Saturday, May 21, 2011

Euripides on the point of punctuation

What is god, or is not god, or what is in between?
Which of mortals can say after searching?
He who can see the divine
leaping this way and that and back again
in contradictory unexpected shifts of fortune,
he it is who has got furthest towards an answer. . . .
. . . I can find no certainty among men,
no true report, about the gods above.

The Chorus in Euripides' Helen, ll. 1137-1150, trans. James Morwood (Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, trans. & ed. James Morwood, Oxford world's classics (Oxford & New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 152).

No comments: