Euripides’ Alkestis, written in the fifth century BCE, tells the story of a queen who volunteers to die instead of her king and husband. Our Spring 2022 issue features an excerpt from the play in Rebekah Curry’s new translation—a delightfully contemporary rendition of this Ancient Greek work based on a collaboration between Curry and classics scholar Stanley Lombardo. In our conversation, Curry—an award-winning translator of old and current languages—reflects on humor in Euripides’ disturbing play, the appeal of ancient stories, and the different shapes collaborative translation can take.
Michal Zechariah (MZ): A new translation of an ancient text is always an exciting event—it seems to go beyond the text at hand and suggest a new relationship with the past, as in Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Odyssey. How did you first encounter Alkestis, and what drew you to translate it?
Rebekah Curry (RC): If memory serves, I first read Alkestis (in translation) as a sophomore classics major at the University of Kansas, while taking a “Greek Lit and Civ” class. Admittedly, I don’t believe I gave any more thought to it at that time than I did to the other texts I read for the class. Then, a few years ago, I was in a conversation with Stanley Lombardo, whose student I’d been at KU, and he proposed a collaboration. He’d spent some time on a translation of Alkestis that he wanted to take in a different direction, and his idea was for us to work on (and, we hoped, publish) it together.
MZ: I noticed you chose to title your translation Alkestis rather than the better-known anglicized Alcestis, a choice that reminds me of Willis Barnstone’s return to original name forms in his Restored New Testament. What made you choose to use the Greek forms of Alkestis’ and other characters’ names? Is this choice part of a wider approach you took to your translation?
RC: My idea in using Greek forms of the names rather than the Latinized/anglicized forms (“Apollon” rather than “Apollo,” “Herakles” rather than “Hercules”) was to create a sort of productive estrangement. The Greek names defamiliarize the story somewhat, distancing it from the accumulated versions and adaptations of classical mythology in English. At the same time as the translation aims at bringing Alkestis into the twenty-first century, the names are a reminder that this narrative is happening in a remote time and place. I should say, however, that this isn’t an approach that I would push everyone translating from Ancient Greek to take—it just depends on what kind of effect you’re trying to create.
MZ: You’ve mentioned that the work originated in a collaborative project with a view to theater performance. In theater, collaboration is the norm, but I haven’t heard as much about collaborative translations. Can you say more about this type of work? I would also love to hear more about your current collaborative translation project, Tales of Dionysus.
RC: In doing Alkestis, I was both translating from the Greek and “remixing” an English version by Lombardo, which felt a lot different than my usual approach. Of course, on the other hand, you could say that in a sense all translation is collaborative—except in cases of self-translation, there is always a minimum of two minds involved, even if the original author is long dead or otherwise unavailable for the translator to communicate with.
Tales of Dionysus is another thing again, since, while the cover of the book states that it’s a “group translation,” it hasn’t relied on what would be considered a collaborative process. It’s a translation of the Dionysiaca, written around the fifth century CE by a poet named Nonnus, which is regarded as being the last classical epic. It’s a sort of wild, sprawling work that encompasses a lot of different genres, and the idea was to mirror that variation by assembling a group of translators who would each render a given section of the poem in their own style, with no attempt to enforce any sort of continuity.
MZ: I’d love to hear more about the collaborative translation process in Alkestis. How was it different from your usual approach? Can you give an example of the types of decisions you had to make?
RC: I was basically using Lombardo’s version as a starting point to depart from, turning it into something looser, often more colloquial, and sometimes terser. For example, his rendition of the play’s first lines was:
House of Admetus, where I ground my teeth
on the bread of slaves although I am a god!
Zeus was behind it, blasting my son Asclepius
with lightning to the chest and laying him low.
Compared to my final version:
Admetos’ house. Taste of slaves’ bread.
I endured it—
Zeus was the catalyst. He killed my son,
my golden boy, Asklepios,
struck a flare of lightning at his heart.
