The difference is one of degree: do translators of, for example, Greek Tragedy, remain resolutely faithful to a language’s indigenous nuance, do they make allowances for regional or temporal variation, or do they adapt the narrative to a modern context entire? Since all translation makes inevitable compromises, there cannot be a single answer.

The adept working of the final Stichomythia brings tentative accord to the Agon, before the solemnised and ritualistic release of harmony and plenteousness in an Athens whose embryonic democracy is a not unreasonable mirror to Aeschylus’ own. Bernstein’s rendering of the efflorescent comity between Athena and the Chorus of Furies is stately in language, and attuned in timbre. The softening of the Erinyes into agents of good, now Eumenides, enacts a reversal whose tone is resonant in its simplicity: The Oresteia of Aeschylus - translated by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein with masks by Tom Phillips is published by Carcanet. He is responsible for the implementation of business strategy, innovation around technology, the development and maintenance of products and systems, talent management and acquisition, financial analysis and reporting, capital planning, supervisory and regulatory initiatives, and overall efficiency initiatives. As Interim Director of Global Credit Research he overseas a team that provides fundamental analysis of global investment-grade, high-yield bond and bank loan markets. Mr. Jeffrey S. Skoglund, CFA MBA, is a Chief Operating Officer of Fixed Income at AllianceBernstein LP.Mr. Skoglund holds a BS in finance from Miami University, Ohio, and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Skoglund was a managing director at UBS Investment Bank, where he held numerous management positions, including global head of credit research, and directed a team of desk analysts who helped allocate capital on the trading desk. Prior to joining UBS, he was a senior high-yield analyst at Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse. Earlier in his career, he was an equity analyst and investment banker at Lehman Brothers and worked at Morgan Stanley in equity derivatives. If Bernstein doesn’t stray far from the path of convention, his reworking of this cornerstone of the Tragic oeuvre adds a new, and highly accessible, richness to a story which has been told and re-told over two and a half millennia of depressingly consistent human endeavour.AeschylusA sense of anxiety is beautifully realised here. At the mercy of impulses both innate, and driven – by the god Apollo – Bernstein yields the fleeting suggestion of Hamlet, if only by definition of existential uncertainty. Apollo’s tribunal defence of Orestes against the Furies in the Areopagus is cravenly inconsistent but the judgement is never in doubt; Bernstein remains resolutely aware of the capriciousness of the entire pantheon of Greek gods, and of the subjection of the earthly players in a drama of bloody revenge. Bernstein has served as executive VP of production at Universal since Dec. 2009. Prior to that, he was named senior VP of production in 2007. Since coming to Universal in 2004, Bernstein has overseen development and production on some of Universal’s highest-grossing comedies and genre films, and worked closely with many Universal-based producers including Bluegrass Films, Imagine Entertainment, Blumhouse Productions and Aggregate Films, as well as Dark Horse Entertainment and Guillermo del Toro.

Cassandra’s fate is met with an accordingly visceral relish in Clytemnestra’s later reaction to her murderous spree, and Bernstein delivers her interchange with the Chorus with a sanguine swagger which is somehow neatly consonant with the blindness of Tragic necessity: In Jeffrey Scott Bernstein’s masterful new take on Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, he plays it relatively safe, which is not to undermine either the renewed emotive force of the Tragedy, or its essential gravitas. Bernstein’s prosodic skills carry an easy and appropriate sense of solemn momentum as though investment in encouraging foreboding were the drama’s central dynamic. And it works: Cassandra’s terrible prognostication in the Agamemnon bears down on the reader like a train from a tunnel, enabling an efflorescence of metaphor; the Furies ‘troubling the rooms with that primal wrong’ bring swift resolve in the embodiment of vengeful, alliterative hubris: The nature of Tragedy – its propensity for time transcendence – lends the form a unique serviceability, for who could deny the currency of love and loss, remorse and revenge in the landscape of any era? The overwhelmingly important things – the emotions by which we live and endure – are some of the characteristics which define the Tragic approach. They themselves endure as prismatically as their ablest interpreters; the long chronology of Tragedy has been dignified throughout by re-invention, translation and re-interpretation, to varying degrees of success, but with the certainty of motivational relevance even where the contexts of lived experience are changed out of recognition.