separating Sophocles’ Greek from English. ![]() This introduction to Sophocles’ Antigone includes an excellent discussion of the problems of translation. ![]()
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