Word: medeia
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...comic twists of fate that they beg for modernization. Claiming such undertakings to be bastardizations, staid classicists might curse the lack of inspiration, the sterility of these transformations. "Myths," said Camus, "are made for the imagination to breathe life into them." John Gardner's epic poem, Jason amd Medeia shows that the modern imagination, violently panting while it makes love to mythology, is still very potent indeed...
...poem, divided into 24 parts, is a cumulative free-translation/interpretation of the full mythic cycle of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Taking as its sources the Argonautica of Apollonios Rhodios and Euripides's Medeia, its story goes as follows: Jason, feared by his uncle, Pelias, king of Iolcus, because an oracle has said Jason will kill him, is sent to fetch the Golden Fleece in the eastern land of Kolchis. Pelias has promised Jason the kingdom--if he can return. Jason reaches Kolchis and finds the Fleece well protected by Aeetes, king of Kolchis. But Medeia, the sorceress princess...
...actually poetry at all. In the deep recesses of the classical unrhymed hexameter narrative lurks the novelist's imagination, concerned more with mechanics than pure, precise wordsway. John Gardner cannot deny his place in the traditional world of Henry James and the Novel of Ideas. Jason and Medeia affirms that fact once more...
...cumbersome epic. Take, for example, his handling of the narrative point of view, his own relationship as writer to his story. The first person narrator is cast into an epic-dream, brought to Corinth by the gods to record for posterity the sad details of Jason's split from Medeia. While this anonymous poet is only a neutral observer, he tries desperately to alter the course of events by reconciling the couple. Only Medeia can see him, and she thinks he's a devil. Gardner's helpless narrator is the hilarious antithesis to the traditional omniscient, omnipotent story-teller...
...William Cranston Lawton, '73, will repeat his six readings from Euripides at the Hawthorne Rooms. The course includes original translations in metrical form of the Alkestis, the Medeia, and the Hippolytos...