Translation+issues


 * Social / cultural / religious / historical context and associations make it difficult to fully translate the words prevalent in Greek tragedy (i.e. god, king, city, law, virture, priest, sin, honor)
 * Discrepancy between reading the printed page and hearing the spoken drama renders the translation process even more difficult, because the audience's understanding and emotion must respond immediately through a familiar word-medium
 * i.e. in ancient Greece, king = wealthy landowner, and should be recognized as a "great one"
 * god/God =
 * unseen arbiter of human destiny
 * used when attributing human characteristics to the deities (i.e. "Only the gods have agelss and deathless life")
 * reference to a particular god (i.e. usually Apollo, "Whatever the god requires it shall be done")
 * specific names cannot be interchangeable with the word "god" in circumstances that have not reached the degree of real intensity that is required by the usage of the word "god"
 * "Translation inevitably omits, or transmutes, something of its original, and cannot escape importing something that is alien to it. At best it can ease the opening of doors that would otherwise remain, for some, permanently closed; it cannot transmit the whole quality of what lies behind those doors."