"Freely adapting Euripides": "Medea" di Robinson Jeffers

Analysis of Robinson Jeffers’strategies in recreating Medea. The drama, “freely adapted from Euripi¬des”, was written on demand of the actress Judith Andersen, and was first performed at the National Theatre in New York during the 1947/8 season. Jeffers’ modus operandi has several points of contact with the so-called ‘artistic translations’ by Latin tragedians from the third century B.C, all the more that two parallel circumstances appear to us: the “discovery” of the Attic masterpieces (repositories of centuries-old literary tradition, from Homer on) made by a culturally young, open-minded audience (the public of ancient Rome and the public on Broadway, “an intelligent but not learned audience”, as Jeffers wrote); the fact that both Ennius and Jeffers were (although in a different way) “poetae docti”, with a deep knowledge of the language and cultural underground of their hypotexts, and therefore they were able to act as competent mediators between Euripides and a non-specialist public. Moreover, like ancient Latin dramatists, Jeffers practises the so-called contaminatio-technique (with interpolations from Seneca, Homer, and lyric poetry of Archaic period).