In a sparkling new translation by Joel Agee, Prometheus Bound, one of the most unique and bewildering of the Greek tragedies, is a classic battle of the gods.
Aeschylus (525 BC-456 BC), the first of ancient Greece's major dramatists, is considered the father of Greek tragedy. He is said to have been the author of as many as ninety plays, of which seven survive. Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has received several prizes, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin in 2008 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist's verse play Penthesilea. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs-Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and, more recently, In the House of My Fear. His translation of Prometheus Bound was produced to much acclaim at the Getty Villa in 2013. He lives in Brooklyn.
“Prometheus’s rebellion is the rebellion of life against inertia,
of mercy and love against tyranny, of humanity against cruelty and
arbitrary violence.” —Thomas Merton
“Joel Agee has found exciting ways to vivify the speeches with
apparently scrupulous fidelity to sound. In this English, the
poetry slashes like modern verse and the direct address boasts a
blunt immediacy that exhorts us to consider our own issues with the
State, with individualism and obedience, with the larger
consequences of war and despoilment. It blows away the dated
rhetoric of such predecessors as Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Robert Lowell.” —Myron Meisel, The Hollywood
Reporter
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