I like this translation of Euripides’ masterwork. It reads smoothly, easily and unpretentiously, and strikes a fine balance between literal and free-wheeling translation. It will serve well as a vehicle for reaching a Greek-less audience and introducing them to the timeless appeal of Classical tragedies; at the same time, it is a pleasing addition to the libraries of long-time devotees of the play, for when they want to sit down with it, as with an old friend.

The book has a brief, two-part introduction aimed at a general audience. The first part, ‘Euripides and his life and times’, by poet A.E. Stallings, genially but somewhat oddly focuses on reported biographical details of Euripides’ life. It starts with a general disclaimer of the reliability of the relevant second- to tenth-century CE sources, but then goes on to mine them ‘for the bright sharp needles in the stacks of hay’ (1).

The second introductory section, co-authored by Stallings and Angela Taraskiewicz, briefly (and without engaging with secondary sources) addresses some key elements of the play, including its contextualization within the myth of the Golden Fleece, Medea’s problematic position both as spurned wife and as a self-exile from Colchis faced now with involuntary exile from Corinth, the much-discussed and often maligned Aegeus episode, the Greek Chorus’ stance of ‘sisterhood’ with Medea and the possibility that the [original?] audience was to be surprised by the mother’s climactic filicide.

The most interesting part of the introductory material is the author’s brief note on the choices he has made in his effort to convey to a modern reader the play’s force as a ‘poetic drama’ (17). Those choices include blank verse for most speakers and a tendency to trochees for chanted verses. Iwould like to have heard more from him about his metrical patterns, but as a general phenomenon Icommend his successes in unobtrusively making his lines feel like poetry. Ican readily imagine an undergraduate reading through the entire translation without any consciousness of reading anything different from prose, yet sensing it as somehow more structured and poetic.

A second set of poetic choices made by the translator regard rhyme, a poetic tool missing from the Greek tragedians’ quivers but available to modern translators who wish to heighten a reader’s (or hearer’s) consciousness of the play as a poetic creation. Martin reports having employed rhyme for Jason’s dialogues with Medea, for the messenger’s speech, for epigrammatic utterances, stichomythic dialogue and choruses (the last on the grounds that ‘rhyme in an English translation of a choral ode frames the utterance, tells us that we must attend to it as something set apart, something performed, and gives, one hopes, some sense of the intention of the original’, 20).

Martin’s patterns of rhyme are nicely varied and normally pleasantly unobtrusive, building most frequently around a chiastic unit abba, often capped by a cc. To offer a particular example, the rhymes in the opening dialogue between the Nurse and the Tutor (27) are structured like this: abba deed ff b ¹ aab ¹ dd ghhg (where b ¹ denotes a near-rhyme: lamentation/station with groan/alone). These patterns are subtle enough to avoid calling a great deal of attention to themselves.

Rhyming patterns in choral odes tend to be even more understated, and, to my mind, especially effective. The first strophe-antistrophe pair of the Chorus’ celebrated ode on the reversal of the supposed natural order, by which women will come into better repute than men (43), for instance, follows this pattern: aba cbc ¹ dede (strophe), ghg ih¹i jkjk (antistrophe).

The one place where Ifound the rhymes distracting was in Jason’s speeches. Martin characterizes these by saying, ‘Rhyming stanzas took over Jason’s dialogue and would not leave’ (19). Whether or not he means to imply that these rhymes were in some sense uninvited guests, Ipersonally reacted to them that way. Aswitch to alternate rather than chiastic patterns in these speeches helps create more insistent sound patterns that left me struggling to return to plain old reading, instead of getting side-tracked into retrospective and prospective analysis of rhyming schemes. Martin’s explanation of the intended effect (‘In my mind they stood in for Jason’s need to persuade [Medea] of his essential goodness by offering her the gift of rhyme, which she refuses’, 19) seems strained.

For the most part, Martin successfully finds a path between the kind of truth to the text that allows important themes and image patterns to ring through in translation and his self-assumed restriction of rhyme. Iwould note, though, two instances in the messenger speech (80) where his striving after the ‘gift of rhyme’ may work against this goal. First, he omits the striking metaphor of the wrestling match (palaismata) between Creon and his daughter’s corpse in favour of an inserted phrase (‘the subtle stuff that drew him to the floor’) that accommodates a rhyme with ‘attempted to/Lift his aged body to his feet once more.’ Second, although the pathos of the messenger speech focuses heavily on the relationship of father and child (and Medea’s diabolical reduction of Creon, like Jason, to child-lessness), Martin slightly skews the tragedian’s emphasis by twice inserting references to the princess as bride rather than as daughter: the convenience of rhyme between way and day forces a seemingly unfounded equation of the princess’ death day with her intended wedding day (lines 1207–08) and just a dozen lines later (1220), again evidently seizing a rhyming opportunity, Martin renders Euripides’ ‘they lie dead, both child (pais) and aged father next to her’ as ‘They lie there side by side/In death, an agèd father, a young bride.’

But these are tiny cavils. In the main, Iapplaud Martin for remaining true to the Greek while at the same time turning out an eminently readable and artfully crafted poetic text.