This was definitely something new for me. Normally I work close to the text and choose not to add extra flourishes (e.g., “my golden boy”), and my style in both my other translations and my original writing tends to be more formal. Overall, it was a step outside my comfort zone, and one that I’m glad I made.
MZ: Despite the tragic subject matter of the play, the exchange between Death and Apollon is sometimes very funny. Using modern terms like “six feet under” and “job description” seems to contribute to this effect. Can you say more about your experience of translating humor in Euripides’ text?
RC: This is an interesting question in light of the sequencing of Euripides’ tetralogy. Alkestis was the fourth play after three tragedies. That was the spot conventionally reserved for the satyr play, in which a chorus of satyrs would comically intrude on a serious mythic plot. But, of course, in Alkestis, there are no satyrs to be found—so what are the comedic elements here? In this opening section, as we’re initially seeing Death from the god Apollon’s viewpoint rather than a human viewpoint, it turns out that when you’re an immortal deity, Death is not at all intimidating. He’s still hateful, but he’s petty, mockable—and, yes, even funny. The play then takes a sharp turn into tragedy with Alkestis’ death scene, but some humor is reintroduced when Herakles, a friend of Admetos, shows up at the palace for an unexpected visit. Admetos can’t bring himself to turn Herakles away, so he pretends that Alkestis is still alive—it can be read like a classic sitcom plot of someone hosting an important guest and trying to convince that person that everything at their house is completely fine, when in fact it isn’t. In short, there are some significant tonal shifts to navigate!
MZ: You also translate from French and have won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize for your translation of the Middle English poem Pearl. How has translating from multiple languages affected your approach to your work? And what draws you to specifically older languages like Middle English and Ancient Greek?
RC: I’ve actually also worked on some as yet unpublished translations from German and Spanish. I have a maybe unsophisticated “collect them all” approach to languages—I like the experience of getting under the metaphorical hood and seeing what the grammar does, while also seeing what sort of aesthetic effect it seems to have. Regarding what I’ve done with ancient and medieval languages, that actually happened to be my introduction to language studies—the first non-English language I ever learned was Latin, and my first teenage foray into translation was an incredibly amateurish, J. R. R. Tolkien-induced attempt to study Old English and translate part of Beowulf. High school nerdery aside, I’m interested in etymology and the history of language, and there’s also something powerful about being able to work with a text that was composed hundreds or thousands of years ago and make it speak to a modern reader.
MZ: Can you say more about how Alkestis may speak to modern audiences? What is it about this play that keeps engaging the imagination for over two thousand years? Would you say that your observations about the play’s enduring elements inform your translation?
RC: At the risk of simply uttering truisms, I do think that a large part of what keeps Alkestis and many other surviving works of ancient literature relevant is the universal aspects of human character and relationships across the gulf of time, plus the authors’ skill in depicting human psychology. For example, when considering Alkestis’ death scene, which I’d mentioned previously, it’s not hard to imagine a version of that scene fitting into a family drama today. That again ties in to my approach of trying to balance familiarity and strangeness—this is not our world, but it’s a world inhabited by people we can recognize.
MZ: You are also a poet yourself. I’ve noticed that like your translations, some of your poems reach to the deep or mythical past. How do you view translation as part of your larger creative work?
RC: I came to poetry long before I came to translation. I was writing poems in grade school, while I started to seriously pursue literary translation only after college. But, for me, both are equally motivated by the desire to use language as a medium of art. In Greek, a poem is a poiēma, literally a “made thing.” Making a poem or remaking a poem into new language—it’s all part of the same whole.
Rebekah Curry is a poet, translator, and archivist. She is a recipient of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and her work has appeared in journals including The Evansville Review, Ezra, and Mezzo Cammin, and is forthcoming in Tales of Dionysus (University of Michigan Press, 2022), a translation of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca.
Michal Zechariah is an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote and scholar of early modern English literature. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Psyche, and 3:AM Magazine, as well as various Hebrew literary journals. She teaches at the University of Chicago.
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