The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

wife agrees to die for him. But in Hughes’s version, Admetos is spared the embarrassing (indeed, damning) task of begging his relatives – and wife – for volunteers; here, it’s Apollo who ‘canvasses’ for substitutes. In fact, Apollo doesn’t even have to ask Alcestis, as in Euripides’ play Admetos most certainly does: she just volunteers. (It’s interesting that Hughes’s heroine is more faithful to her counterpart in the Greek original than his Admetos is to his; and when he gives her lines that Euripides didn’t – as when, in her farewell to her daughter, she pathetically exclaims, ‘She will not even know what I looked like’ – the drama is enhanced.)

Similarly, Hughes smooths away any sign of what Charles Segal calls the ‘unthinking self-centredness of the husband’. He erases the solipsistic whininess from Admetos’s laments at the beginning of the play. The breathtakingly self-involved utterances that Euripides puts in Admetos’s mouth, well translated by Lattimore – ‘sorrow for all who love you – most of all for me / and for the children’ and ‘Ah, [‘good-bye’ is] a bitter word for me to hear, / heavier than any death of my own’ – here become the considerably less galling ‘Fight against it, Alcestis. / Fight for your children, for me’ and ‘Good-bye! – don’t use that word. / Only live, live, live, live.’ (For American readers, at least, the latter will have an unfortunate Auntie Mame-ish ring.)

      Most strikingly, Hughes eradicates any sense of the strange excessiveness of Admetos’s promise to build a replica of his wife, which in the new version becomes a dismissive, indeed incredulous, rhetorical question: ‘What shall I do, / Have some sculptor make a model of you? / Stretch out with it, on our bed, / Call it Alcestis, whisper to it? / Tell it all I would have told you? / Embrace it – horrible! – stroke it! / Knowing it can never be you …’ Hughes’s subtle rewriting inverts the whole point of the scene. The original hints disturbingly at the husband’s readiness to accept a substitute for the dead wife; the new version emphasizes the husband’s steadfast fidelity. (To further deflect blame from Admetos, Hughes makes his father, Pheres, particularly disgusting. Here the old man not only refuses to die for his son, but ‘screeches’ and ‘wails’ at the younger man to ‘Die … clear off and die.’)

      Hughes’s alterations, ostensibly minor, ultimately sap the strength of Euripides’ dramatic climaxes. In the original, the culminating scene in which a veiled, voiceless Alcestis returns home to her husband on Herakles’ arm owes much of its eeriness precisely to Admetos’s deathbed promise, which has prepared us for the idea, however odd, that the king will settle for an inhuman facsimile of his dead wife; and lo and behold, at the ‘happy’ ending we see him holding hands with something that could well be such a dummy. But since Hughes has dispensed with Admetos’s vow, the climax loses all of its creepy potential. Once again, the translator’s embarrassment about the grand, bizarre qualities that so often characterize tragic action and diction takes its toll in dramatic effectiveness.

In the original, what leads us to a fleeting suspicion that Herakles’ companion is, in fact, nothing more than a statue is the figure’s total silence during a lengthy exchange between Admetos and Herakles – a muteness that clearly disturbs the other characters and, precisely because we’re afraid the silent woman might be just a simulacrum, a revenant, ought to disturb us, the audience, too. In Euripides, an agitated Admetos turns to Herakles and demands: ‘But why does she just stand there, voiceless?’ Fred Chappell’s rendering for the Penn Series nicely conveys Admetos’s agitation: ‘But why does my Alcestis stand so silent?’ In Hughes’s version, an ever-polite Admetos blandly murmurs, ‘Will she speak?’ You wonder whether he cares.

