Heroes and Men: John Tipton's Ajax

The gory image of rams’ heads on a blood-spattered backdrop^[1] adorning the cover of John Tipton’s new translation of Sophocles’ Ajax immediately suggests that this is no tired, dusty classic, but a hip, cutting-edge work. “Wow,” said the guy checking it out to me at the library, “this looks intense.” Indeed.

Sophocles’ Ajax is not as well known as the Theban plays, perhaps because it’s a far darker and more disturbing work. The play opens with a conversation between the goddess Athena and the hero Odysseus, who has come searching for Ajax because he suspects him of having slaughtered the army’s cattle (and the shepherds guarding them, though this tidbit seems rather to fall by the wayside). Athena confirms that Ajax is the killer, and explains that he actually thought he was slaughtering men. A few pages later, we hear the howls of Ajax himself, now recovering from his delusion and realizing what he has done. He will ultimately kill himself as a result of this knowledge, and the play continues with an argument over his corpse. It’s not exactly an uplifting story.

Tipton, a poet living in Chicago, said he was drawn to the work partly because it’s lesser known, and partly because of its resonances with the political scene of Bush-era America. He first read the play while serving in Iraq, and reading his translation, one can discern the echoes. Tipton is not a translator by trade, and does not profess to be fluent in Greek. The translation is not meant to be an academic project, but an artistic one—a version that will do justice to the feel of the original above all else.

Rhythmically, Tipton’s translation conveys the mood of the work beautifully—it’s terse and clipped, with short sentences that are occasionally jarring in their abruptness. Tipton explains in the afterword that he has chosen to use a counted line, where the number of metrical feet in the original Greek determines the number of words per line. The effect is strangely un-lyrical, almost ugly, but it does give the text a kind of dogged rapidity, as though the words themselves are relentlessly hurtling towards the hero’s destruction.

Tipton’s Chorus is reworked into what he calls “a kind of disturbed unconscious to the play itself.” Their lines read like eerie modernist poetry, a demented and fragmented meta-narrative of the play with occasional moments of lucidity. It takes some getting used to, of course—but then, the Chorus is generally a dissonant presence to the modern reader. We never really know what they’re doing and why they’re there. Their relative lack of agency, combined with their omniscience, produces a disturbing effect on its own, and this is magnified in Tipton’s Ajax and made to carry the overall ethos of the work.

Tipton spends a lot of time in the afterword discussing the impossibility of translation—it is “a kind of forgery,” he says. Sophocles’ poetry has been replaced with his own, he admits (indeed, he is so insistent on this point that one rather wonders why he took up translation in the first place). Perhaps it is because of this stated impossibility that Tipton allows himself to take such liberties with the work^[2]. In some cases, this is a good thing, a way of recasting the earlier material so as to invigorate it and more vividly capture its mood for a modern audience. In others, unfortunately, it is clumsy, crude anachronism that detracts from the play rather than adding to it.

One such crudity is Tipton’s use of colloquial modern language in dialogue. The combination of the rather blunt pacing with unpolished language is absolutely disastrous. Modern readers are accustomed to translations of Greek classics where men speak like heroes, so it is jarring when characters call each other assholes or use words like “sure” and “whatever.” Tipton’s choice of idiom makes the characters sound like meatheads rather than the noble fighters other translators have given us.

Compare, for instance, this moment of dialogue between Teucer and Menelaus. In an earlier translation by Shomit Dutta, we have Menelaus saying, “Someone will suffer for these words,” to which Teucer responds, “No more, I think, than the pain I will inflict.”^[3] In Tipton’s version, Menelaus announces, “You’re starting to piss me off,” and Teucer comes back with, “Oh really? Welcome to the club.” The use of idiom is all the more irritating because it’s so inconsistent. At some moments, the characters spout off late 1990s jargon; at others, they retreat to a more formal and archaic style, and the shift between the two leads the reader to regularly question Tipton’s judgment. The play’s abrupt pacing already robs it of a certain elegance, a sacrifice that actually heightens its effects. The diction, however, deprives it of its dignity.

[1] It’s worth noting that it was Tipton himself who deserves the credit for that image—he saw it in a New York Times piece and immediately called his agent and said he wanted it for the cover.
[2] The marks of Christopher Logue and Louis Zukofsky, pioneers of modernist versions of Antique works, are clearly felt, and indeed, Tipton cites them as influential.
[3] Ajax, by Sophocles. Translated by Shomit Dutta. Cambridge University Press, 2001. p. 83.

Born in Poland, raised by vagabond mathematicians, Katarzyna Kunicka is currently working on a PhD in Comparative Literature. She loves books, movies, language, food, and hip-hop. More of her inner monologue can be found at http://www.kasiapontificates.blogspot.com/