Nerdspecial Seneca’s “The Insanity of Hercules”: a shocking efficiency, an excellent new translation!
Actress and singer Grace Wade because the betrayed and offended goddess Juno.
This month Seneca made his first look within the Bay Space in a few years, if ever. The event was a staged studying of The Insanity of Hercules, on Saturday, June 14, at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. The dramatic setting in entrance of the brick portico at nightfall intensified a drama that wanted no intensification. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a Seneca revival. It’s lengthy overdue.
Along with the mesmerizing efficiency of Grace Wade as Juno/Megara, the opposite performers included: Kyle Ryan as Hercules; John O’Malley as Amphytrion; Joseph Bissex as Theseus/Lycus.
The textual content is newly translated by poet and former NEA chair Dana Gioia, additionally a former California poet laureate. The re-creation of Seneca’s play was revealed by Wiseblood Books. (Excerpt from the textual content coming in one other publish.) Purchase the ebook. Greater than a 3rd of the amount is an insightful introduction to “Seneca’s Tragic Imaginative and prescient,” Seneca and European Tradition, Roman Tragedy and Roman Politics, Seneca’s life, and extra.
The slim quantity was praised by poet Frederick Turner: “Dana Gioia’s Hercules Furens is a poetic and significant tour de power. By giving us a translation as sleek, vivid, and pure as the unique should have been, he paradoxically brings out its important strangeness to our sensibility. His poetry makes it a kind of darkish existentialist Bunraku theater, an allegory of the horrors of Nero’s Rome and maybe a warning to us in the present day. His coinage of the time period ‘lyric tragedy,’ connecting the play with the beginning of opera fifteen hundred years later, aptly notes that strangeness.”
“It’s a unbelievable translation, clear and highly effective. Dana Gioia does an important job of reconciling Seneca’s calm philosophy and emotionally charged drama.” That’s a mini-review by somebody identified on-line solely as “TheophileEscargot.”
The Antigone Journal ran Dana’s interview with Mateusz Stróżyński, a classics professor on the Adam Mickiewicz College in Poznań. Right here’s an excerpt:
What drew you to Hercules Furens? Does this tragedy assist illuminate or replicate any up to date state of affairs or circumstance?
DANA GIOIA: I’ve at all times been interested in verse tragedy, even earlier than I knew I used to be going to be a poet. I didn’t research Greek tragedy in highschool, however I learn Sophocles and Euripides alone (within the Robert Fitzgerald and Richmond Lattimore translations). The primary elective course I took at Stanford was a two-term freshman seminar on tragedy taught by a courtly older man who chaired the Spanish Division. (He most well-liked Racine to Shakespeare and infrequently lamented the haphazard strategies of Golden Age Spanish theater.) We learn each main tragedian within the Western custom, besides Seneca. That struck me as odd. There was the same silence at Harvard grad faculty. Lastly, after I left academia, I explored Seneca. I knew Classical Latin poetry however nothing about Roman tragic theater. I learn Thyestes in translation, and I used to be dazzled by its violent splendor. I learn the opposite performs, one after the other.
I selected Hercules Furens to translate due to its fabulous account of the Underworld. The play was the lacking hyperlink between Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno. My curiosity wasn’t scholarly. These poems had been foundational to my very own sense of being a poet. I significantly admired Virgil and Dante’s capacity to create highly effective, multi-leveled narratives that by no means misplaced their lyrical impulse. Musicality is the mandatory magic of narrative poetry. It is usually a high quality lacking from most up to date poetry. From Seneca I realized how you can current drama that alternates between common motion and sudden however sustained moments of maximum emotion. You may name these excessive factors verbal arias or poetic oratory. In theater, they’re referred to as “show-stoppers”. Seneca’s lyric tragedies helped me write poetic texts for opera.
MATEUSZ STRÓŻYŃSKI: I grew to become interested by Hercules Furens throughout my analysis on Euripides’ Heracles and Medea, which I started round 2010. I attempted to have a look at the that means of infanticide in these two performs, from a psychoanalytic perspective, making an attempt to carry collectively my curiosity in Classical drama and psychoanalysis in addition to my expertise as a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. What struck me was that Seneca’s Hercules was rather more just like Euripides’ Medea than to his Heracles. Each appear to offer an unimaginable perception into what has been conceptualized in psychoanalysis as pathological narcissism, particularly by authors resembling Herbert Rosenfeld, Heinz Kohut, and Otto Kernberg.
Seneca’s Hercules (like Medea) describes a destruction of the internal capability to like and rely upon others, by means of a want to regulate each the self and the others. I believe the horrifying sterility of the Underworld in Seneca displays the internal vacancy and deadness of a narcissistic persona, which inevitably manifests itself in aggression and destruction. However as we are able to see in Seneca, this narcissistic dynamic is usually masked by a story of saving the world from monsters in an effort to carry peace and concord.
Hercules, at first, is introduced by others and himself as a saviour and monster-killer who’s going to determine a legendary Golden Age. However the final result’s that his spouse and his kids are destroyed in a most horrifying method.
I believe this narcissistic dynamic, which has taken management over Western society in the previous couple of many years, has been depicted powerfully additionally by J.R.R. Tolkien (the Ring in Lord of the Rings destroys the soul of its bearer in trade for invisibility and energy) and J.Okay. Rowling (within the Harry Potter novels, the Horcruxes of Voldemort give him ‘immortality’ on the worth of splitting his soul). Seneca’s play is sadly prophetic in the way in which it describes how we, as a society, sacrifice what’s most fragile and valuable in our pursuit of utopian management over our personal our bodies and minds, and people of individuals round us.
Learn the entire thing right here.
I’ve a particular cause for taking an curiosity within the play, in addition to my greater than a quarter-century friendship with Dana. He devoted to me, with the phrases, “Tanquam Explorator.” I treasure that. Thanks, Dana!
Tags: Dana Gioia, Grace Wade, Mateusz Stróżyński, Seneca
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