Euripides Day 9: The Rhythms of Tragedy in one easy lesson, and why.

          The evolution of Greek tragedy in translation has followed a clear trend in the past fifty years: Lines of dialogue have become shorter and less metrically uniform, as the goal of producing a “dramatic poem” (the phrase comes from the foreword to Oxford’s “Greek Tragedy in New Translations” series) has predominated over that of drama per se. The increasing ratio of white space to print, seen in the works of poet-translators like Anne Carson, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, has reached a new extreme with Bryan Doerries’ 2015 All That You’ve Seen Here is God, where most lines of Sophocles and Aeschylus are shortened to three or four syllables. This trend has gone largely undiscussed despite the enormous change taking place in a modern reader’s experience of Greek tragedy. As lines have shortened and lost uniformity, looking more like choral odes than dialogue, the lyric and emotional quality of the plays has crowded out the more discursive side that is best expressed in the iambic trimeter lines of the original, their functional “blank verse” as is iambic pentameter in Shakespeare and Milton.

          In tragedy, Meter is the rhythm of speech and song. The more you get into it, the more you feel how the meters are in touch with the feelings of the characters and their actions, bringing emphasis and tone to their words. I am going to try and explain meters in tragedy simply, but there will be some vocabulary, ( about 1% of the vocabulary of Greek prosody as a whole!)
First thing: Ancient Greek was a pitch-accented language and its metrical rhythms are based on patterns of long(_) and short(u) vowels. Modern Greek has lost many of the diphthongs and vowels that in ancient Greek provide the actual rhythm of the lines.
( Ioticization : in Modern Greek the letters ι, ει, η, υ, υι (rare), οι, are all pronounced [i]! (ee!)

          Because English speakers use stress instead of pitch or length for scanning poetry the convention is to stress the first long vowel in each foot, which in Epic and much Lyric poetry is usually the first syllable. I like to try to imitate vowel length rhythm by drawing out the long beats, which are always the value of two short beats. Lots of long beats slow down the pace, and lots of short beats speed things up.

Iambic trimeter ( for spoken dialogue) and dactylic hexameter (Epic) are not easy to scan, but much easier than the wide variety Lyric meters used in solo “arias” and “choral odes,” which carry intense emotions and choral dance movement in contrast to the “verse-speak” of dialogue. Here are English examples of iambic trimeter.
“I love the jocund dance,
The softly breathing song…” (Blake)
The 1948 poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke uses the trimeter:
...We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

To make them memorable, advertising slogans often fall into iambic trimeter:
“The best a man can get.” Or “Be all that you can be.” Even “ It’s finger lickin’ good.”

     The typical structure of an Ancient Greek tragedy is a series of alternating dialogue and choral lyric sections. (There are exceptions, and technical divisions naturally do not explain intellectual and emotional “soft power” aspects of a great Greek tragedy.) The dialogue sections are in typically iambic trimeters or, less often, trochaic tetrameters (more on these two meters below)—but sometimes there are other meters in dialogue sections, such as short subsections in meters associated with Lyric poetry. The Choral lyric sections are found in a variety of traditional meters represented in the surviving Ancient Greek lyric poetry such as Pindar’s victory odes and the lyric poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus.

Dialogue:Iambic trimeter
Most used for spoken dialogue. The most basic pattern is u_ u_(short-long short-long, or da-DUM-da-DUM) repeated three times in the line, but there is some variation: for example the first short can be long instead (the first syllable of a Greek iamb being capable of being either long or short, is technically termed “anceps” (a Latin word meaning “facing two directions”, or undecided), and sometimes two shorts can take the place of a long. A beginner who attempts to scan each iambic trimeter (or other meter) encountered will soon get the feeling for the rhythm.
Catalectic: trochaic tetrameter
Another important speechverse is the catalectic (catalectic, meaning a syllable is left off at the end) trochaic tetrameter. A Greek trochaic metrum has the form _u_X (long-short-long-anceps, DUM-da-DUM-da, or sometimes DUM-da-DUM-DUM). The trochaic tetrameter is a close relative of the iambic trimeter.

Chorus: anapests or spondees
The parodos is often delivered, at least for a stretch, in anapests, with basic metrum pattern uu_ (short-short-long, or da-da-DUM). Routinely dactyls (long-short-short, or DUM-da-da) or Spondees (long-long, or DUM-DUM) are substituted for anapests in the anapestic dimeter (line, or colon, of two anapests), the typical meter of the Chorus’ entrance (if not the whole parodos, the first part of the parodos).
Aeolic meters: choriambus, glyconic, pherecratean
Another important metrum is the choriambus _ u _ (long-short-short-long, or DUM-da-da-DUM) which seems to me a wonderful rhythm to dance to. It is a major fixture in most of the Aeolic meters of Greek tragedy and Aeolic lyric poetry generally.

That’s enough for now, back to Trojan Women tomorrow, when I will highlight some of the ways Euripides uses rhythms and the contrast and context of speech versus song.