Nick Ripatrazone applauds a new translation and presentation of the Roman writer Seneca’s play The Madness of Hercules.
Dana Gioia, the notable American Catholic poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has made a trade of writing seminal essays that capture the pulse of the literary moment. In 1991, his essay “Can Poetry Matter?” lamented the absence of poetry reading and engagement outside of academia. Across the span of two decades, Gioia has been able to offer an objective but passionate assessment of the literary world. He now takes those considerable talents and directs them toward antiquity: the plays of Seneca. The pivot is surprisingly natural. As a deeply Catholic writer, Gioia is innately interested in form and function – in the symbol and substance, so to speak, of a text and narrative. He is also concerned with the moral scope of literature; although not, thankfully, as a moralist admonishing his audience. Gioia has always been a literary realist: he wants all of us to read, and to read better.
His project with Seneca, then, is best seen through that lens: a contemporary Catholic artist offering a useful new vision of an essential writer of the past. Gioia’s volume includes an expansive essay that provides introductory and contextual material; not since TS Eliot’s essay “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation” in 1927 has a contemporary poet of Gioia’s style undertaken such a comprehensive look at the Roman writer.
One of Gioia’s gifts as a writer is that he gets to the heart of the matter. “Seneca the tragedian is a forgotten author,” he writes early in his introduction. “The plays are never performed, rarely discussed and hardly read, even by specialists. Most readers of Seneca’s philosophical texts are unaware that he was Rome’s most eminent tragedian.” Seneca is now best known as “the author of aphorisms, mined from his essays and epistles”. Our contemporary acquaintance with him is, at best, piecemeal.
Gioia thinks such current ignorance is a problem. Seneca, he demonstrates, was tremendously influential. In pithy and precise phrases, Gioia lists those shaped by the Roman writer: the early Church Fathers, including Tertullian and Saint Jerome; Dante (who gently placed him among other “virtuous pagans” in Elysian Fields); Erasmus, Calvin, Montaigne, and more.
Seneca shaped the Elizabethan idea of tragedy: “He gave Tudor playwrights the five-act structure to frame the dramatic action with a beginning, middle, and end (rather than the episodic form of most medieval drama).” He also “provided a very un-Athenian version of the chorus that moralises on events but never participates in them.”
“Finally, Seneca introduced the arresting figure of the ghost who ret-urns from death to provoke revenge.”
Gioia’s temperament as a literary realist means that he doesn’t sanitise Seneca’s work, nor his life. Seneca was young Nero’s tutor; perhaps, even, “a father figure”. When Nero became emperor, “Seneca became the de facto prime minister”. He was also, essentially, “the first political speechwriter on record” – to the consternation of the Roman elite. He died by suicide during the fallout from the failed assassination plot against Nero.
Although “Seneca’s plays survived the sack of Rome, the burning of libraries, the leaky roofs of monasteries, the appetites of beetle larvae and the erosions of rot and mildew, they have not had a conspicuously easier time among modern critics”, who have found them by turns vulgar and jaded. Gioia argues for a literary resurrection. His translation of Seneca’s essential play is a great start.
The play’s opening soliloquy, a fuming screed from the goddess Juno, is an arresting introduction to the devilish world of the play. She loathes Hercules: “And come to me, you whom I most desire, / Goddess of Madness, who turns men on themselves, / You who will be the spur of my revenge.” She awaits his ascent from the underworld: “I crave occasion to applaud this hero, / Who triumphed over death’s dominion, / As he begs for death and grovels for oblivion.”
Juno’s frothing speech stains the play with revenge, an all-consuming sin that drives Hercules to murder his own family. Seneca’s vision of the afterlife is powerful: no growth, no green, no fruit. “But only wasteland everywhere, the fields / Unwatered and untilled, the soil exhausted / And nothing moving on the silent land.” Whether he is describing Hades or the terrestrial plain, Seneca manages a surreal atmosphere.
Gioia describes the play as “Seneca’s Inferno, a vision of hell without the consolations of Christian redemption”. In this new translation, Gioia is an excellent curator – and perhaps his work here might influence other Catholic writers to recover forgotten texts from antiquity.
Seneca: The Madness of Hercules, translated and introduced by Dana Gioia (Wiseblood Books)
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