A review by dlbvenice
All That You've Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound by Bryan Doerries, Aeschylus, Sophocles

5.0

In these four Greek tragedies, Sophocles and Aeschylus explored various dimensions of human pain. Bryan Doerries's translations seek to explicitly link these 2500-year-old dramas to contemporary suffering, that felt by soldiers in wartime (Ajax, Philoctetes), by prisoners facing a life sentence (Prometheus Bound), and by terminal patients enduring extreme pain (Women of Trachis). His translations are approachable because of his use of contemporary vernacular, and still extremely moving.

The translation of Ajax was particularly moving. In his introduction, Doerries likens Ajax to a soldier suffering an extreme case of PTSD, drawing analogies between the decade-long Trojan War and our apparently endless war in Afghanistan. It is a melancholy thought indeed that despite all the changes wrought by more than a score of centuries, we still fail to recognize the full cost of our inability to resolve contention without the devastating and long-lasting effects created by armed conflicts. I find it particularly poignant to be reading this just days after our man-child President has turned our slow-burning conflict with Iran into a conflagration that could easily plunge the Mideast into war once again.