514
PARTISAN REVIEW
extreme and transpoSes it into something colloquial and "modern," with
an occasional interpolation of Elizabethan epithets. Sophocles may thua
perhaps he made appropriate for high school tableaux, but his quality
becomes speedily obliterated.
.
The Oedipus sequel depicts the banished king still expiating the sins
which fate had wished upon him. He wanders ragged, blind and hideous
into distant countries. When the final agonies overtake him he faces them
all imperiously. This play, which I believe was chronologically the last
of the great Greek dramas, is imbued with a character that sets it apart
from the others. The "choral dialogues" (particularly the last, set against
a background of lightning and thunder) although they whip the emotion
up to a terrible pitch, are used more purely as structural pivots than any·
where previously. It is in such passages that Fitzgerald's verse seems most
palpably thin and tasteless. (His rendering of "eptexa thumon" into
"my guts shrink" will prove a sorry snare for the student who takes the
Commentary's
assurance literally, that this translation "could be used
without unusual peril as a trot.")
A further characteristic of the original is the unending hiss and
crackle that runs through almost every speech of Oedipus, except when he
is consoling Antigone; the translator gives us nothing of this, nor of the
more internal subtleties. "As for my mother,-damn you, you have no
decency'' is not far from the Maxwell Anderson which he tells us in his
Commentary
is no style for Sophocles. The more straight-forward pas·
sages such as those that begin and end the play are the most congenial
to him.
In conclusion may I urge the friends of Greek drama to devise appro–
priate punishments for translators who turn "0 Zeu" into "Ah God!"
A stiff sentence would await Fitzgerald.
G.L.K.M.
THE RED DECADE. By Eugene Lyons. Bobbs-Merrill.
$3.00
With times changing so fast, and memories so short, it is a fine thing
that Eugene Lyons has made a permanent record of names and dates.
Here, given a form that cannot so easily be dropped into furtive and
kindly wastebaskets, are the lists of Stalin's piebald fronts in the United
States, with sponsors, signers, executive boards, leading spokesmen and
members. Here is chronicled their birth under the eyes and forceps of the
Kremlin accoucheurs, their lives and loves, and their so very humiliating
deaths. There is no squeamish reserve taking refuge in abstractions or
vagueness: the names are named. So far as I can check, the account is
flccurate, and, though frankly journalistic, inclined toward understatement.
The Red Decade
is best in handling the "cultural" and middle-class
organizations-the League for Peace and Democracy
(nee
against War
and Fascism), Friends of the Soviet Union, Anti-Nazi League, League of
American Writers, TAC, and so on, It is admittedly sketchy about Stalin–
ist operations in the unions, so much so that Lyons might have been well