      On the face of it, at least part of the reason for Hughes’s shifting of emphasis – and any suspicion of moral weakness – away from Admetos is that he wants his adaptation to be a grand dramatic and poetic statement about the triumph of the human spirit, about mortality and the victory of love over death. The husband and wife are idealized, whereas there’s a lot of complaining about ‘God’ and his pettiness and cruel indifference to human suffering (‘As usual, God is silent’). To bolster this cosmic interpretation of the original, Hughes adds, in the Herakles scene, elaborate riffs on Aeschylus’s antiauthoritarian Prometheus Bound, with its questioning of Zeus’s justice, and on Euripides’ own profoundly antireligious Madness of Herakles (in which the hero, freshly returned home from his labours, is temporarily maddened by a vengeful goddess and in his delusion murders his wife and children). And Hughes’s dark mutterings about ‘nuclear bomb[s] spewing a long cloud / of consequences’ and the accusatory descriptions of God as ‘the maker of the atom’ who is served by ‘electro-technocrats’ suggest as well that the poet had not given up his preference for primitive Nature over cold Culture.

Yet even as Hughes ups the thematic ante in his adaptation, formal problems seriously undercut his ambitions. Perhaps inevitably when dealing with Alcestis, the translation is, even more than his others, marred by the poet’s inability to find a suitable tone. In what looks like an attempt to convey the tonal variety of Euripides’ hybrid drama, Hughes experiments more than previously with slangy, playful diction. The results can be odd, and often betray the dignity of the original where it is, in fact, dignified. ‘You may call me a god. / You may call me whatever you like,’ Hughes’s Apollo says in his prologue speech, which in the original is crucial for setting the mournful tone of the entire first half. It’s a bizarre thing for Apollo to say: characters in Greek tragedies get zapped by thunderbolts for far less presumptuous haggling with divinities. (Alcestis begins, in fact, with a dire reference to Zeus’s incineration of the hubristic Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, who dared to raise the dead – the first allusion to the all-important theme of resurrection.) Apollo goes on: ‘The dead must die forever. / That is what the thunder said. The dead / Are dead are dead are dead are dead / Forever …’ You suspect Hughes is trying here to convey the thudding infinite nothingness of death, but bits like this are unfortunate reminders that the translator was also a prolific author of children’s books. The intrusion of comic informality is hard enough to adjust to in Euripides’ Alcestis, where the biggest moral problem is a husband’s gross inadequacies; but it’s a disaster in Hughes’s Alcestis, where the big moral problem is God’s gross inadequacies.

Hughes, it should be said, wasn’t the first widower poet for whom the opportunity to translate the Alcestis served as the vehicle for a corrective shift in emphases. In Robert Browning’s long historical poem Balaustion’s Adventure (the subtitle is ‘Including a Transcript of Euripides’), which was composed after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, a poetess comes to Athens from Rhodes to meet Euripides, and then sets about adapting Alcestis. But her version – and, by extension, the Browning version – turns out to be a redemptive one. In it, ‘a new Admetos’ rejects out of hand Alcestis’s offer to die in his place: ‘’Tis well that I depart, and thou remain,’ he tells his wife, with whom, indeed, he gets to enjoy a fairy-tale posterity. (‘The two,’ Browning writes, ‘lived together long and well.’) Hughes’s adaptation renovates Euripides along comparable lines. If the ancient dramatist’s Alcestis forces us to ask, ‘If a husband lets his wife die for him, what manner of man must that husband be?’ then the contemporary poet’s Alcestis asks, ‘If God lets people die, what manner of god must He be?’ In Hughes, as in Browning, there are no guilty husbands – no profound delving into the emotional (if not moral) squalor that often goes with being the survivor. There are just guilty abstractions.

      Disturbing silences like the one with which Euripides’ Alcestis concludes are a leitmotif in the drama of Plath and Hughes. In Bitter Fame, her biography of Plath, Anne Stevenson describes a tiff between Plath and Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, that took place during the Christmas holidays in 1960: depending on whose side you’re on, the episode demonstrates either Plath’s irrationality or Olwyn Hughes’s coldness. In response to a remark of Olwyn’s that she was ‘awfully critical’, Plath ‘glared accusingly’ at her sister-in-law but refused to respond, keeping up her ‘unnerving stare’ in total silence. ‘Why doesn’t she say something?’ Olwyn recalled thinking. (That would have been an excellent translation of Admetos’s climactic line, conveying vividly the frustration and unease of someone faced with this particular brand of passive-aggressiveness.) As recently