Eastern Weeping

Anything that Sartre touches is likely to have his own peculiar honesty about it; that gritty quality of pumice rubbing on metal. He has written about his own version of Euripides’s play:

The Trojan Women was produced during the Algerian War, in a very faithful translation by Jacqueline Moatti. I was impressed by the way this version was received. I admit it was the subject of this play which first interested me. This is not surprising. The play had a precise political significance when it was first produced. It was an explicit condemnation of war in general, and of imperial expeditions in particular. We know today that war would trigger off an atomic war in which there would be neither victor nor vanquished. This play demonstrates this fact precisely: that war is a defeat to humanity. The Greeks destroy Troy but they receive no benefit from their victory. The gods punish their belligerence by making them perish themselves. . . .

Now, this might make us suspect that Sartre’s play is Sartre alone, and nothing like Euripides; but in fact it is not so, for (as far as I can gather from a comparison of this with older translations) Sartre has stuck close to Euripides’s pattern, even to the point of keeping to the verse choruses. This laudable fidelity may have been his dramatic downfall. I have never yet heard Greek choruses on the modern stage without a feeling that they are dated by their very form: the religious dance and song which we no longer have with us. But the words have at least some modernity and precision (Ronald Duncan, being an accomplished poet, would be the right man to translate Sartre); and I would suggest strongly to any group looking for an anti-war play, that they should experiment with this sad story of slaves and war survivors who feel they are worse off than their dead husbands. After all, it is, as Sartre suggests, absolutely topical. If we listen carefully enough we can hear at this moment the sound of weeping coming to us from the East.

1967 (485)